Introduction

Welcome to the Growth Chart training web site, which offers a set of self-directed, interactive training courses for health care professionals using the pediatric growth charts in clinical and public health settings to assess growth of infants, children, and teens.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that US health care practitioners in primary care settings use:

• World Health Organization (WHO) growth standard charts to monitor the growth of children aged birth to younger than 2 years regardless of type of feeding.
• CDC 2000 growth reference charts to monitor growth of children aged 2 to 20 years.
• 2022 extended BMI-for-age growth charts for children and adolescents with very high BMI (above the 97th percentile). BMI is body mass index.

In 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics published the Clinical Practice Guideline for the Evaluation and Treatment of Children and Adolescents with Obesity, which are evidence-based recommendations on medical care for those age 2 and older.

This training provides US health care practitioners with expertise on using and interpreting the growth charts. Users can complete any or all of the training courses in the desired sequence and at no cost. Each course includes learning objectives, text, and examples. The training takes about 30-minutes to read through, or about 40-minutes to read through and complete the Test Your Knowledge sections.

The training courses include:

• Using the WHO Growth Charts to Assess Growth in the United States Among Children Ages Birth to 2 Years
  Background for the recommendation and rationale for using the WHO growth charts to assess and interpret the growth of infants and children aged birth to 2 years. Includes examples to help interpret growth indicators.
• Overview of the CDC Growth Charts for Use in the United States Among Children and Teens Aged 2 Years to 20 Years
  Background for using CDC growth charts to assess growth among US children and teens aged 2 years to 20 years.
• Using the CDC BMI-for-age Growth Charts to Assess Growth in the United States Among Children and Teens Aged 2 Years to 20 YearsBackground for the recommendation and rationale for using the BMI-for-age growth charts to assess and interpret growth among US children and teens aged 2 years to 20 years. Includes Test Your Knowledge sections to assess understanding.

Other Growth Chart Resources

• Use and Interpretation of the WHO and CDC Growth Charts for Children from Birth to 20 Years in the United States – Adobe PDF file [PDF – 751 KB]
• Tools to Calculate BMI
• BMI Percentile Calculator for Child and Teen
  Provided in both English and Metric versions.
• Children’s BMI Tool for Schools
  An Excel spreadsheet intended for use by school, child care, and other professionals who want to compute Body Mass Index (BMI)-for-age for a group of up to 2000 children, for example a school class room or grade.
• Clinical Growth Charts
  The National Center for Health Statistics has growth charts in several formats, or use the following documents:

• CDC Table for Calculated Body Mass Index Values for Selected Heights and Weights for Ages 2 to 20 Years [PDF-168KB]
• Checkbook size BMI Table for Children and Adolescents [PDF-404KB]