What is the difference between parenting and child health?

The two are essentially the difference between "full-dimensional parenting practices" and "core goals/underlying benchmarks". The scope and positioning are completely different. The boundaries of parenting are much wider, and children's health is the bottom line that cannot be broken in the parenting process and is also one of the core indicators for measuring the quality of parenting.

I usually provide parenting guidance related to child health care in the community, and the most common misunderstanding I encounter is that the two are confused. Not long ago, I met the mother of a 3-year-old boy. For the past six months, she had been staring at her baby's height and weight curve every day. If there was a difference of 0.1 centimeters, she would have to look up the information for several days. Her baby would stop all outdoor play and gatherings after coughing twice. As a result, when the baby just entered kindergarten, he didn't even dare to say hello to the teacher, and he always got into trouble grabbing toys. Hitting someone with her hand, she realized when she came for consultation with her baby in her arms that the most she had focused on before was the physiological indicators of children's health. Even the social adaptability required by the current common definition of children's health was not up to standard, let alone the habit formation, character guidance, and cognitive enlightenment that parenting also covers.

The debate between the two in the parenting circle has never stopped. One group of parents firmly believes that "health is more important than the sky, and everything else is empty." As long as the child can eat, sleep, and not get sick, the child will not speak two years later and is afraid of being unsociable. You can wait until he grows up. The other group believes that "focusing only on health is the beginning of raising a useless child." They arrange English enlightenment and special sports training when they are just one year old. In order to keep up with the so-called growth schedule, they even have to shorten the child's sleep time by one hour. Both of these views actually screw up the relationship between the two.

It’s not difficult to figure out the relationship between the two. Just like when we drive a private car for a long trip, parenting is the entire arrangement of the trip - you have to choose a suitable route, arrange rest breaks, deal with emergencies such as traffic jams and flat tires, and also take care of the people in the car. Driving is not fun, and children's health is the condition of the car. You must first ensure that the car has no faults, has enough oil, and the tire pressure is normal before you can drive forward smoothly. You can't drive the car and scrap it just to rush to your destination, and you can't just park it at home because you are afraid of the car breaking down, right?

In fact, there is no need for ordinary parents to be too obsessed with these two concepts. As long as they grasp that "all parenting actions cannot be at the expense of harming the child's health, and at the same time, do not just focus on health and ignore other possibilities for growth", there will basically be no major deviations.