What are the differences between parenting and children's health

The core difference between the two is that their positioning is completely different - parenting is the sum of comprehensive parenting practices covering the entire life cycle of children from birth to adulthood, while children's health is not only a core evaluation dimension in the parenting system, but also an independent branch of public health and clinical medicine. The former focuses on "a collection of all parenting actions", while the latter focuses on "evaluation, intervention and related research of growth status".

It’s normal for ordinary parents to not be able to distinguish between the two. After all, these two topics are often mixed together when talking about them in daily life. If you go to walk downstairs and listen to the mothers chatting and say, “I’m studying parenting recently,” most likely you are studying how to add complementary foods to your baby, how to put him to sleep, and how to put them to sleep. Teaching children to recognize numbers is all about bits and pieces of specific actions; but if someone says, "I am paying attention to children's health recently," the first reaction will definitely be to talk about the prevention of high-risk diseases in children, compliance with height and weight standards, and whether to give children nutritional supplements, which are directly related to the physical and mental state.

I met a pair of novice parents at community child care before. They were holding a 6-month-old baby with a sad face. They said that they strictly followed the procedures of a popular parenting book to raise the baby. What time did they eat, what time did they go to bed, and how much did they eat every time? Why was the baby still below the growth curve and always having stomachaches? The child care doctor laughed after flipping through two pages of their parenting records, saying that you were considering "complete the parenting process" as your goal, and were not focusing on the core yardstick of children's health. Every baby has individual differences in digestion capacity and sleep needs. How can they all follow a unified template?

Nowadays, many industry practitioners will deliberately blur the boundary between the two. For example, those who provide family parenting guidance will make children's health assessment a core part of their services. Doctors who provide child health care will also provide parents with specific parenting suggestions on feeding, daily routine, and parent-child interaction. Many popular science contents will even talk about the two together, making everyone think they are the same thing. Many parents also believe that the core goal of parenting is to ensure the health of children, and there is no need to draw boundaries too clearly. This statement does make sense in a family setting. After all, when ordinary families raise children, the starting point of all actions is ultimately to allow the children to grow up healthily, both physically and mentally.

But when it comes to professional fields or public services, the boundaries of the two are quite different. Parenting can extend to areas that are not directly related to health, such as family education, academic planning, and parent-child relationship building. Children's health can also break away from specific family parenting scenarios and extend to public health and professional medical fields such as children's epidemic prevention and control, children's drug research and development, and rehabilitation of special children. You can't let a pediatrician control what interest classes your child enrolls in, right? To put it bluntly, you can think of parenting as a "full-cycle growth customized service" for your child, ranging from the school entrance plan to the choice of material for socks, as long as it is related to the child's growth. Children's health is the most basic "quality control red line" in this set of services, and it is also a separate and systematic professional research field. It is difficult to mix it up.