The problem lies in your base case.
“The height of a tree is the length of the path from the root to the deepest node in the tree. A (rooted) tree with only a node (the root) has a height of zero.” – Wikipedia
If there is no node, you want to return -1 not 0. This is because you are adding 1 at the end.
So if there isn’t a node, you return -1 which cancels out the +1.
int findHeight(TreeNode<T> aNode) {
if (aNode == null) {
return -1;
}
int lefth = findHeight(aNode.left);
int righth = findHeight(aNode.right);
if (lefth > righth) {
return lefth + 1;
} else {
return righth + 1;
}
}