There are two other common leg problems that bother parents. They are: 1) toddlers who trip and fall and 2) growing pains in young children.
Tripping and falling
Small children, who have just learned to walk, trip and fall a lot. This may cause family members to believe that something is wrong with the child’s muscles or worse, their brain. This is possible but quite rare. Most children normally trip and fall a lot because their gait is immature and they are in the exploratory phase of walking.
One-year-olds have a wide-based gait, rather like a man (or these days a woman), who has had too much to drink. They also put their feet down flat, causing the toe or tip of the shoe to catch the ground. They trip because they have not automatically learned to lift their toes up. This happens especially when they wear shoes.
When you take the shoes off, they trip and fall less. This is a good way of deciding if the tripping and falling is normal and another reason not to put shoes on the child or do it as little as possible.
Like older people, they also have less ground clearance (the small vertical distance between the lowest part of the swinging foot and the ground during the mid-swing phase of walking) than adults, so it’s easier for the foot to stumble.
Also, to go faster, they must take more steps because they can’t take longer steps like adults. All that makes them fall.
Small children don’t walk in a straight line. Instead, in their exuberance at living and exploring, they twist, turn, overbalance, and fall.
Finally, toddlers, like most European women, and unlike Caribbean women who walk with their hips, walk with their knees flexed. This causes in-toeing and contributes to tripping and falling.
Tripping and falling disappears by itself without any need for treatment by the time the child is three years old.
Growing pains are a misnomer if there ever was one. It’s a nice explanation for these innocuous pains, but it’s not correct. They’re called “growing pains” because people used to think they happened when your bones were growing quickly and stretching the leg muscles. It turns out the pain isn’t related to growing, but the name has stuck. No one is sure what causes them. Everyone is sure they are harmless.
Growing pains generally occur in children between three and eight years old. Typically, they occur in the early evening before bedtime when the child is preparing for sleep.
Occasionally, they will awaken the child during sleep. The pain is a vague sort of ache or discomfort in both calves and shin areas. It is difficult for the child to locate precisely. It can be quite severe, although rarely bad enough to require a visit to the emergency room. Sometimes it’s difficult to say whether the child is indeed having pain or whether it is a “trick” not to go to bed. The pain seems to come and go without any pattern. Weeks, if not months, can go by without complaint, then suddenly the crying returns one night. Always in the night.
The most common explanation is that these pains are caused by increased physical activity leading to overuse and tiredness of the muscles. So it is not something wrong with the bones; it’s the muscles. Anxiety is another possible cause, in the same way anxiety causes headaches and abdominal pain. There might also be a genetic factor because it runs in families.
Growing pains are not serious, although they can interrupt everyone’s sleep. The child should see a doctor, but special tests are not needed as long as the child has no fever, is playing and eating normally, and not limping.
If the pains occur only in one leg, during the daytime or late night, cause a limp, or stop the child from playing, however, X-rays or further tests may be needed.
There’s no specific treatment for growing pains, but gentle massage or stretching of the muscles in the area that hurts, as well as a heating pad, reassurance and paracetamol or ibuprofen will help. Sometimes mixing up sports or physical activities to work different muscles can help prevent the problem.
As in all things with children, don’t let growing pains take over your evenings. Children will use them as an excuse to keep their parents nearby.
