whim-mckinney.org

Diminutive children don’t end up with the short end of the stick when it comes to self esteem and other issues, a new study finds. Instead, smaller children scored as well as their taller peers in psychological tests measuring self esteem, self perception, parent’s perception and behavior.

Researchers based in Southampton, Britain observed 106 short children and 119 children of average height over a period of several years, analyzing them at age 5-6 and again at ages 11-13. “We found no evidence… that the shortest children are more likely to experience significant (psychological) problems,” concluded Linda D. Voss, according to a Reuters report.

Voss, the study’s senior research fellow and the corresponding author of the British Medical study, noted that the shorter children wished to be taller when asked, but were overall happier with their appearances than the taller children.

“It seems that any dissatisfaction elicited when children were questioned specifically about their height did not affect other areas of their emotional well-being… short stature, per se, is not a major source of distress,” Voss said in a Reuters report.

The shorter children did score lower on tests measuring IQ, reading and number skills, the researchers found. This was probably because of the greater prevalence of shorter children from working-class families, which suggests that social class, not height, is a greater factor affecting psychological development.