Some dads call their daughters “princess,” “sweetheart” or “doll.” Greg Irby calls his 10-month-old, Myla, “chicken nugget.” “I didn’t know babies have rolls on wrists, but they do,” says Irby, a 30-year-old attorney in Danville, Indiana. He’s not the only one who’s noticed Myla’s roly poly shape. “Everyone who sees her says, ‘Oh, what a little chunk you have!'” adds her mom, Melissa Irby, a 31-year-old attorney.
Indeed, Myla — who, at about 20 pounds, 28 inches, is bigger than nearly 80 percent of her peers — has curves. And, by her pediatrician’s account, “she’s as healthy as can be,” Melissa Irby says. Still, parents like the Irbys sometimes can’t help but wonder if their babies are too fat, says Dr. Robert Murray, a pediatrician and professor of human nutrition at Ohio State University. “The opposite was always the case previously, where people wanted their kids to be chubbier,” he says, “and now with the obesity thing, people are wondering how much is too much?”
[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids’ Health.]
It’s an understandable concern. About 17 percent of 2- to 19-year-olds in the U.S. are obese, and obese children, even as young as 2, are more likely to become obese adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And what parents want to boost their child’s chances of developing cardiovascular disease, diabetes, premature death and all the other possible consequences of obesity?
But in most cases, worrying about your little one’s stout shape before he or she has turned 1 is misguided, says Dr. Steven Schwarz, a professor of pediatrics at SUNY-Downstate Medical Center. “Babies should be adorably pudgy,” he says, noting that their first year of life is a sort of hibernation period in which they store up fat to fuel their energetic, growth-filled toddler years.
What’s more, fixating on babies’ weight in the first year (or three) of life is typically a waste of energy, since they grow and shrink in fits and starts, Schwarz adds. “When parents weigh their children once a week, it drives me nuts because they don’t gain weight in a linear fashion,” he says. Their infantile size isn’t a good indicator of their adult stature, either. “A 10-pound baby isn’t going to turn out to be giant,” Schwarz adds, nor is a 6-pound baby destined for a life of being little.
So what does influence whether your cherubic child becomes an obese adult? These five factors are among the best indicators:
1. Parental Size
In Schwarz’s experience, lean parents often worry about their infant’s fatness, even though it’s the overweight and obese parents who have more reason for concern. “If the mother or both parents are overweight, they are at significantly greater likelihood of the child being overweight, and that’s both environmental and genetic,” he says, noting that children born to two obese parents have a 70 percent chance of becoming obese, and those with obese moms have a 50 percent chance of growing up to be obese. “That’s the group that you’re really most concerned about in the long run.”
Where babies’ relatives are from is also important to consider when comparing them to peers on growth charts, which don’t reflect the diverse U.S. population, Schwarz says. “The growth charts that we have were really created for children growing up on farms in Iowa,” he says. “You have to be really mindful of family history.”
[See: 10 Fun Kid Activities for Adult Bodies and Minds.]
2. Birth Weight
While a hefty newborn won’t necessarily grow into a plus-size adult, and a little newborn won’t necessarily wind up petite, at the extremes, body weight at birth does have some influence on future health, Murray says. “Very high birth weight babies and, ironically, low birth weight babies, they both have a higher risk going forward in life for becoming overweight,” he says.
Babies with some of the best chances of entering the world at a healthy size are those whose moms have gained an appropriate amount of weight during pregnancy, Murray says. While women should talk to their health care providers about what that means for them, in general, women who are underweight when they become pregnant should gain between 28 and 40 pounds, women of average weight should pack on 25 to 35 pounds, overweight women should gain 15 to 25 pounds and obese women should gain 11 to 20 pounds, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
3. Growth Curve
Comparing babies to their peers on the playground is a fool’s errand, Murray says, since a 12-pound, 4-month-old and his 18-pound counterpart could both be perfectly healthy if they’ve both doubled their birth weight, which should happen around that age, Murray says. That’s why pediatricians monitor babies’ growth on a personal curve that tracks height, weight and head circumference — and probably won’t get concerned so long as growth in all measurements is relatively stable. “The kids who are following their curve — they’re in good shape,” he says.
How a baby grows might raise a red flag if there’s a big discrepancy between height and weight, such that the baby is bigger than what suits his or her frame, Schwarz adds. “If the child is growing along the 50 th percentile for height and 90 th for weight, that at least raises a concern,” particularly if the parents are overweight and not so tall, he says. In that case, there’s a better chance the child will never outgrow his heft. “You can actually drive early linear growth by overfeeding,” Schwarz says.
4. Feeding Habits
The single best protection against childhood obesity is breast-feeding, experts say. “Babies have a very, very vigorous need to suck, and so the problem is when you start to bottle-feed every time the baby cries … they start to get overfed,” Schwarz says. Nursing, on the other hand, is a sort of natural shield against eating too much because babies start when they’re hungry and stop when they’re satisfied. As Murray puts it, “a breast-fed baby regulates its own intake.” One common mistake? Moms turning to formula because they worry that their baby’s weight loss in the first week or two of life is due to a poor breast milk supply when, in reality, that fluctuation is normal, Murray says. “That’s not a sign that they should stop breast-feeding,” he says.
[See: 10 Things No One Tells You About Breast-feeding.]
Parents can support babies eating the right amount of food by learning to recognize their hunger cues — and not conflate them with normal infantile irritability or fatigue, Schwarz says. “The response every time the baby cries shouldn’t be food because that’s not always the answer,” he says. “Food then becomes the agent of comfort and food should be an agent of growth.”
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Is Your Baby Too Fat? originally appeared on usnews.com
