Latent Growth Model and Repeated Measurement

I had a brief conversation with Linda Adair on the past Wednesday about the issues of catch-up growth. She mentioned that she would have done the analysis differently, had she known the method of latent growth modeling methodology in the 1990s. The idea of standardizing the measurement and calculating the difference score does not make much sense.

I am thinking about doing a Monte Carlo simulation to demonstrate the relationship between two sets of relationships: that revealed by latent growth model, and that revealed by standardized difference scores.