Preference for sons causes average height to decrease.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Indian children are among the statistical shortest in the world, and the nation’s preference for sons may be the primary cause. About half the world’s stunted children live in Asia and another one-third live in Africa. India claims the fifth-highest stunting rate in the world – nearly 40% of the children were stunted in 2005.
The trend towards the shorter end of the height spectrum is a worrisome one for India’s population, especially considering India is projected to have the world’s youngest population by 2020. As Quartz India pointed out, shorter children are typically less healthy, perform poorly in cognitive tests, and consequently earn less in the way of working wages.
India’s economic growth exceeded 6% per year, between 1992 and 2005, yet stunting declined by just 0.6% per year, reported Quartz. But while India performs better on most health and economic factors, such as life expectancy, food security and educational attainment, when compared to Sub-Saharan Africa, Indian children are, on average, shorter than their African counterparts.
The practice of open defecation in rural parts of India may be the root of India’s height disparity, according to Ars Technica:
Poor children play in the same fields where their friends and parents relieve themselves. Disease-causing bacteria and parasites then end up on these children’s hands and feet, eventually landing in their food and drink … Many years of exposure to such bugs can cause enetropathy—a chronic intestinal problem that prevents proper absorption of calories and nutrients, leading to stunted growth.
However, Northwestern University’s Seema Jayachandran and Harvard University’s Rohini Pande thought that it can’t be the full explanation behind the discrepancy. In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jayachandran and Pande find that stunting in Indian children could also be blamed on the cultural preference for sons.
The duo found that on average, if the firstborn child in an Indian family was male, he didn’t suffer from height stunting. However, if the eldest was female, she had a height deficit. If the second child is a boy, hence the eldest son of the family, he won’t be stunted, either. Jayachandran and Pande deduced the phenomenon was due to an “unequal allocation of resources to the first child.”
The height not only differed between sons and daughters, but also tended to vary according to the order of birth. Basically, the first is the tallest; the second is shorter than the first, but taller than the third, and so on.
“The birth order dependency of a child’s height also downplays the effects that genes may have,” according to the paper. If genes were causing children to be shorter, then all children within a family would suffer—and not the ones born later.
When Jayachandran and Pande compared Indian and African results, they found that the Indian first and eldest son tended to be taller than an African firstborn. If the eldest child of the family was a girl, and a son was born next, the son would still be taller in India than Africa. For girls, however, the India-Africa height deficit was more significant. It is the largest for daughters with no older brothers, presumably because repeated attempts to have a son negatively affected the growth of the girls.
The study has yet to be peer reviewed, but the authors told Quartz India that they believe “the results are robust.” The data was collected from extensive surveys of more than 174,000 children throughout India and sub-Saharan Africa.