While I was growing up in the ’90s, my parents had a way of mollifying frequent aches and pains that arose in my sensitive bones and muscles: “It’s just growing pains.” Essentially, childhood taught me that these so-called growing pains could be attributed to just about any vague throbbing. And I’m hardly alone.
“My parents said the exact same thing,” says Rebecca Carl, a pediatrician who specializes in sports medicine and orthopedics at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “I could fall and break a bone and my parents would be like, ‘Growing pains.’”
It should go without saying that broken bones are not growing pains. And in case you're wondering, growing pains are a real thing — though the term itself is a misnomer.
