Does Your Child Have Heel Pain?

There’s just no way around it – physical activity is important for humans of all ages!

As physical beings, we all need to do a couple of things for optimal health. If you eat well, exercise on a regular basis, and get enough sleep at night, you’re on the right track for a healthy you.

Regular physical activity is particularly important for children, and here are a couple of the countless reasons:

• Establishing a good habit early makes it more likely the habit will still be practiced later in life.
• Participating in sports contributes an array of benefits, like the opportunity to make friends and learn the values of hard work, dedication, and leadership.
• According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, students who are physical active tend to have better school attendance, classroom behaviors, grades, and cognitive performance.

If you’re a parent, you don’t want your son or daughter to miss out on benefits like those, especially not on account of heel pain!

So how do you know if your child has heel pain? Well, there are a couple of signs you should know. Withdrawal from favorite activities can be an indication, as can fatigue. Of course, the most obvious is if they actually tell you their heel hurts. (But many children are, for various reasons, too reluctant to speak up.)

There are a couple of different potential causes of heel pain, but the most common one for children is a condition known as Sever’s disease.

Don’t let the name fool you – this isn’t actually a “disease.” Rather, Sever’s is a kind of growing pain, a condition that develops when the heel bone (calcaneus)—and, more specifically, a growth plate found in the back—reaches physical maturity before the Achilles tendon, which anchors to the back of the bone.

The discrepancy between growth rates creates a situation wherein the Achilles is being pulled by the calcaneus. With Sever’s disease, pain tends to be worse during or immediately following physical activity, since this means additional tugging between the bone and connective tendon.

Sever’s is the most likely reason as to why your child has heel pain, and especially if there wasn’t a specific incident that might indicate a traumatic injury (like a broken heel bone, which tends to be quite rare).

Now that you understand the most likely reason as to why your child has heel pain, what can be done about it?

Fixing Feet Institute provides a wide range of child foot care services—including treatment for the pain caused by Sever’s—so call us to set up an appointment or connect with us online.

We will diagnose the condition to determine if Sever’s disease is actually the problem—or the pain is being caused by something else—and then create an appropriate treatment plan to address it. In the case of Sever’s, treatment is centered on relieving symptoms, and not “curing the problem” (since your son or daughter will grow out of it in time).

Until your child’s Achilles tendon has caught up, we can prescribe a treatment regimen centered on conservative care options to relieve any pain and soreness.