Heightism

What I tell parents of abnormally short children

Friends,

I’m very short. At my zenith I was 4 feet, 11 inches.

From time to time, worried parents of abnormally short children phone or email me seeking reassurance. I tell them that if they or their children are desperate, they can resort to limb-lengthening surgeries, growth hormone treatments — humatrope — with unknown and potentially dangerous side effects, or a wide variety of homeopathic and crank remedies. But I discourage this.

The newest craze is height surgery, a procedure in which the leg bones are fractured and implanted with devices that slowly stretch them over several months. It can add three or so inches per procedure to a person’s height.

Mario Moya, chief executive at the LimbplastX Institute in Las Vegas, says demand for height surgery has been surging. Dr. S. Robert Rozbruch, an orthopedic surgeon at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, says he used to see about 10 cases a year; last year, his clinics had 155 cases.

Last week, The New York Times ran a long feature on height surgery. The procedure was even used recently as a plot point in the film “Materialists.”

Why are so many parents worried about their child’s height these days? Maybe because, in this era of record-breaking inequality, they believe greater height will give their kid a leg up.

I gently urge the parents of short children not to seek height surgery or anything else to make their children taller.

I tell them to love their short kids, to inundate them with affection, and they’ll be okay.

I should know. I was bullied and ridiculed as a young kid, as I’ve recounted in my memoir, Coming Up Short.

Starting when I was around six years old, my mother and grandmother Minnie told me not to worry that I was at least a head shorter than other kids my age because I’d “shoot up” when I got to be 13 or 14 years old. I pictured a magic beanstalk; one morning, I’d wake up and be 6-foot-10. But by the time I was 15, I remained an inch under five feet, and I never got any taller.

Soon after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, when the whole country seemed to be bubbling with optimism, my optimistic mother took me to see a doctor in New York who specialized in bone growth. He took a bunch of measurements, asked questions about the heights of my grandparents and great-grandparents (they were all normal), made some X-rays, drew some blood samples, and three weeks later phoned to say he had no idea why I was so short.

Reluctantly, I gave up waiting to shoot up. By that time I wasn’t particularly worried about being bullied or ridiculed. But being a very short man wasn’t especially helpful when it came to dating. A few years later, Dartmouth College, which was then all-male, seemed comprised almost entirely of big young men able to swoop the inhabitants of women’s colleges literally off their feet. (When I swooped in, they seemed to flee.)

That’s where things stood, as it were, until I was in my 30s, when my then wife (about five inches taller than I) and I contemplated having children. Medical science had advanced considerably over the two decades, because there was an answer to why I was so short.

I inherited a mutation called Fairbanks Disease, or multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, a rare genetic disorder that slows bone growth. (The actor Danny DeVito also has this condition.) Normal bones grow when cartilage is deposited at their ends. The cartilage then hardens to become additional bone. But my cartilage didn’t work that way.

Not only were my bones short, but the experts predicted I’d also have pain in my joints. I’d often tire, they said, and have problems with my spine. I’d have arthritis all over, and I’d waddle when I walked. Other things would go wrong as well.

Their predictions were accurate. I have had problems with my hips, and in my late 30s had to replace both. I had a bout of grand mal seizures in my late 30s, which neurologists couldn’t explain. There’s no need to bore you with my aches and pains. But the geneticist I consulted explained that the odds of passing this mutation to my children were very small. Even if they had it, the odds that it would slow their bone growth or cause any other irregularities, or be passed on to their own children, were minuscule.

We decided to have kids. And our sons turned out perfectly normal. But what’s “normal” anyway? And why is normal so important? I’ve had a wonderful life. I have a loving family. I’ve had good friends, work that I consider satisfying and important, reasonably good health except for the above-mentioned problems. So what if I’m very short?

Researchers have correlated being taller with greater income, high-status jobs, and positive perceptions of leadership. And it can be a tricky issue in an era of dating apps that can filter for height preferences.

Yet David Sandberg, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studied hundreds of children in the Buffalo area and found no real problem with being short and little benefit to being tall. In fact, height didn’t affect the number of friends those kids had, or how well they were liked by others, what others thought of them, or even their own perception of their reputation. But when psychologists Leslie Martel and Henry Biller asked several hundred university students to rate the qualities of men of varying heights on 17 criteria, short men were assumed to be less mature, less positive, less secure, less masculine, less successful, less capable, less confident, less outgoing, more inhibited, more timid, and more passive. In another study, only two of 79 women said they’d go on a date with a man shorter than themselves (the rest, on average, wanted to date a man at least 1.7 inches taller).

Heightism has even infected our language. Respected people have “stature” and are “looked up to.” People are more likely to make disparaging cracks about short people because nobody gets pulled up short for doing it — except for Randy Newman, who went too far with his “Short People (Got No Reason to Live)” song, which he has apparently regretted ever since.

When it comes to choosing leaders, our society is exceptionally heightist and seems to be getting more so. My dear friend and mentor, the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was 6-foot-8. He once said that favoring the tall was “one of the most blatant and forgiven prejudices in our society.” (When we walked around together, chatting away, people stared at us as if we were a carnival act. We laughed it off.)

When I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, it seemed that the only attribute reporters wanted to cover was my height. Regardless of what I said in my speeches, the Boston Globe ran photos of me standing on boxes so I could see over the podium. The right-wing Boston Herald ran a headline on its front page charging “Short People Are Furious with Reich” because I had joked about my height on the campaign trail. None of it helped me with that election. But I didn’t lose because of my height. I lost because I was a lousy campaigner.

Research shows that voters do prefer taller candidates. A paper published in 2013 by psychologists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands analyzed the results of American presidential elections dating back to 1789. They found that taller candidates received more votes than shorter ones in roughly two-thirds of those elections. And the taller the candidates were relative to their opponents, the greater the average margin of their victory. Among presidents who have sought a second term, winners have been two inches taller, on average, than losers. The authors conclude that height may explain as much as 15 percent of the variation in election outcomes. Presidents are becoming taller relative to average Americans (as measured by army records of recruits of the same age cohort). The last president shorter than this average was William McKinley, elected in 1896.

A survey of the heights of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies showed they were on average six feet tall, about 2.5 inches taller than the average American man.

Why are we so heightist? Probably because of some genetic trigger in our brain that told early humans they needed the protection of very big men. Other things being equal, large males are more to be feared, and they live longer. An impulse to defer to them, or prefer them as mates, makes evolutionary sense.

In Size Matters, Stephen S. Hall writes that in the 18th century, Frederick William of Prussia paid huge sums to recruit giant soldiers from around the world, thereby giving tangible value to matters of inches, and revealing “the desirability of height for the first time in a large, post-medieval society.”

But hey, I’m okay with being protected by giant soldiers, big security guards, and massive first responders. I don’t want to do these sorts of jobs anyway. I’m fortunate to have grown up (or at least grown upward) in a society that values brains at least as much as brawn. And to have had parents who loved me for who I was.