Youth health management content

The core of adolescent health management is by no means as simple as "not getting sick and growing tall enough", but is based on the bio-psycho-social three-dimensional medical framework, covering the three core directions of daily health baseline maintenance, potential risk early warning intervention, and long-term healthy habit development. There is no unified standard that applies to all children. It must be dynamically adjusted based on individual development rhythm, personality traits, and living environment.

I have worked in the youth health department at a community health service center for almost 7 years, and the most common misunderstanding I have encountered is that parents equate health management with "keeping an eye on height, controlling myopia, and losing weight." Last month, a mother brought her 14-year-old son for consultation. She said that after following the online "Youth Health Plan" for three months, the child was forced to run 3 kilometers every day, drink 500ml of milk, and not eat any snacks. As a result, the child not only failed to lose weight, but also suffered from insomnia for half a month in a row and could not concentrate at all in class.

Regarding the management of physiological dimensions, there are actually two different practical ideas in the academic community: one is the "quantitative management school" commonly used in European and American private schools, which will set precise exercise duration, nutritional intake standards, sleep duration, and even screen usage time for children of different ages. It is accurate to the minute. This method is really effective for children with strong self-discipline and a development rhythm that is in line with the average level.； However, most domestic scholars who study pubertal development in the field of public health support the idea of ​​"elastic adaptation". After all, individual differences in adolescence can extend to more than three years. Some children complete their height spurt at the age of 12, while others only start growing at the age of 15. Adopting uniform standards for calorie intake and exercise intensity can easily lead to problems such as eating disorders and sports injuries. The 14-year-old boy I just mentioned had an old knee injury. He couldn't sleep in pain after running 3 kilometers, and he didn't dare to tell his parents. That's why there was a problem.

What many people don’t realize is that in adolescent health management, mental state is no less important than physical health. I previously treated a 12-year-old girl whose blood pressure was high for three consecutive school physical examinations. Her parents took her through a full set of organic examinations and found no problems. After chatting for a long time, she discovered that every time her mother picked her up from school, the first thing she said when she got in the car was "How many points did you get on today's test?" When she saw her mother waiting at the school gate, she instinctively became nervous, and her blood pressure suddenly rose.

Practitioners in different fields have different views on intervention in the psychological dimension: When our clinical health managers encounter such emotional problems that have already experienced physiological feedback, they generally recommend that parents first conduct 1-2 family consultations to adjust the parent-child communication model.； However, many teachers in the field of basic education feel that there is no need to "make a fuss out of a molehill." Teenagers are already in a stage of violent mood swings. If they seek psychological counseling when they are slightly stressed, it will give the child a negative hint of "I have a psychological problem." It is better to try to adjust the communication method first and observe for half a month before talking. Both ideas are actually reasonable. The core is to see whether the child's condition continues to deteriorate.

In addition to physical and psychological factors, many people have no idea about health management in the dimension of "social adaptation." To put it bluntly, it means whether children can cope with various social and academic pressures they encounter during their growth, and whether they can allocate their energy reasonably. Last year, there was a boy who was a freshman in high school. He had a fever at the end of the semester and had to take two or three days off each time. His parents thought it was because of his poor immunity at first, so they bought a bunch of health products to no avail. Later, they found out after chatting that he had a soft personality and would not reject his classmates. Half the class asked him for help copying their homework. After finishing his own homework every day, he had to write for others. He often stayed up until one or two o'clock, and the pressure reached the critical point, and he immediately developed a fever. To put it bluntly, he has never been taught how to reject others reasonably since he was a child. This is also a symptom of the lack of health management.

I have been involved in intervention for so long, and the most common thing I tell parents is, don’t use the “perfect health checklist” on the Internet to apply to your children. Some children are naturally introverted. If you force them to go out and play with friends for 3 hours every day and say it is "improving social adaptability", it will cause a huge psychological burden on them. ； Some children just love to move and can't sit still. If you insist on letting them sit there and read for 2 hours every day and say that they need to "cultivate concentration," this is essentially going against their developmental laws.

To put it bluntly, adolescent health management has never been about drawing a box for the child and asking him to dig in step by step. It is more like setting up a comfortable little shelf with him, giving him a little support where it is crooked, and a little bit making up for where it is missing. After all, health is a dynamic state. How can there be any 100% standard answer?