Your Incredible Growing Body

You know your bones grow throughout your childhood. But did you know you will have 94 fewer bones as an adult than you did as a baby? Where did those bones go? They fused, or combined, with other bones! In babies, some bones start out in pieces to allow space for growth. Eventually those pieces fuse into a single bone. Your bones keep developing until your 20s!

Your eyes have been nearly the same size since you were 3 months old. A baby’s eyes grow rapidly for the first three months after birth. Eyes don’t grow again until puberty, a time of physical change when children grow into adults.

In the first several weeks after birth, a baby’s brain grows 1 percent larger every day! Babies’ brains are their fastest-growing body part. On average, a baby’s brain grows from the size of a softball to the size of a jumbo orange in 90 days. Then brain growth slows down.