Summary and reflections on parenting and children’s health experience

There has never been a standard answer to parenting and children's health. All scientific consensus is only a reference coordinate system. The final destination is always the unique child in your family. Rather than pursuing the perfect state of "not getting sick at all" and "fully developing up to standard", learning to observe the child's true reaction and helping him build both physical and psychological resilience is the core underlying logic.

To be honest, I actually stocked up half a cabinet of popular parenting books in the past two years. I applied whatever "standards" I saw to my baby. When my baby was just one month old and developed jaundice, I stayed up three nights reading the information on the Internet. One school said that physiological jaundice only requires If there are no indications for phototherapy, breastfeed as normal. If you eat more and have more bowel movements, the symptoms will naturally subside. The other group says that stopping breastfeeding for three days will help the symptoms subside quickly and avoid excessive jaundice that may damage your brain. They went to two hospitals to sign up with experts, and the advice they gave happened to be in these two directions. Later, I stared at the baby for a long time. He could eat, feel refreshed, and cry louder than anyone else. I simply stopped breastfeeding, spent half an hour in the sun every day, and fed him two more probiotics. Within two weeks, the jaundice was gone. Later, after talking with colleagues, I learned that academic circles have different tendencies on this issue. European and American guidelines prefer to reduce unnecessary feeding interventions. Some domestic pediatricians will consider the parents’ anxiety and come up with a compromise plan. There is no principled error in either choice. The core is to look at the child’s condition and whether the parents can handle the anxiety.

The biggest pitfall I have ever encountered was following the trend and giving my children "strict taboos". At that time, I read a lot of Chinese medicine parenting content, which said that children with weak spleen and stomach should not touch cold things. In winter, I had to steam and heat fruits before eating them. In summer, watermelons must be brought to room temperature, and popsicles were not allowed to be touched. As a result, when he was 3 years old and just entered kindergarten, the child got half a stick of crushed ice. He had vomiting and diarrhea the same day after eating it. I was still complacent at that time, thinking that it was indeed too cold to touch. Fortunately, I usually control it strictly. When I talked about this matter with a pediatrician I knew well, he came back with one sentence: "You never let his stomach and intestines come into contact with the stimulation of cold. Of course, his tolerance is poor. If you touch it once in a while, wouldn't something happen?" ”The controversy over raw and cold food has not stopped to this day. Most schools of traditional Chinese medicine believe that excessive coldness will damage the spleen and stomach and easily cause food accumulation and diarrhea. Western medicine believes that as long as the child has no underlying gastrointestinal diseases and no abnormal reactions after eating, low-temperature food will not cause harm to health. My own experience after trying it is that there is really no need to go to extremes. At that time, my baby had a weak spleen and stomach and often had bad breath and dry stools, so he should avoid being exposed to cold things. If he runs and jumps every day and has high energy, it is not a big deal to eat half a popsicle in the summer. After raising it for half a year, he now drinks yogurt directly from the refrigerator in the winter without having a stomachache. My previously tense nerves have been mostly relaxed.

In fact, raising a baby is like opening a blind box. The instructions you get are all universal versions, and you have to figure out how to operate them yourself. I used to be particularly resistant to antibiotics. I read a lot of content about the dangers of overusing antibiotics. When my son got bacterial otitis media for the first time, I refused to take any medicine. As a result, he cried in pain all night until he vomited. The next day, he went to the hospital for a checkup. The doctor said that there was a risk of eardrum perforation, so he had to take antibiotics for three days. Later, one time my baby had a viral cold and the fever reached 39 degrees Celsius. The doctor at the community hospital wanted to prescribe antibiotics. Instead, I refused directly with the blood test sheet. I went home and gave me electrolyte solutions and wiped my body with warm water. After three days, the fever was completely gone. This thing is really neither a scourge nor a panacea. Don't force it when you should use it, and don't feed it blindly when you shouldn't use it. It's better than anything else.

When many people talk about children's health, they only think about not getting sick and growing taller. In fact, those invisible emotions are also an important part of health. Last year, my son just entered middle school and cried for a week and refused to go to kindergarten. My first reaction was to scold him, "You must be naughty and disobedient, and the teacher is scolding you." Later, I patiently played kindergarten role-playing games with him, and then I realized that he was slow to eat. The teacher said in front of the whole class, "If you can't finish eating, I'll put your food in the trash can." At that time, I debated for a long time whether to find a teacher or not. My friends around me were divided into two groups. One group said, "Is this such a small thing important?" Children have to adapt to setbacks from an early age." Another group said, "You must find it, otherwise it will leave a psychological shadow and make you feel inferior." Later, I had a private chat with the teacher, and without any criticism, I just said that my baby had been slow to eat since he was a child, and I asked the teacher to be more considerate. After that, every day when I came back, I played the game of "feeding the dolls" with him, praising him for eating quickly and well. After less than half a month, he was jumping up and down and willing to go to kindergarten. You see, there is no absolutely correct method of education. As long as the child's mood is smooth, no matter what principle, it will work.

Last week I took my baby to the community to slide on the slide, and I met an enthusiastic aunt who pulled me and told me that I wore too few clothes for my baby, "I don't know if it's spring or autumn?" If you catch a cold, you will suffer." I touched the back of the baby's neck. It was warm and the forehead was covered with sweat. I smiled and thanked the aunt, then turned around and took the baby to buy popsicles. In the past, I would definitely have to worry about it for a long time. Is it really true that I don’t wear enough clothes, and will I catch a cold?

To be honest, when I read the content about "3-year-olds must be able to memorize 100 poems" and "10 foods that must not be touched under 6 years old", I immediately crossed them out. How can there be so many "musts" and "absolutes" in raising a baby? If your child likes to run, let him run more. If he likes to read quietly, read with him more. As long as he opens his eyes every day, he smiles, eats well and sleeps well, and can continue playing when he gets up after falling. It is more effective than all standard tables and perfect score strategies. My biggest realization in the past few years is that don’t make parenting a test paper that requires full marks. The best answer is that both you and your baby are comfortable.