What factors differentiate parenting from child health?

The core difference is actually that the underlying orientations of the two are completely different. Children's health is a bottom-line rigid need, while childcare is a growth-oriented comprehensive development need. The judgment standards, responsibility bodies, and error tolerance spaces of the two are quite different.

Last week when I was volunteering at community child care, I met several parents looking at the growth curve and asking if their baby had gained less than a pound in weight this month because they were not fed properly. The doctor looked through the past records and said that as long as the growth rate is in the range of 3%-97%, there will be no problem. This is a typical judgment of children's health - there are clear medical quantitative standards, and the core goal is to maintain the child's physical and mental state. Above the baseline of disease and development standards, ranging from the diagnosis and treatment of colds and fevers to the screening and intervention of congenital diseases, and even the screening of children's mental illness, which is now receiving more and more attention, the essence is to stick to the bottom line. Most of the core judgment rights in this part are in the hands of medical staff, and parents are more in the role of cooperating with the implementation. The room for error is very small. If something is missed, it can easily cause irreversible effects.

But after you leave the child care clinic, you are struggling to decide whether to sign your child up for exercise classes or art classes, whether you should treat your child coldly or lecture him on the spot when he grabs other people's toys, and whether you should let the elderly chase him for food. These are all aspects of parenting. To use an inappropriate analogy, raising children is like opening a small bookstore. For children's health, you must first ensure that the store has passed the fire protection, has a complete business license, the bookshelf will not collapse, and does not sell pirated books. These are rigid requirements. If you fail to meet the standards, you will not be able to open it. ； When it comes to parenting, whether you want to sell comics or literature, whether you want to have a reading group, whether you want to decorate in an Instagram style or a retro style, all depends on the shop owner’s ideas. There is no standard answer. Even if you just want to set up a folding table and only sell second-hand picture books, as long as you think it’s appropriate, no one can say you are wrong.

The most common mistake many parents make now is to confuse the boundaries between the two, or to regard individual differences in parenting as a health problem. For example, if a baby runs away two months later than his peers, they check the information every day and think it is developmental delay. They go to several hospitals for check-ups and spend money in vain.； Or they regard health problems as "bad habits" in parenting. I met a three-year-old boy before. His parents always thought that the boy was "introverted and lazy" because he didn't like to talk. After more than half a year of teaching, there was no improvement. Finally, after a physical examination, it was found that mild middle ear effusion caused hearing loss, which delayed the golden intervention period for language development. It is a pity.

Of course, the two are not completely separated. The most typical one is the field of child psychology. At present, there is no unified conclusion in the industry. Some scholars believe that as long as there are no clear mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression, and ADHD, it is a normal state within the scope of children's health. Children who are prone to losing their temper, being sensitive, crying, and being unsociable are all problems of parenting style and should be placed under the supervision of parents.； Some experts have also proposed that the current children's health standards should be broadened to include basic thresholds of emotional stability and social adaptability. Intervention should not wait until pathological problems develop. This part is still under discussion, and the guidance of different institutions is also different.

In fact, ordinary parents don't need to worry too much about the clear boundaries between the two. When they are really unsure, they should first seek professional medical staff to check for health problems, rule out organic and pathological abnormalities, and then return to daily parenting and slowly adjust, and basically they will not step into a big pit.