Are You Taller Than Your Mother? Was She, Too?

“I hate holidays. Everyone always asks me how tall I am,” my son said, looking down at me. At only 13, he could already reach the top kitchen shelf without a step ladder.

“Well why don’t you ask it back?” I said. “Ask if they’re taller than their mom.”

We got great stories from the aunts and uncles that Christmas. And we discovered a surprising thing: even the shortest of the aunts and uncles were taller than their parents!

x

How can kids keep on growing taller than their parents? Where will it end? Will doorways become hobbit holes? Will humans end up being giants!?

By some measures, we are getting taller and taller. By other measures, average height hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age (well over 8000 years ago). Back then, the average European adult (that we have unearthed) was 168 cm tall. That's only 2 cm shorter than today.

Some of the height humans have gained comes from eating better. Nutrition is getting better understood over time, and it has gotten much easier to get a variety of good foods all year ‘round. Kids are also less often, thanks to sanitation and vaccination, so their growth isn't stunted. That makes the biggest difference before age 2, when a body’s pretty much decides how tall it can get.

In the last 200 years, average height has been creeping up. A full 10 cm more for the average adult Earthling in just the last 100 years. (That's confusing, if you remember Stone Age people were only 2 cm shorter than us. But we've only been able to measure about 80 people who lived in the Stone Age.) The data show that this change might be slowing down. The areas on Earth where we find the tallest adults, those people are not gaining height as fast as they used to. In fact, they're practically not getting taller at all. The human body may simply not be able to take in enough nutrients to make us a race of giants.

Even among healthy, well fed people today, adults are a lot of different sizes. Variety is normal; height isn’t a way to know for sure if one person grew up healthy. Genetics has such a big affect on height that where someone is born — their parents’ genetics — makes a bigger difference than their health. 

Sweden is where you'll find the tallest people, and Canadians are only a couple centimetres shorter. Even location differences are not steady: South Asian women have been getting taller much faster than women from anywhere else in the world. 

Women are usually shorter than men. A full smartphone length shorter, on average. This may change too. In some places on Earth, women’s average height is growing faster than men’s. 

Are you going to be taller than your parents? Probably. But the data shows that may be more about them shrinking than the boundless potential for you to be a giant. We'll talk about the incredible shrinking ancestors in another post.

Take a look at the interactive charts on “Human Height” from Our World in Data. They’re pretty interesting. I wonder what data from the last 20 years will show.  

By Adrienne Montgomerie