Is my baby or child eating okay?
This is a follow up to my last post – There is a huge range of normal growth and eating patterns for babies and kids, and as long as your child is following along their own growth curve well, it’s all probably ok. I’m Dr. Wagner, I’m a pediatrician, my goal is to post one piece of evidence based medicine for kids each day this year, hence some unique locations of these videos. For about the first year of life in healthy full term babies, growth follows birth size. Most babies will double their birth weight by about 4 months of age and triple it by 12 months of age. So a healthy baby who is 6lbs in the 7.5%ile at birth to trend along their percentile would weigh about 15lb at 6 months and about 18lbs at 12 months; whereas a healthy baby who is just over 9lbs at the 95%ile would be about 21lbs at 6 months and about 26lbs at 12 months. That 95%ile baby weighs a full 40-50% more than that 7.5%ile baby throughout, and both can be completely healthy and normal. Between six months and age 2, babies transition from following their birth size to following parental genetic factors. At birth, length is only 25% correlated to adult height, but by age 2, these are 80% correlated. So some babies continue to follow the trend of their birth size throughout their lives, but some can be very healthy babies on the higher or lower end of the growth curve at birth who settle into very healthy children at the opposite end of the growth curve by age 3. If your pediatrician is telling you that your baby or child is growing well on their growth curve, that can look very different from one baby or child to another, and both can be healthy and normal!
**This can look different for babies who have growth restriction during pregnancy or excess growth hormone from insulin in gestational diabetes.**
Breast fed infants tend to gain weight more quickly in the first three months compared with formula fed infants, and then slow down thereafter; formula fed infants more slowly at first then quicker thereafter.
