An Evaluation Of The Channel System On The Baby Grid

Of the wide variety of growth assessment standards developed in the past 25 years, the Wetzel Grid (5) has received widespread attention in the literature. However, Wetzel's Baby Grid (7), which extends the Grid technique to the period of infancy, has received little descriptive or critical attention (i). The present paper describes and evaluates the Baby Grid with reference to 230 infants seen at The Merrill-Palmer School in Detroit. The Baby Grid is essentially a chart providing two complementary methods for assessing changes in length and weight during infancy. These methods are used to provide a measure of healthy progress through the evaluation of physique constancy and change in size. The portion of the five-color Baby Grid consists of a graph on which length is plotted on the abscissa and weight on the ordinate. Increases in length and weight are represented by a line running diagonally from lower left to upper right. A series of lines running parallel to the usual progress of an infant are called channels. The channel lines are crossed at regular intervals by another system of lines called developmental levels. The channel lines represent guide lines for the maintenance of a consistent physique; the crossing of levels indicates an increase in size.