What are the differences between parenting and child health?

The core difference between parenting and children's health is that the former is a collection of comprehensive parenting practices covering the entire growth cycle of minors aged 0-18 years old, while the latter is a medical/public health professional field that focuses on the physical and mental development of children. The core of the former is "how to raise children", while the core of the latter is "whether they are raised well and how to intervene when problems arise." The two overlap but the underlying logic is completely different.

I have been working as a family parenting coach in the community for almost 6 years. Almost every week I meet parents who confuse the two concepts. Last week, a mother who just gave birth to her second child came to me to sort out the course materials. Of the more than 20 courses I saved during pregnancy, half were about parenting content about parent-child reading and emotional guidance. , half of which are children's health-related courses that talk about infant feeding and common disease care. She herself said that she was confused. Sometimes when her baby doesn't like to eat, she doesn't know whether to follow the parenting blogger's advice and not follow the feeding habit, or follow the child care doctor's advice to supplement with zinc to improve nutrition first.

In fact, this kind of entanglement itself hides the boundary difference between the two: you are entangled in whether to enroll your 4-year-old child in a hip-hop interest class, how to talk to your child about being excluded by classmates in kindergarten, and whether to allow your child to watch cartoons for half an hour every day before entering elementary school. These are typical parenting issues, and there is no absolutely unified standard answer. They need to be adjusted based on your family's family rhythm and your child's personality characteristics, which involve pedagogy, developmental psychology, and even the sense of propriety in family relationships. But if you are confused about whether your 3-year-old needs to sleep 12 hours a day, is it normal that your baby has not grown in height in the past half month, or is the baby rubbing his eyes all the time because of allergies, these fall under the category of children's health. There are clear industry reference standards, and professional medical staff are required to make judgments. You cannot rely on scattered parenting experience on the Internet to guess.

Of course, there are a lot of overlaps between the two, such as daily feeding, work and rest training, and exercise guidance. They are not only the core components of daily parenting, but also the focus of children's health intervention. This is also the reason why many people are confused. Even practitioners in different fields will have different opinions: For example, most teachers who provide parenting guidance will advocate compliant feeding, and children will not eat if they don't want to. Force to avoid developing the bad habit of catch-up feeding, but pediatric child care doctors sometimes recommend that parents adjust the feeding method appropriately for children whose weight growth lags behind. Even if they feed a few more mouths, they must ensure that the current nutritional intake reaches the standard. Both views are not wrong, but the former is from the perspective of long-term parenting habits, and the latter is from the perspective of meeting current health indicators.

To use an inappropriate analogy, if you compare raising children to planting an orange tree in your yard, raising children is all your actions from selecting seedlings, loosening the soil, watering, pruning, to protecting it from wind and rain, and even thinking about how to let it get more afternoon sun. You also need to consider whether the tree is good-looking, whether it will produce enough oranges for the whole family to eat, and whether it will grow too densely and block the hydrangeas next to it.； Children's health is equivalent to asking an agricultural and forestry technician to perform physical examinations on the tree regularly to check whether there is a lack of trace elements, whether there are worms, and whether the branch development meets the growth standards of the species. If there are any problems, he will prescribe fertilizer and medicine for you, but he will not care whether you usually water it with rice water or tap water, nor will he care whether you give the oranges to your neighbors or eat them yourself.

In fact, for ordinary parents, there is no need to draw too close the boundaries between the two. The biggest use of clarifying the core differences is to avoid detours: There was a father who called the child care specialist of a tertiary hospital because his 5-year-old son refused to dress by himself. He waited in line for 3 hours. After checking, the doctor said that the child's growth and development and fine movements were normal. It was just that the family did too much for him and developed a dependence. Just go home and guide him slowly. He spent most of the day in vain and was nervous for a long time. Originally, good parenting is to naturally integrate the requirements for children's health into daily life. There is no need to separate them. It is much more useful to have a map in mind and find the right person when encountering problems than to pick up concepts.