Tall order for Korean children

Published on Saturday 26 December 2009 19:28

WITH acupuncture needles trembling from the corners of her mouth like cat's whiskers, five-year-old Moon Bo-in, whined with fear. But the doctor, wearing a yellow gown patterned with cartoon characters, poked more needles into her wrists and scalp.

"It's OK, dear," said her mother, Seo Hye-kyong. "It will help make you pretty and tall. It will make you Cinderella."

Swayed by the increasingly popular conviction that height is crucial to success, South Korean parents are trying all manner of remedies to increase their children's stature, spawning hundreds of growth clinics that offer traditional Eastern treatments and exercises.

"In our society, it's all about looks," said Seo, 35. "I'm afraid my daughter is shorter than her peers. I don't want her to be ridiculed and lose self-confidence because of her height."

Seo spends 482 a month on treatments for her daughter and her four-year-old son at one such clinic, Hamsoa, which has 50 branches across the country and offers a mix of acupuncture, aromatherapy and a twice-a-day tonic that contains deer antler, ginseng and other medicinal herbs.

"Parents would rather add 10cm to their children's stature than bequeath them one billion won," said Dr Shin Dong-gil, a Hamsoa doctor, invoking a figure in Korean currency equal to about 532,000. "If you think of a child as a tree, what we try to do here is to provide it with the right soil, the right wind, the right sunshine to help it grow. We help kids regain their appetite, sleep well and stay fit so they can grow better."

Koreans used to value what was perceived as a grittiness on the part of shorter people. "A smaller pepper is hotter," according to a Korean proverb, and one need look no further for proof than to the former South Korean strongman Park Chung-hee, or across the demilitarised zone to the North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il, who claims to be 5ft 5in (but adds inches with platform shoes and a bouffant hairdo).

But smaller is no longer considered better, thanks in part to the proliferation of Western models of beauty and success.

Park Ki-won, who runs the Seojung Growth Clinic, says: "On TV, all young pop idols are tall. Short kids are ostracised."

Concerns about the trend are growing, too, with some groups warning that growth clinics, while operating within the limits of the law, promise far more than the evidence supports.

Yoon Myoung, a top researcher at Consumers Korea, a civic group that, with the help of scientists, has been investigating the clinics, said parents should be more sceptical.

"There is no clinical proof or other evidence that these treatments really work," Yoon said. "They use deceptive ads to lure parents. But Korean families often have only one child and want to do whatever they can for that child."

Last month, the simmering discomfort over the trend exploded when a college student put it into blunt words on national television.

"Being tall means being competitive," said Lee Do-kyong, a student at Hongik University in Seoul. "I think short guys are losers."

Bloggers vilified her, and lawmakers denounced the station, KBS-TV, for not editing her comments. Viewers filed defamation lawsuits. Lee was forced to apologise, and the Communications Standards Commission ordered the show's producers to be reprimanded for "violating human rights" and "stoking the looks-are-everything phenomenon".

But Dr Kim Yang-soo, who runs a growth clinic called Kiness, said: "She simply said what everyone thinks but doesn't dare say in public. Here, if you change your height, you can change your fate."

At his clinic, Kim Se-hyun, a fifth grader, walked on a treadmill with her torso encased in a harness suspended from an overhead steel bar. The contraption, the clinic maintains, will stretch her spine and let her exercise with less pressure on her legs.

Nearby, sweat rolled off Lee Dong-hyun, 13, as he pedalled a recumbent bicycle while reading a comic book. Behind him, his sister, Chae-won, the shortest girl in her first-grade class, stretched to touch her toes on a blue yoga mat, squealing as an instructor pushed down against her back.

Two years ago, their mother, Yoon Ji-young, had tried giving Dong-hyun growth hormone shots, which have also increased in popularity here. But many doctors will prescribe them only for children with severe growth disorders. And parents have been discouraged by their high cost and fears of side effects.

Yoon said she was spending 532 a month on the shots but had stopped after eight months.

Now she drives her children to Kiness three times a week. "Both my husband and I are short," said Yoon, 31, who is about 5ft tall. "I don't want my children to blame us for being short when they grow up."