In 1983, then 24-year-old Patricia Clark gave birth to her second child in the maternity ward of Community Memorial Hospital in Toms River, New Jersey. Big babies seemed to run in her family, so she was expecting a decent-sized newborn. To everyone’s surprise, Kevin Robert Clark weighed in at slightly more than 16 pounds at birth.
Kevin’s parents were worried about the baby’s health since he was double the normal size of a newborn, but doctors checked him out and reassured them he was perfectly healthy. His parents struggled a bit with the fact he didn’t fit into his crib or his baby clothes. Further details of the incredible birth are noted here in an archived report in The New York Times.
Kevin started out big and kept getting bigger. When he began junior high, he was already 6 feet 5 inches tall. Now, at age 38, he stands 6 feet, 9 inches tall and weighs around 300 pounds, according to a 2019 story from the New York Post.
“A challenge in high school and adult life was finding clothes and shoes that fit — I could never shop off the rack,” Kevin said in a 2019 interview. “As a teenager, I grew so quickly I always needed new clothes.”
Kevin likes to make jokes about his size, which has turned heads and attracted stares his entire life. He tells people he’s 5 feet, 21 inches tall, and when they ask if he plays basketball, he asks if they play miniature golf.
“There was always an expectation that I would play basketball because I was so tall,” Kevin explained in a 2019 interview.
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“I had a conversation with my high school health teacher, who was also a coach and he said, ‘If you want to pass health class, you’re gonna play basketball.’”
Kevin added, “He said it in jest but there was truth to it. It was a small school and they needed me to play. But it was never my passion, and I wasn’t actually good at it.”
Instead of going into basketball or football like everyone expected, Kevin joined the Air Force and then became a military policeman in Texas for a time before returning to school to get his MBA. He currently resides with his 6-foot-tall wife, Jenna, and a Great Dane, as reported here at the New York Post. He enjoys hunting and fishing.
It turns out that there are some benefits to being super tall — beyond being a coach’s first pick for the basketball season.
“There’s a natural tendency for people to think that because you’re tall, you’re in charge. I always say, ‘Everyone looks up to me,’” Kevin explained.
“I was a police officer for a while and everyone instantly would ask me questions, like I was in charge. I’d be in the same uniform as them, sometimes with less stripes,” he added. “Conversely, though, I was never able to hide in a crowd.”
Typically, a newborn full-term baby weighs between 5 pounds, 8 ounces and 8 pounds, 13 ounces, according to KidsHealth.org.
Guinness World Records reports that the heaviest baby of all time was born 1879 to Anna Bates, a Canadian woman known for her incredible size at 7 feet, 11 inches tall.
Bates’ boy, who tragically died 11 hours after birth, weighed 22 pounds and measured 28 inches.
“He was 28” tall, weighed 22 lbs and was perfect in every respect. He looked at birth like an ordinary child of six months,” wrote the boy’s father, Martin van Buren Bates.
There are many factors that determine a baby’s size, as Dr. Gerard Nahum explains in an interview with The Guardian. After Nahum and his team conducted a study in which they looked at 244 healthy Caucasian women who gave birth to full-term babies, they determined that even altitude can affect a newborn’s size. Other factors that affect a baby’s size include “sex, the mother’s height, starting weight and weight gain in the third trimester, plus the father’s height.”
Larger babies like Bates’ son and Kevin can present problems for the mother, which is why Nahum recommends a cesarean or induction for babies that weigh over 8 pounds, 8 ounces.
One mother featured in The Guardian article described her last birth as “traumatic” because of the baby’s size.
But just because you’re likely to have a big baby, doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed to have a bad experience.
“Plenty of women give birth to 10lb babies with absolutely no complications. The question should not be, ‘Is the baby big?’ but ‘Is the baby big for the mother?’” said James Walker, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Leeds, in an interview with The Guardian.
Despite the perceived drawbacks of having a big baby, Lucy Atkins of The Guardian cites a recent study that lists some benefits: “bigger babies do better at school, have more stellar careers and are more likely to marry than small ones.”
