What are the differences between parenting and child health?

To put it simply, the two concepts are not the same category at all. Children's health is one of the core basic goals to be achieved by parenting, and parenting is the sum of all parenting actions covering the entire growth stage of a child from birth to adulthood. The boundary is much wider than that of child health.

First, let’s talk about the most familiar children’s health. We usually take our children for height and weight assessment, dental caries screening, gross motor and fine motor development assessment, prevention and treatment of physiological diseases such as colds, fevers, allergic eczema, as well as scientific guidance on daily sleep, diet, exercise habits, and even Interventions for psychological development problems such as children's emotional disorders and developmental delays fall under the category of children's health. Its core criterion is "reaching the standard." As long as each indicator meets the development standards of the corresponding age group and there are no diseases or abnormal development conditions, the basic requirements for children's health are met. Oh, by the way, there are still different opinions in the industry about the boundaries of children's health. One group believes that as long as there are no physical diseases and the emotional state is stable, it is considered healthy. There are also many child development doctors who propose that basic social adaptability should also be included in the health assessment. For example, whether a 3-year-old child can carry out simple cooperation with peers, and whether he can try to calm down on his own when encountering minor setbacks. There is currently no completely unified assessment standard.

But anyone who has really raised a child knows that when raising a child, you only need to focus on these compliance items. For example, when your child enters elementary school, you need to teach him how to organize his schoolbag and desk, how to reconcile with classmates who have conflicts, tell him historical stories, take him to museums to see the customs of different places, and even figure out how to help him build resilience in the face of failure and how to find hobbies that he is really interested in. These things are not directly related to health indicators, but they are all part of parenting. I met a mother in a community mother's group a while ago. Her baby always received excellent child care, and his height was 3 centimeters above the standard for the same month of age. His fine motor and language development were all at the upper level. However, during that time, she was in the group every day to learn from the experience and said that her baby was too "Buddha". She didn't feel the countdown at all. She lost the Lego building competition she signed up for and refused to participate again. She was worried about how to guide her children to develop a proper competitive spirit. This kind of thing was not on the list of children's health assessments at all, but it was a trivial problem that every parenting family faced every day.

Of course, the two are not completely separated. If you are not careful during the parenting process, always feeding your child high-sugar snacks and staying up until 11 o'clock every day, the first thing that will be affected is the child's health. On the other hand, if the child has long-term health problems such as allergies and malnutrition, the difficulty of parenting will also skyrocket. Many parents complain that it is "difficult to raise a baby". When looking back, most of them are due to undiscovered minor health problems that are holding them back.

In fact, to use an inappropriate analogy, if raising a child is compared to planting a small peach tree that wants to bear peaches, children's health is whether the trunk of the tree is straight enough, whether there are wormholes, and whether the leaves are bright green, which are the most basic indicators of survival.； And parenting is the whole process from watering and fertilizing to pruning miscellaneous branches, then protecting it from heavy rain and wind, guiding it to grow in the direction of the sun, until finally it can firmly take root and bear sweet fruits on its own. Doesn’t it make it easier to understand?