Growing Pains

They’ve Got Nothing to Do With Growth!

They’re plenty confusing to parents – these mysterious pains that plague kids’ legs at night and reliably vanish by morning. Medical tests show that there’s nothing wrong, and your child’s doctor has no tips on preventing or treating the pain.
“Growing pains” are a common childhood ailment. And yet, they’re not even caused by a child’s growth.

“It is true that muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones grow continuously, but the growing process alone seldom causes pain,” explains Francis Y. Lee, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital of New York and Columbia University.

In fact, growing pains are most common from ages 3 to 12, when kids aren’t having rapid growth spurts. So why call them “growing pains”? Because all children eventually outgrow them, says William Oppenheim, M.D., a pediatric orthopedic surgeon with the Luskin Children’s Clinic of Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital and the UCLA Department of Orthopedics.

What They Are

Growing pains are the third most common type of pain in children ages 3-12 (headache and stomachache rank first and second), impacting between 15 percent and 30 percent of this age group.

The pains tend to occur:

• at night,
• for a few nights at a time, every one to three months,
• in both legs, and
• in the thighs, calves and behind the knee.

In the morning, kids who had been suffering from growing pains get around just fine;  you’d never know they had a problem. “During the day they’re totally normal,” says Meghan Imrie, M.D., associate clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Stanford University. Any lab tests that your pediatrician performs will also come back normal if growing pains are the problem.