What are the differences between parenting and child health?

Parenting is the sum of all nurturing behaviors covering the entire stage of children from birth to adulthood, while children's health is a professional field focusing on children's physiological and psychological development status and related intervention. The former is one of the carriers of the latter, and the latter is an important assessment dimension of the former. To put it simply, things that are not directly related to physical and mental health, such as choosing clothes for your child, picking up your child from school, teaching your child how to deal with conflicts with friends, are all considered parenting, but only content that involves whether the physical and psychological development of the child meets the standards and whether intervention is needed falls under the category of child health.

Last month, I met a father who brought his 3-year-old baby to the doctor. He said that the baby couldn't recite Tang poems, so it must be developmental delay. I tested the gross motor, fine motor, and language and social skills, all within the normal range. When I asked, I found out that the couple usually played on their mobile phones after get off work and had never taught the baby to recite poems. This is a typical example of the enlightenment education issues in parenting being misclassified as developmental abnormalities in children's health.

Of course, the two are not completely separated. Many daily parenting actions are themselves basic interventions for children's health. For example, if you arrange two hours of outdoor activities for your baby every day, it is not only a daily parenting arrangement for taking care of your baby, but also a children's health intervention method to prevent and control myopia and promote bone development. The boundary between this part is actually very blurred, and it is no wonder that people are easily confused.

Nowadays, there are two completely different voices, whether in academic circles or parent groups. One group advocates that parenting should be based entirely on the developmental indicators of children's health. All parenting actions must be directed towards the indicators. If there is a height difference of one centimeter or a language delay of one month, intervention must be made quickly. The other group believes that Children's health indicators are only the bottom line for parenting. As long as they are within the normal range, there is no need to stick to the data. It is more important to pay more attention to the child's emotional feelings and individual development. The two views have been arguing for several years and there is no conclusion. Essentially, it is because everyone has different perceptions of the weight of the two in parenting.

To put it simply, if you think of raising a child as planting a small fruit tree of your own, parenting is the whole process of taking care of it from soil selection, watering, fertilizing to pruning, helping it to bask in the sun, and even adjusting its direction so that it grows upright. Children's health is to regularly test the tree to see if it is deficient in nutrients, has insects, and whether its growth is within the normal range. No matter how deeply related you say these two are, they are not the same thing at all, right?