What are the differences and connections between parenting and children's health

Essentially, parenting is a personalized parenting practice that covers all dimensions of children's growth. Children's health is not only the core bottom line that parenting should adhere to, but also the core indicator for evaluating the rationality of parenting. The two are more like the relationship between "a full set of maintenance actions for taking care of fruit trees" and "the growth and fruit-bearing status of fruit trees". They are not two separate things. The boundaries are different but the core is highly bound.

When I provide parenting guidance in the community, I always encounter parents who confuse these two concepts. When many elders are new to scientific parenting, they always think that "raising children means feeding them well and not getting sick." In fact, this is equating children's health with parenting. There is a clear medical evaluation system for children's health. From the physiological level of growth and development, nutritional status, and organ function, to the psychological level of emotional regulation and cognitive development, to the social adaptation level of peer interaction and rule awareness, there are corresponding and quantifiable reference standards, such as 3 It is normal for a child aged 10 to 90 to have a height and weight within the range of P10-P90. Children who can express their needs clearly and interact simply with their peers are considered to have met the standard. This is a set of universal judgment standards. Regardless of differences in family conditions and parenting philosophies, children's health standards are the same. But parenting is not a standardized matter at all. When raising a 3-year-old baby, some parents like to take their baby to fish and dig in nature, while others are willing to spend time reading picture books with their baby for enlightenment. As long as the baby's health indicators are within the normal range, there is no difference between the two options. When I usually give lectures, I always use the example of two neighbors downstairs: Sister Zhang on the first floor takes her son in the community every day. She "runs like crazy" in the house, her clothes are always stained with mud, and her child has never even attended a dedicated early childhood education class. However, the child care assessment has perfect scores, and her expressive ability is better than that of many children who are raised according to the school schedule. Sister Li on the tenth floor has a meticulous schedule. She has provided sensory enlightenment and habit training for her child since she was a child. She rarely gets sick and is very generous when greeting people. This is the most intuitive difference between the individualization of parenting and the standardization of children's health.

Of course, the two never go their separate ways. All parenting choices will ultimately depend on the child's health. The feeding methods, work and rest arrangements, and educational rhythm you choose will ultimately be reflected in the child's physical and psychological state. A while ago, a stay-at-home mother came to me for consultation. She said that in order to give her baby an "early start", she signed up for four classes in English, logical thinking, painting, and balancing scooter at the age of 3 and a half. She also had to attend classes in the middle of the week and evening. As a result, her baby got pneumonia three times in six months. She also started biting her nails frequently and woke up in the middle of the night. She went to the child care for evaluation. The anxiety index had exceeded the critical value. This is because the parenting arrangement did not regard health as the bottom line, but put the cart before the horse.

There are always two conflicting views in the industry. One is to narrow the scope of children's health. They believe that "no disease is healthy." There are no boundaries when raising children. Children are given whatever they want, and no rules are established. As a result, when the age of entering kindergarten is reached, the children are completely unable to adapt to collective life and roll around on the floor when things don't go well. In fact, this is already a health problem in the dimension of social adaptation. The problem is that many parents are not aware of it; the other is to set the goal of parenting too biased, always focusing on the obvious results such as "whether the child can recite poetry or do arithmetic", thinking that as long as there is no serious illness, there is no problem. In the end, the child will develop myopia, scoliosis, and even have somatic reactions such as vomiting and headache when he just goes to elementary school. This actually ignores the anchoring role of health in parenting.

I have been doing this for almost ten years, but I feel that there is no need to tighten the boundary between the two. When raising a baby, you don’t always have to look at the “perfect parenting guide” on the Internet. Instead, you should pay more attention to the baby’s state: whether the food tastes good, whether the sleep is stable, whether you look forward to going out to play when you wake up every day, and whether you can calm down when encountering unhappy things. These simple health indicators are the best way to score your parenting choices.