SEOUL, South Korea — With acupuncture needles trembling from the corners of her mouth like cat’s whiskers, Moon Bo-in, 5, whined with fear. But the doctor, wearing a yellow gown patterned with cartoon characters, poked more needles into her wrists and scalp.
Kim Ok-hee and her daughter, Kang Hyon-hee, 7, at the Seojung growth clinic in Seoul.
“It’s O.K., 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 hormone shots, traditional Eastern treatments and special exercises.
“In our society, it’s all about looks,” said Ms. 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.”
Ms. Seo spends $770 a month on treatments for her daughter and her 4-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 10 centimeters 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 $850,000. “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 saying here, and one need look no further for proof than to the former South Korean strongman Park Chung-hee, or across the demilitarized zone to the North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il, who claims to be 5-foot-5 (but adds inches with elevator shoes and a bouffant hairstyle).
But smaller is no longer considered better, thanks in part to the proliferation of Western models of beauty and success. “Nowadays, children scoff if you mention Napoleon and Park Chung-hee,” said Park Ki-won, who runs the Seojung Growth Clinic. “On TV, all young pop idols are tall. Given our society’s strong tendency to fit into the group and follow the trend, being short is a problem. Short kids are ostracized.”
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 skeptical.
“There is no clinical proof or other evidence that these treatments really work,” Ms. Yoon said. “They use exaggerated and 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,” Lee Do-kyong, a student at Hongik University in Seoul, said on a television talk show. “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. Ms. Lee was forced to apologize, and the Communications Standards Commission ordered the show’s producers to be reprimanded for “violating human rights” and “stoking the looks-are-everything phenomenon.”
“She simply said what everyone thinks but doesn’t dare say in public,” said Dr. Kim Yang-soo, who runs a growth clinic called Kiness. “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 pedaled 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 exceptionally small children with severe growth disorders. And parents have been discouraged by their high cost and fears of side effects.
Ms. Yoon said she was spending $850 a month on the shots but stopped after eight months.
Now she drives her children to Kiness three times a week. “Both my husband and I are short,” said Ms. Yoon, 31, who is about 5 feet tall. “I don’t want my children to blame us for being short when they grow up.”
Another mother at the clinic, Chang Young-hee, 54 and 4-foot-10, said her children had already experienced height discrimination. Both her daughters are college graduates and have good jobs, but when they reached marrying age, matchmakers regarded their short stature as a defect.
“It felt like a blow to the head,” Ms. Chang said. “I learned a lesson. If you fall behind in your studies, you can catch up later. But if you miss the time to grow, you miss it forever.”
Her daughters eventually married, but for the past four years, she has been taking her youngest child, Seo Dong-joon, to Kiness. The boy, now 15, knows his goal.
“If I’m tall, I’ll have an advantage selecting my future wife,” he said, holding an English vocabulary book, which he studies while exercising. “Short guys are teased at school.”
South Koreans have been growing taller anyway, thanks to changes in their diet. Over the past 30 years the average height of high school senior boys in South Korea has increased 3.5 inches, to 5-foot-8, according to government data. Senior girls grew an average of 2 inches, to 5-foot-3.
Doctors at the growth clinics say that most children simply aspire to the new average height, but with more tall teenagers, those who are not as tall seem even shorter. “The gap between tall and short has become more pronounced,” said Dr. Park of Seojung, who recently opened 36 joint-venture growth clinics in China and said the quest to become taller was regionwide.
If so, one country that has been left behind is North Korea. Food shortages there have left children stunted, according to the United Nations and private relief agencies. Dr. Park cited the case of a 16-year-old who fled North Korea last July to join his mother, who had arrived in the South three years earlier. The boy was 5 feet tall, almost four inches below the South Korean average.
“His height wasn’t unusual for the North,” Dr. Park said. “But when his mother saw him again, she cried because the boy hadn’t grown at all, and because she knew the disadvantages he’d face here.”
“My dream is to open growth clinics in North Korea,” Dr. Park said, “so that, once we unify, children from both sides will be able to stand shoulder to shoulder, not with one side a head taller than the other.”
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