The Why? Letter #2
Why does my kid have growing pains and what are they? It’s a great question and it’s also a question that 20-40% of parents are going to ask since it happens that often in children. So let’s dive in and see if we can clear some stuff up.
First off, growing pains often get called “bone pain” and this is wrong. It would be best to be described as muscle pain. We do see “growing pains” happen during the periods when children experience very rapid phases of growth, but it is not from their bones hurting as they grow. We see growing pains occur during the ages of 2-6 years old and then again from about 9-12 years of age. They will usually occur more at night and your child will often wake up crying in pain.
So what causes them? Well we think there are two different causes to this pain. The first cause is damage. These kids are not very nice to their bodies and treat them terrible; jumping, running, falling and running into things. We do our healing during the night and sometimes healing hurts. The second cause is growing, bones grow faster than muscles and tendons and when they are having rapid phases of growth the muscles and tendons have to be stretched to catch up…that stretching sometimes causes pain.
So how do we know it’s growing pains and not something much worse? Everyone has heard the horror story of a parent that was told by their doctor their child had growing pains and it ended up being a bone tumor, so how do we know? To start off we would like to have a history of a child complaining of multiple different sites hurting. Not at the same time, but that they may have complained of the right leg this week and last week it was the left leg. Bone tumors are usually solitary so we worry more if the pain is in the same spot all the time. We should see nothing with growing pains. If we see anything like swelling, redness or feel any warmth we worry something else is going on. Finally the child should like you to rub the area that hurts when they are having growing pains, but the bad things will hurt worse when they are touched or rubbed.
If your child is having pain that you are thinking might be growing pains just talk to your doctor, rub the painful area if they want you to, and use some ibuprofen or a heating pad on the area. They tend to last a week or so, be more common at night and then they will go away only to show up again on some night when you are deep asleep and probably having the best dream of your life.
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