No, Coffee Doesn’t Stunt Kids’ Growth

If you’ve browsed any of our coffee coverage, you know that we take our brew pretty seriously. From pour-overs to espresso machines, and from bean roast to brew strength, we have strong opinions about it all. This week, it’s all things coffee at Wirecutter.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when I started drinking coffee, but I must have been in grade school because my earliest memories are of sipping a cup with lots of milk and no sugar while reading the comics before school.

Coffee for kids wasn’t considered a big deal in my family when I was growing up in the 1990s. But I knew this was somewhat deviant: To most parents, coffee was an adult beverage, not appropriate for children. Kids shouldn’t even like the flavor. And everyone knows it’ll stunt your growth. Right?

The idea that coffee stunts kids’ growth actually has no basis in science (as noted by The New York Times, which is now Wirecutter’s parent company). It likely dates back to the marketing efforts of Postum, a non-caffeinated, bran-based hot drink developed in 1895 by C.W. Post (inventor of Grape-Nuts). Through ads and articles, Postum tried to convince people that coffee was bad for everyone but especially for kids.

In what today we’d call an advertorial in the Boston Daily Globe in 1901, Postum wrote that letting kids drink coffee was “a crime,” that it “prepares them for dyspepsia and nervous wrecks,” and, of course, that it “stunts their growth.” In a 1907 article in The New York Times, a mother reported that coffee caused her young son to “lie awake at night probably three or four hours, with his eyes wide open, talking to himself and grasping at imaginary objects in the air.” A switch to morning Postum cured the boy’s “coffee delirium.”

I wasn’t too surprised when my second daughter developed a taste for coffee as a toddler, frequently asking for “coppy” in the mornings. I knew an occasional splash of homemade brew in her milk wouldn’t stunt her growth, or make her fall into a delirium. But was it okay for her to drink?

The caffeine in coffee is still a problem for kids, said Dr. Marcie Schneider, a pediatrician and former member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Nutrition: “Coffee is an addictive substance. Caffeine is addictive.” Besides making you feel alert and awake, caffeine can cause a host of other changes in the body, including increasing your heart rate, blood pressure, and frequency of urination, and altering your digestion. It may make some people feel anxious, and it can interfere with sleep. “The smaller you are, the more susceptible you’re going to be” to caffeine’s effects, Schneider said. Moreover, “nobody knows what it does to a developing brain.” Although Postum’s most enduring claim—that coffee stunts kids’ growth—proved false, the company was right in cautioning that frequent caffeine consumption isn’t good for children.

So if you plan not to allow your child to taste coffee until they are older, you’re not wrong. The AAP says caffeine has no place in a child’s diet. But that means all types of caffeinated beverages; there’s nothing uniquely bad about coffee. According to a 2016 analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, soda and tea are the most common sources of caffeine for children.

Personally, when I let my daughter, now 4, have an occasional cup of super-milky coffee, I put it in the same category as her other favorite but less-than-nutritionally-ideal foods: vinegar-flavored chips, Entenmann’s doughnuts, and rainbow sprinkles on toast. All good things in moderation.