Temporary and lasting effects of childhood deprivation on male stature. Late adolescent stature and catch-up growth in Woerden (The Netherlands) in the first half of the nineteenth century

Abstract

This paper compares the statures of men during late adolescence, measured at age 19, with the stature in adulthood, measured at age 25, specially focusing on the influences of household situation and family stress. On average, the men studied became five centimeters taller in the interval, but there was a large individual variation as the shortest men realized the largest 'catch-up' growth. We study how childhood deprivation impacted on growth in adolescence. Childhood deprivation was measured, apart from socioeconomic status and social cultural characteristics of the household, through family size, number of siblings, mortality clustering in the family, and certain characteristics of the mother. In particular, we are interested in the question whether these early-life experiences had a lasting effect, in other words to what extent they were still visible at age 25 and to what extent they influenced the potential for catch-up growth. Our results indicate that the independent influence of family composition was very weak. When comparing temporary and lasting effects on male stature, we see that in general the influences of socioeconomic status and sociocultural factors were, although weaker, still visible at age 25. The results also make clear, that the height at the age of 19 is a better, more sensitive, indicator for the circumstances in which a child grew up. The results of this exercise should be interpreted with caution, as they are based on a small number of cases.

Height and health in late eighteenth-century England

“…Unmarried men were only 1 cm shorter, on average, than married men (Table 2). Estimates of mean growth between ages 18 and 24 are as much as 3-5 cm in previous studies (Alter et al 2004b;Beekink and Kok 2017), so the difference between single and married men in our study was within the range expected if it were due simply to the younger average age of single men. However, it is also possible that selection into marriage was more stringent for some occupations, and this could distort our measures of socio-economic differences in height by marital status.…”

Height and Inequality in Spain: A Long-Term Perspective

“…With respect to the nutritional crisis of the 19 th century, the underlying factors have already been commented on: it was a period in which a succession of economic crises occurred, which, in specific cases, lowered the standard of living to the subsistence level. The frequency of these crises hardly gave the growth cycle of the above-mentioned birth cohorts the chance to activate the compensatory mechanisms of physical growth during the period preceding the end of the cycle (Beekink and Kok 2017). Within this context, our results reveal an association between relatively high values of the coefficient of variation and relatively low values of average height.…”

Testing the conditional resource-dilution hypothesis: the impact of sibship size and composition on infant and child mortality in the Netherlands, 1863–1910

“…The argument is mainly based on the relation between sibship size, income and nutritional dilution, crowding and the higher chances of infection in larger families (Bailey, Hatton, & Inwood, 2016;Hatton, 2017). Yet results are mixed: some studies found a significant negative effect of the number of siblings on the height of individuals (De Keyser & Van Rossem, 2017;Mazzoni, Breschi, Manfredini, Pozzi, & Ruiu, 2017;Myrskylä, Silventoinen, Jelenkovic, Tynelius, & Rasmussen, 2013;Roberts & Warren, 2017;Stradford, van Poppel, & Lumey, 2017), while others found effects which are weak or disappear over time (Beekink & Kok, 2017;Öberg, 2015;Poulain, Chambre, Herm, & Pes, 2017;Ramon-Muñoz & Ramon-Muñoz, 2017). The latter argued that the changing role of sibship size could be caused by fertility decline, the general improvement of standards of living, the development of the welfare state, and improving health.…”