this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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HER DAD'S TALLER. HOLY SHIT.
genetics, right? at least one of her parents had to be similarly tall.
I once knew a married couple with the husband at 6'8" and the wife at 4'10". For years, we all joked about them having kids, and either would quip "logistics". I was part of the family gathering during the birth of their first child, and a caesarian was essential. 🙃
You might be surprised! My uncle is 170 cm tall, his wife about 165, and two of their sons are about 170. Their third son is nearly 195 cm. Yes, he's their biological child - we've checked!
Both my aunt and uncle had tall fathers and very short mothers. Height is polygenic (multiple genes are responsible), so my cousin won the height allele lottery and inherited a higher proportion of the height increasing traits both parents carried, making him a height outlier.
I'm 201 cm both my parents are both over 6ft
My cousin is 211cm, both his parents are under 6ft.
That cousin isn't even related to the taller side of my family. He's sort of a freak outlier.
I am 197 cm and taller than both my parents or really anyone in my family
Do your family pictures also look photoshopped?
Same boat. I’m 20cm taller than my dad. Do grandparents come into play? I’m really bad at biology
Height is about 80% genetics, 20% environment (nutrition and general health). Grandparent's genetics are a factor since that is where the parents inherited their genes.
A child inherits two copies of every gene from their parents, one copy from each. Your family could be like mine, where my grandfather was quite tall and my grandmother was unusually short, suggesting my grandfather had double pairs of genes for height and my grandmother had double pairs of genes for... not height. Their children, my mother and her siblings, then had an even assortment of tall and short genes.
Her brother married a woman whose parents followed the same tall father/short mother pattern and they had three sons: two of about the same height as the parents (even tall/short gene mix) and one who is about 20 cm taller than the rest (few or no short genes).
Thank you for the detailed explanation. And yep, that’s the situation. One of my grandparents was tall, the other grandparent was short.
I mean not neccesarily. Both my parents are at least 15cm shorter than me. My mum is quite tall (looking at averages she falls in the 20th percentile but still is around 175cm) but my dad is average height at 48th percentile. And yet I fall in the 1st to 2nd percentile.
Both my brothers are about as tall as my dad and the only one even close to my height is one of my mother's cousins.
I was complaining that I thought my kids would all be my height or a little taller because my ex was a little bit taller than me, so should they not be the average of our heights?
My kid who did genetics in school says no, the average result is add mom and dads heights, divide by 2 but then add 10cm for boys, subtract 10cm for girls. So if I wanted girls my height I would need a man taller than me. And boy children would likely end up taller than either of us.
Obviously it's not an unbreakable rule, but a likely result.
If I do your formula I would be around 186cm tall. I am in fact around 196. My brothers do fall more in line with one being 184 and the other 182.
My parents had a big height gap, mom 163 in cm, dad 193. So the average is 178. My sister is 178cm, I am 175. I guess that's why I expected my daughters to be the average of our heights. My brothers are 188 cm. So all of us are in between the heights of the parents but there's a lot of "in between".
My mom's parents were actually both quite tall though, her mom my height, which for back then was really tall, she (my mom) told me she kept expecting to get taller than her mom like the rest of her friends and it never happened.
And my dad's parents were both quite short, about 165cm and all their kids as tall as my dad, so obviously there are other factors. I have no idea why my dad and his brothers were so tall. Like nearly a whole foot taller than both their parents.
He played 7 seasons in the NBA, was kinda a journeyman playing backup center for a bunch of different teams.