How to Relieve Growing Pains: What the AAP Suggests

There is no treatment for growing pains, because there is nothing to treat — only an episode to get through. The AAP’s suggestions are comfort measures: gently massage the child’s limbs, a warm bath before bed, and a dose of children’s acetaminophen or ibuprofen when the ache is bad enough to matter. The one thing that reduces how often episodes happen is daily stretching.

During an episode

1. Massage the muscle, firmly but gently. Thighs and calves are the sites; work along the muscle, not into a joint. Most children settle within minutes.
2. Add warmth. A warm bath before bed is the AAP’s version, and it is safer than a heating pad for a child who is about to fall asleep.
3. Stay in the room. Being present is part of the treatment for a child woken by pain in the dark, and it costs nothing.
4. Medicate if needed. Children’s acetaminophen or ibuprofen, dosed by weight. Never aspirin.
5. Then let it go. Episodes last roughly 10 to 30 minutes and end on their own.

Between episodes: the part that prevents them

The AAP’s preventive advice is specific and easy to forget because it is boring: stretch daily, targeting the quads, hamstrings and calf muscles. It also suggests building rest breaks into hard play — not less play, just interruptions in it. Both work on the same theory the AAP gives for the cause: soreness from overworked muscles that surfaces once they relax, hours later.

Thirty seconds per muscle group, both legs, as part of the bedtime routine, is enough structure to actually happen every night.

What not to do

• Do not massage hard enough to hurt. A screaming child is not being helped.
• Do not leave a heating pad on a sleeping child.
• Do not give aspirin to a child or teenager.
• Do not medicate every night as a routine. Regular dosing masks a changing pattern, which is the one thing you need to be able to see.
• Do not restrict activity. No limitation of activity is part of the definition, and cutting sports does not shorten the condition.

Comfort is not a substitute for a second look

Comfort measures are the right answer only when the episode matches the pattern: both legs, muscles rather than joints, evening or night, and a child who is completely fine in the morning. If any of those slips — one leg, morning pain, a limp, a swollen joint, fever — stop treating and have the child examined. The full list of features that break the pattern is in growing pains and joint pain, and the causes it opens up are in leg pain at night in children.

This content is informational and does not replace medical consultation, diagnosis, or treatment. See also growing pains symptoms and when do growing pains stop.