Please, stop the insanity. You can buy cool shoes that I can't.

This is some serious bad parenting. If there's anything I hate, it's parents willing to flood their children's bloodstreams with needless medications, and the huge pharmecutical corporations willing to take advantage of them.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. regulators on Friday approved use of a growth hormone for boosting the height of children who are short but in good health.

Eli Lilly's hormone, Humatrope, has been sold in the United States since 1987 and used for treating children with growth-hormone deficiencies. With the new approval, Indianapolis-based Lilly will be able to market Humatrope for short children with normal levels of the hormone and no evidence of a disease that stunts growth.

This is the stupidest thing I've heard of in a while. And given current events recently in the United States, that's really saying something.

As a woman who's been 5' 10" since she was 11 years old, I may not have much to say on this subject. But then again, maybe I do. It may not be easy being "abnormally" short. But being tall is just as difficult. Dresses and skirts my size usually fall 3-5 inches too short. The only women's shoes that come in my size are either Dr Scholls' or (ack) nurse's shoes. (I think that's one of the reasons I was a punk rocker...Doc Martens in UK men's size 9 fit just right!)

I hit my head on everything. I once saw stars knocking my head on a high shelf the bedroom of my petite, elfin friend Anna (who, incidentally, once bought the coolest punkest boots ever --they had a fat chunky steel toe with a hammer and sickle in red leather emblazoned on it, perfect for shocking all the rich Bostonians back home-- in in a tiny shop in the Village for 80 percent off because they were size 5, and only her tiny, Cinderella-like feet would fit them). There was a chandelier over the dinner table at the house where I grew up that I bumped my head on two or three times a day. My husband now thinks it's cute when I hit my head every time I get out of the car.

I get backaches stooping down to reach my keyboard at work. Or, I have to lower my seat to the point where my knees ache from being bent at a 45 degree angle all day. I'm taller than everyone else in my family, even my father.

So, in order to save my head from all the lumps and to save me from the social akwardness of highwater pants and nurse's shoes, should my parents have given me shots as a child to mediate my growth to an "acceptable" or "normal" level? Or, should they have encouraged me to see myself as statuesque and elegantly elongated? Should they have given me a sense of Amazonian pride at the fact that I would never need someone to reach something on the top shelf for me?

So, parents of potentially short children, please do not make Eli Lilly any richer by giving your children growth hormones they don't need. Please let your children know that although they may never play basketball, they could be great equestrians or gymnasts. They may need help getting that last jar of spaghetti sauce off the top shelf at the supermarket, but their heads will remain pristinely unlumped.

And please, please let them know that really cool shoes are easier to find in size 5.