Pediatrician Quotes

What's been important in my understanding of myself and others is the fact that each one of us is so much more than any one thing. A sick child is much more than his or her sickness. A person with a disability is much, much more than a handicap. A pediatrician is more than a medical doctor. You're MUCH more than your job description or your age or your income or your output.

The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay married to a mate that cracked? "Anything interesting happen at work today, honeybunch?" "Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?

Children's literature as a literary aberration or at best a minor amusement is a notion held most strongly by people who read the fewest children's books. I think it was Ruth Hill Viguers who compared this attitude with asking a pediatrician when he's going to stop fooling around and get down to the serious business of treating adults.

Depression” was a foreign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering.

I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.

Children with cancer, as one surgeon noted, were typically “tucked in the farthest recesses of the hospital wards.” They were on their deathbeds anyway, the pediatricians argued; wouldn’t it be kinder and gentler, some insisted, to just “let them die in peace”?

Too often, the risk of careless or needless medical intervention is greater than the dangers of the illness itself.

I didn’t have the time to deal with man-children who owned a singular set of sheets and still called their hometown pediatrician for every sore throat.

Do you think I’m better than the pediatrician lady with all the cardigans?”  Confused, I tilt to get a better look at her. “Max’s pediatrician is a man, and I don’t think he’s all that into cardigans.

Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he's seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see. Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of the docs don't even know what to call. And girls are going through puberty much earlier; and kids are allergic to just about everything, and asthma is out of control. Everyone knows it's our foods... Kids today are the first generation to grow up on this stuff...

Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative health consequences, the doctors found that constant stress can actually change the chemistry of a child’s brain. Stress, after

But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I've no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn't have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn't automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah. Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family, I think of them living in places where they can't work, where they can't speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and things herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right? ....... I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

Mother Nature, mothers, grandmothers - yes, even fathers, and grandfathers - are the best doctors around, because they do not share the typical doctor's compulsion to interfere with the body's efforts and ability to heal itself.

Psychologists say the best way to handle children at this stage of development is not to answer their questions directly but instead to tell them a story. As pediatrician Alan Greene explained, “After conversing with thousands of children, I’ve decided that what they really mean is, ‘That’s interesting to me. Let’s talk about that together. Tell me more, please?’ Questions are a child’s way of expressing love and trust. They are a child’s way of starting a conversation. So instead of simply insisting over and over again that the object of my son’s attention is, in fact, an elephant, I might tell him about how, in India, elephants are symbols of good luck, or about how some say elephants have the best memories of all the animals. I might tell him about the time I saw an elephant spin a basketball on the tip of his trunk, or about how once there was an elephant named Horton who heard a Who. I might tell him that once upon a time, there was an elephant and four blind men; each man felt a different part of the elephant’s body: the ears, the tail, the side, and the tusk . . .

A SPOONFUL OF KINDNESS When Tommy, my son, was three years old, my wife, Lilly, and I took him for his annual checkup and the pediatrician asked us what his eating habits were like. “Well,” we confessed, “he’s going through this phase of only liking chicken fingers and carbs, so we’ve kind of given up trying to get him to eat vegetables for now. It’s become too much of a struggle every night.” The pediatrician nodded and smiled, and then said, “Well, you can’t really force him to eat the veggies, guys, but your job is to make sure they’re on his plate. He can’t eat them if they’re not even on his plate.” I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. I think about it with teaching. My students can’t learn what I don’t teach them. Kindness. Empathy. Compassion. It’s not part of the curriculum, I know, but I still have to keep dishing it out onto their plates every day. Maybe they’ll eat it; maybe they won’t. Either way, my job is to keep on serving it to them. Hopefully, a little mouthful of kindness today may make them hungry for a bigger taste of it tomorrow. —Mr. Browne

Mothers, Grandmothers, and Mother Nature are the best doctors around.

My grandson met a nice man while you were gone. He’s a pediatrician. I expect there to be a spring wedding. It will be in a church, of course, because they are both godly men.

I swing my feet happily. “I have a non-athletic cousin who just became a pediatrician. She feels my pain.

I also knew you wouldn't remember this trip, because you're only five years old, and our pediatrician had told us that children don't starting building memories of things until after they turn six. When I realized that, that I was ten and you were only five, I thought, fuck. But of course I didn't say so out loud. I just thought, fuck, silently, to myself. I realized that I'd remember everything and you maybe wouldn't remember anything. I needed to find a way to help you remember, even if it was only through things I documented for you, for the future. And that's how I became a documentarist and a documentarian at the same time. (p 213)

JUST FOR THE record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!). Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even, to assert a kind of spurious decency. “Basically I am a very good person.” This from the latest serial killer—destined for the chair, they say—who, with incarnadine axe, recently dispatched half a dozen registered nurses in Texas. I have followed his case with interest in the papers.

And has anything changed today? Where are the authorities now? How come any regular M.D. or pediatrician is allowed to diagnose depression or bipolar illness or ADD in children, and prescribe medications, without a second opinion? How many children are taking powerful brain medications now simply because their parents find them too difficult to handle? How many of those boys and girls are having their childhoods taken away from them, the way mine was taken away from me?

If Porter had had a baby when she was young, it wouldn’t have been like that. She would have been measuring ounces of milk and counting diapers and calling the pediatrician every time the baby sneezed, full of anxiety, the way God intended.

Some people blamed his oddities on his dyslexia, which was so severe that one giddy pediatrician called it a gift: While he might never learn how to spell or read better than the average fourth grader, he’d always see things the rest of us couldn’t.

Obesity doctors and pediatricians are not calling to lower the recommended added sugar for children to zero; they are saying obesity is a “brain disease” and that the government should subsidize bariatric surgeries and pharmaceutical injections to manage it.

Along with better training, pediatricians need better pay. Paradoxically, physicians involved in the primary care of our children—the doctors on the front lines who receive tens of thousands of visits every day from parents and their children—are among the lowest paid of all physicians in the United States. Something is wrong with our system when the doctor who performs a brief diagnostic procedure—some form of X-ray, for example, or a fifteen-minute operation—is paid many times more than the doctors making crucial decisions about our children’s health.

On The Patty Winters Show this morning the topic was Toddler- Murderers. In the studio audience were parents of children who'd been kidnapped, tortured and murdered, while on stage a panel of psychiatrists and pediatricians were trying to help them cope - somewhat futilely I might add, and much to my delight - with their confusion and anger. But what really cracked me up was - via satellite on a lone TV monitor - three convicted Toddler-Murderers on death row who due to fairly complicated legal loopholes were now seeking parole and would probably get it.

And so I have three separate regrets. What does Lizzie see? What does Stephanie hear? What unsatisfied, yearning tension does Leah feel in my flesh when she snuggles against me and puts her hands on my shoulders? There is no hiding from them, is there? And there is no talking to them. They don’t understand what they understand. I am afraid. I should call the pediatrician, but I don’t. I think, as people do, that everything will be all right. But even so, I can’t stop being afraid. They are so beautiful, my daughters, so fragile and attentive to family life.

I bet she’d know how to make him feel better when he’s sick. I’m sure she would’ve been able to get him to stop crying in the parking lot. She’s most likely a lawyer or a doctor. Even worse, she’s probably a pediatrician who owns a lot of cardigans and comes from a giant family who would love to welcome those two into their fold.

This was inspired by my pediatrician, a relatively young man whom I called Dr. Handsome. I had assumed this was because his name was Dr. Hasen or Dr. Branson, but I recently found out his name was Dr. Ritger, so I guess I should have just died at age four when I decided to call my physician Dr. Handsome without so much as a pun to justify it.

When I describe this scene to Michel Cohen, the French pediatrician in New York, he knows immediately what I’m talking about. He says these mothers are speaking loudly to flaunt what good parents they are. The practice of narrated play is so common that Cohen included a section in his parenting book called Stimulation, which essentially tells mothers to cut it out. “Periods of playing and laughing should alternate naturally with periods of peace and quiet,” Cohen writes. “You don’t have to talk, sing, or entertain constantly.” Whatever your view on whether this intensive supervision is good for kids, it seems to make child care less pleasant for mothers.2 Just watching it is exhausting

Reject the fearmongering. Adopt best practices. Slow down.

Parents need to learn when to call a doctor, and what they can do, without a doctor's intervention, to reinforce the body's ability to heal itself.

Your most important contribution to the future health of your child will be the attention you give to your own diet during pregnancy and to proper nutrition for your baby after he is born.

With the increased recognition that an important part of brain development occurs within the first three years of a child’s life, and that reading to children enhances vocabulary and other important communication skills, the group, which represents 62,000 pediatricians across the country, is asking its members to become powerful advocates for reading aloud, every time a baby visits the doctor.

What is troubling is not just being average but settling for it. Everyone knows that average-ness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters—looks, money, tennis—we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child's pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average.

I think one of those old ladies down there gave me something. Which one looked guilty?” “Probably both of them. After all, my mother is a doctor and yours is a nurse. They’d have the nerve and the stuff to do it.” “Your mother is a kindly pediatrician, not a drug moll, so it had to be mine.” “I don’t know, Pepper. I have large chunks of my childhood missing thanks to her and her Benadryl supply.

I planned playdates and barbecues and pediatric dental checkups and adult dental checkups and plain old internists and plain old pediatricians and hair salon treatments and educational testing and cleats-buying and art class attendance and pediatric ophthalmologist and adult ophthalmologist and now, suddenly, mammograms. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner.

Each time I met a parent struggling to come up with the money to get treatment for a sick child, I thought back to the night Michelle and I had to take a three-month-old Sasha to the emergency room for what turned out to be viral meningitis—the terror and helplessness we felt as the nurses whisked her away for a spinal tap, and the realization that we might never have caught the infection in time had the girls not had a regular pediatrician we felt comfortable calling in the middle of the night.

For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself. Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self." "The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in solitude." Officially, Asperger's disorder no longer exists as a diagnostic category. The diagnosis, having been inconsistently applied, was replaced, with clarified criteria, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Asperger's is now grouped under the umbrella term Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD.

Well, you can't really force him to eat the veggies, guys, but your job is to make sure they're on his plate. He can't eat them if they're not even on his plate" -pediatrician "I've thought about that a lot over the years. I think about it with teaching. My students can't learn what I don't teach them. Kindness. Empathy. Compassion. It's not part of the curriculum, I know, but I still have to keep dishing it out onto their plates every day. Maybe they'll eat it; maybe they won't. Either way, my job is to keep on serving it to them. Hopefully, a little mouthful of kindness today may make them hungry for a bigger taste of it tomorrow" -Mr. Browne

This rarely happens in a visit to the pediatrician’s office, but it should. The good doctor would ask you about the health of your baby and give your little bundle of joy a routine examination. Then she’d look you in the eyes and ask some truly intrusive questions about your social life. “Do you have many friends?” the pediatrician would inquire. “What social groups do you and your husband belong to? How important are these groups to you? How diverse are they? How much contact time do you and your husband have with them?” The doctor doesn’t ask about these things because your social life is none of her business. The problem is, it is plenty of the infant’s business.

It must be stressed that we are still in a primitive stage of evolution and conditions on this planet are quite brutal. Radical pediatricians insist, with good evidence, that childbirth by conventional means in a conventional hospital is almost always traumatic for the newborn — creates a bad imprint, in our language. Our child-rearing methods are far from ideal also, adding bad conditioning on top of bad imprinting. And the general violence of our societies to date — including wars, revolutions, civil wars and the “undeclared civil war” of the predatory criminal class in every “civilized” nation — keeps the first circuit of most people in an emergency state far too much of the time.

Sorry I’m late, dear. I was snatching babies and children from the jaws of death.” I thought that as a pediatrician I would be taken care of and protected, that if people knew I was a pediatrician they wouldn’t break into my house or mug me, that I wouldn’t have to stop and chat after minor car accidents, that my way would be smoothed. I wanted to be someone no one could take exception to. When I told a professor at Harvard that I wanted to go into primary care, he said that it would be a waste of a Harvard education. He had done primary care. It was easy. With a Harvard education we could cure generations rather than individuals. So it wasn’t enough that I was in medical school. I was supposed to be lining up to cure generations. And I’d thought I was crazy.

Dr. Satinover: “What is known, from decades of research on family structure, studying literally thousands of children, is that every departure from the traditional, stable, mother-father family has severe detrimental effects upon children; and these effects persist not only into adulthood but into the next generation as well. In short, the central problem with mother-mother or father-father families is that they deliberately institute, and intend to keep in place indefinitely, a family structure known to be deficient in being obligatorily and permanently either fatherless or motherless.”6 An American College of Pediatricians paper from January 2012 seconded this judgment: “Clearly, apart from rare situations, depriving a child of one or both biological parents, as same-sex parenting requires in every case, is unhealthy.”7

Well,” Kristy went on, “the pediatrician says Emily isn’t making as much progress as she’d expected. Plus, Emily has some emotional problems. She’s started having these nightmares — at least, we think she’s having nightmares — and she wakes up screaming. ‘Me! Me!’” (Kristy pronounced the word as if she were saying “met,” but leaving the “t” off the end.) “‘Me,’” she informed us, “is what Vietnamese children say for ‘Mama’ or ‘Mommy.’ Plus, she seems scared of everything: the dark, loud noises, trying new things, and being separated from any of us, especially Mom and Watson. Doctor Dellenkamp isn’t too worried about the fears, even though Mom and Watson are. The doctor says the fears are a delayed reaction to all the upheaval in Emily’s life. You know, losing her mother, going to the orphanage, getting adopted, moving to a new country. The doctor says Emily will outgrow the fears and nightmares. She’s more worried about Emily’s speech, and even how she plays. She says she doesn’t play like a two-year-old yet. She still thinks Emily will catch up, though.

Yet there is dynamism in our house. Day to day, week to week, Cady blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks indicating her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room. Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence—and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day. It is a tired hare who now races. And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist. If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably. With little to distinguish one day from the next, time has begun to feel static. In English, we use the word time in different ways: “The time is two forty-five” versus “I’m going through a tough time.” These days, time feels less like the ticking clock and more like a state of being. Languor settles in. There’s a feeling of openness. As a surgeon, focused on a patient in the OR, I might have found the position of the clock’s hands arbitrary, but I never thought them meaningless. Now the time of day means nothing, the day of the week scarcely more. Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing. I don't know. And so it's not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future - that is, beyond lunch.

He recited the poem to her. "so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens" Allison applauded, “William Carlos Williams. A classic. A very short classic.” “You know what it means?” “An ode to a wheelbarrow?” … “Dr. Williams was a pediatrician,” he said. “He wrote that while sitting at the bedside of a dying child.” Dr. Capello blinked and in an instant tears were in his eyes. And hers. “I never knew,” she said. “Wonder why he thought of that.” “I'd say he was looking out the window and trying to think about anything other than the little child he couldn't save. All doctors keep a graveyard inside their hearts for those patients. That's why I like my view so much.” He reached out and tapped the glass of his window, which looked out onto the ocean. “It comforts me.” “Looking at the Graveyard of the Pacific comforts you?” she asked. “Of course it does,” he said, gazing out his window at the dark shifting waters in the near distance. “Compared to the graveyard out there, mine's tiny. A doctor with children in his graveyard takes any comfort he can get.

tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library, and I learned that behavior I considered commonplace was the subject of pretty intense academic study. Psychologists call the everyday occurrences of my and Lindsay’s life “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood. The trauma need not be physical. The following events or feelings are some of the most common ACEs: •​being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents •​being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you •​feeling that your family didn’t support each other •​having parents who were separated or divorced •​living with an alcoholic or a drug user •​living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide •​watching a loved one be physically abused. ACEs happen everywhere, in every community. But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A report by the Wisconsin Children’s Trust Fund showed that among those with a college degree or more (the non–working class), fewer than half had experienced an ACE. Among the working class, well over half had at least one ACE, while about 40 percent had multiple ACEs. This is really striking—four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma. For the non–working class, that number was 29 percent. I gave a quiz to Aunt Wee, Uncle Dan, Lindsay, and Usha that psychologists use to measure the number of ACEs a person has faced. Aunt Wee scored a seven—higher even than Lindsay and me, who each scored a six. Dan and Usha—the two people whose families seemed nice to the point of oddity—each scored a zero. The weird people were the ones who hadn’t faced any childhood trauma. Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative

Well, hello, Cameron.” “Vanni, how are you?” “Very well, thanks. And you?” She chewed her lip a little bit. Why couldn’t this just be Paul? “I’m good. Listen, I know Virgin River is perfection, but I was wondering if you’d like to get out of town for a weekend.” “A weekend?” she asked, completely unprepared for such a question. “There’s a great seaside hotel in Mendocino, on the ocean. Lots to do around there. Very relaxing and entertaining.” “Cameron, I have a baby.” He chuckled. “I thought maybe I could bring along a pediatrician.” “But, Cameron, I’m really not ready for—” “Easy, Vanni. We’ll get two rooms. Think of it as a chance to get to know each other better, that’s all. And no, I have not mentioned my plans to Carol.” “Oh. Listen—I appreciate the invitation, but I’m not sure I’m ready for something like a weekend date. That’s moving a little fast for me…” “I’ll be a Boy Scout,” he laughed. “Two rooms, good views, great food, a little relaxation, conversation, no pressure…” “I appreciate the thought, really. It’s very nice of you, but…” “All right,” he said. “It was worth a try. Well, then, can I wrangle another run down to Virgin River? I have Jack’s phone number. I could make a reservation at that little cabin…” “You’re welcome anytime,” she said. “Maybe this weekend, since I scheduled it off?” “Sure,” she said without enthusiasm. “Let me know if you decide to come down.” *

It’s not like I wasn’t busy. I was an officer in good standing of my kids’ PTA. I owned a car that put my comfort ahead of the health and future of the planet. I had an IRA and a 401(k) and I went on vacations and swam with dolphins and taught my kids to ski. I contributed to the school’s annual fund. I flossed twice a day; I saw a dentist twice a year. I got Pap smears and had my moles checked. I read books about oppressed minorities with my book club. I did physical therapy for an old knee injury, forgoing the other things I’d like to do to ensure I didn’t end up with a repeat injury. I made breakfast. I went on endless moms’ nights out, where I put on tight jeans and trendy blouses and high heels like it mattered and went to the restaurant that was right next to the restaurant we went to with our families. (There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.) I took polls on whether the Y or the JCC had better swimming lessons. I signed up for soccer leagues in time for the season cutoff, which was months before you’d even think of enrolling a child in soccer, and then organized their attendant carpools. I planned playdates and barbecues and pediatric dental checkups and adult dental checkups and plain old internists and plain old pediatricians and hair salon treatments and educational testing and cleats-buying and art class attendance and pediatric ophthalmologist and adult ophthalmologist and now, suddenly, mammograms. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner.

Almost no one—not even the police officers who deal with it every day, not even most psychiatrists—publicly connects marijuana and crime. We all know alcohol causes violence, but somehow, we have grown to believe that marijuana does not, that centuries of experience were a myth. As a pediatrician wrote in a 2015 piece for the New York Times in which he argued that marijuana was safer for his teenage children than alcohol: “People who are high are not committing violence.” But they are. Almost unnoticed, the studies have piled up. On murderers in Pittsburgh, on psychiatric patients in Italy, on tourists in Spain, on emergency room patients in Michigan. Most weren’t even designed to look for a connection between marijuana and violence, because no one thought one existed. Yet they found it. In many cases, they have even found marijuana’s tendency to cause violence is greater than that of alcohol. A 2018 study of people with psychosis in Switzerland found that almost half of cannabis users became violent over a three-year period; their risk of violence was four times that of psychotic people who didn’t use. (Alcohol didn’t seem to increase violence in this group at all.) The effect is not confined to people with preexisting psychosis. A 2012 study of 12,000 high school students across the United States showed that those who used cannabis were more than three times as likely to become violent as those who didn’t, surpassing the risk of alcohol use. Even worse, studies of children who have died from abuse and neglect consistently show that the adults responsible for their deaths use marijuana far more frequently than alcohol or other drugs—and far, far more than the general population. Marijuana does not necessarily cause all those crimes, but the link is striking and large. We shouldn’t be surprised. The violence that drinking causes is largely predictable. Alcohol intoxicates. It disinhibits users. It escalates conflict. It turns arguments into fights, fights into assaults, assaults into murders. Marijuana is an intoxicant that can disinhibit users, too. And though it sends many people into a relaxed haze, it also frequently causes paranoia and psychosis. Sometimes those are short-term episodes in healthy people. Sometimes they are months-long spirals in people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. And paranoia and psychosis cause violence. The psychiatrists who treated Raina Thaiday spoke of the terror she suffered, and they weren’t exaggerating. Imagine voices no one else can hear screaming at you. Imagine fearing your food is poisoned or aliens have put a chip in your brain. When that terror becomes too much, some people with psychosis snap. But when they break, they don’t escalate in predictable ways. They take hammers to their families. They decide their friends are devils and shoot them. They push strangers in front of trains. The homeless man mumbling about God frightens us because we don’t have to be experts on mental illness and violence to know instinctively that untreated psychosis is dangerous. And finding violence and homicides connected to marijuana is all too easy.

In Greek, our word for play is paidia and the word for education is paideia, and it is very natural and right that these words should be entangled at the root, together with our word for children, paides, which gave you your words pedagogy and pediatrician.14 What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good. A child’s natural form of behavior is play, and in our aim to educate, play should be honored and preserved for as long past childhood as can be. So we may say, in fact, the sum and substance of education is the right training that effectually leads the soul of the child at play on to the love of the calling in its adult life (Laws 643d).

The biggest lesson we learned is the same lesson you will learn as you deal with your child’s chronic condition: No one knows the nuances of your child’s health like you do. When you think something’s wrong, it probably is. And you are your child’s best witness. It’s up to you to pursue the matter with grace and firmness. It’s up to you to describe what you see happening. Speak calmly and knowledgeably. Don’t cast blame. Don’t be unreasonable. Just tell the truth about what you observe, and don’t give up until you get a satisfactory answer. Once we started to do that, the doctors listened. In fact our pediatrician apologized about the Fourth of July phone call and said, “If I ever have another patient with this condition, I’ll refer the parents to you. You’re better experts about this than I’ll ever be.” The truth is a powerful witness. It saved our child’s life. It can save your child’s too. Dear Father, make me an expert about my child’s health. Help me be a good observer of the truth and a good communicator with the doctors when I sense something is wrong. Keep me from blaming them when they can’t find the answers. Give me strength to speak the truth until they do.

When we talked to the pediatrician about our concerns, the diagnosis was, “no inhibitions.” That might be a good thing, we thought, he could do well in life. But there is no such medical condition as ‘no inhibitions’.

I am not a pediatrician… or a doctor… but too much being nice is another sign mutated and defected genes.

Mahler, through her earlier work as a pediatrician and her psychoanalytic work with psychotic children, had become interested in how, during the first three years of life, a child had to separate from the mother-infant dual unity.

These books, which cover many of the topics discussed in this book, may be helpful further reading. GENERAL REFERENCE American Academy of Pediatrics. Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age Five. New York: Bantam, 2004. Druckerman, P. Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. New York: Penguin, 2014. Eliot, L. What’s Going On in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life. New York: Bantam, 2000. Nathanson, L. The Portable Pediatrician for Parents: A Month-by-Month Guide to Your Child’s Physical and Behavioral Development from Birth to Age Five. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. DISCIPLINE Phelan, T. W. 1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2–12. Naperville, IL: ParentMagic, Inc., 2010. Webster-Stratton, C. The Incredible Years: A Trouble-Shooting Guide for Parents of Children Aged 2–8. Toronto: Umbrella Press, 1992. SLEEP Ferber, R. Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Karp, H. The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer. Rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 2015. Weissbluth, M. Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child: A Step-by-Step Program for a Good Night’s Sleep. 4th ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2015. POTTY TRAINING Glowacki, J. Oh Crap! Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need to Know to Do It Once and Do It Right. New York: Touchstone, 2015.

Comfort and consistent tactile experiences help the baby develop a sense of its body as a safe and consistent boundary. If the baby is not held and comforted, or is frequently dropped, or handled roughly, or neglected or abused—painful, disruptive experiences British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called impingements—the child will not grow to feel like a whole entity, sheltered and contained by her skin. The failure to master this first important developmental task makes it difficult to differentiate between self and others, inner and outer, thought and action, fantasy and reality. Later, the child or adult may use cutting to work out these conflicts in a concrete, literal way on the body, reverting back to the most primitive means of psychic organization the knows to test her own reality.

I think a kid is always an obstacle. Every parent has to come face-to-face with things about themselves when they start a family, right? You have to alter behaviors you don't want impacting the kids, traits you don't want them to inherit, learn your own way of parenting, so you don't repeat the mistakes your own parents made. It isn't just about diaper changes and picking a good pediatrician. There is real work going on on the inside too. So what if our work is a little different than someone else's? We can do it.

Speaking on the failure to test chemicals for safety and toxicity, the late Herbert L. Needleman, a noted pediatrician and pioneer in the study of childhood lead poisoning, observed, “We are conducting a massive toxicological experiment in the world today, and our children and grandchildren are the unknowing, unconsenting subjects.

husband, Dave, my daughter, and I had moved out of Cen- ter City and into a house in Haverford that I refused to call a McMansion, even though that's exactly what it was, but I loved Ellie's pediatrician so much that 1'd never even tried to find a suburban replacement.

Two days after the German occupation, my mother called the pediatrician. "Would you come to see Gabi?" she requested. "He has been crying almost without stop since yesterday morning." "I'll come, of course," the doctor replied, "but I should tell you: all of my Jewish babies are crying.

Sometimes parents will get angry because I won’t prescribe antibiotics for their child. The first thing they say is, ‘Every other pediatrician does it. I’ll just go to someone else.’ It’s not easy to hear this, but I always fall back on the thought: It’s okay if I’m alone on this. That’s not what I believe is best for this child. Period.

Whenever I hear about saintly parents, I get suspicious. It’s not that I’m looking for problems. It’s just that no parent is a saint. Most of us end up being the “good-enough” parents that Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, believed was sufficient to raise a well-adjusted child.

remember later asking Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s press secretary, “What kind of country sacrifices its children out of fear for adults?” To me, this was a sin, a total breakdown of the moral contract between a civilization and its children. I asked myself, “Where are the teachers? Where are the pediatricians and child psychologists? And where are the parents?

attachment theory, which predicts social competency and the ability to thrive as functions of nurturing early attachments, of bonding; and Erik Erikson, whose work suggests that the violation of the child’s trust leads to a life of increasingly perilous failures of trust; and D. W. Winnicott, the British pediatrician whose writings stress the importance of parental love, the ongoing connection between mother and child. All these authors describe the crucial role of touch, and of the family setting as a place of safety and security.

The concept of internalization helps us understand what kids need to separate successfully; kids literally have to “take in” something from a parent so they can hold on to the good feelings of the relationship even when a parent says goodbye. English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the idea that children create a mental representation of the parent-child relationship so that they can access the feelings of the relationship even when a parent is absent. Transitional objects help children with this process; a blanket or stuffed animal or object from home becomes a physical representation of the parent-child bond, reminding a child that parents still exist and are “there” for you even when they are not right in front of you. I always recommend transitional objects to parents whose kids struggle with separation anxiety—they are a way to help make tricky transitions feel more manageable. After all, to ease separation anxiety, we have to help kids “hold on to us” in our absence.

The Portable Pediatrician for Parents by Laura Nathanson.

The melon of belly expanding, contracting. Nowadays babies were always put to sleep on their backs; in facedown position they would succumb to SIDS, if the pediatricians were to be believed. This “back-is-best” propaganda was news to Willa, whose kids were born in the decade when babies always had to be put to sleep on their tummies, lest they die of SIDS. The absolutism of these Cheshire-cat dogmas seemed funny, or maybe valiant. Probably nobody knew why little lives sometimes evaporated like smoke, but all guardians wanted to be given the amulet of prevention. And they didn’t want “maybe.

I remember the interviewer emphatically stating, “Nutrition is superfluous to human health.” And he was a pediatrician! I knew I was in for a long road ahead. Come to think of it, I think the only medical professional who ever asked me about a family member’s diet was our veterinarian.

(Juice is not recommended for babies under 1 year, and many pediatricians and dietitians do not recommend juice at all, regardless of age.)

Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can’t sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She’d like you to take him to be evaluated. And so you do. It’s a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what’s wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be. But obtaining a diagnosis for your kid is not a neutral act. It’s not nothing for a kid to grow up believing there’s something wrong with his brain. Even mental health professionals are more likely to interpret ordinary patient behavior as pathological if they are briefed on the patient’s diagnosis.[15] “A diagnosis is saying that a person does not only have a problem, but is sick,” Dr. Linden said. “One of the side effects that we see is that people learn how difficult their situation is. They didn’t think that before. It’s demoralization.” Nor does our noble societal quest to destigmatize mental illness inoculate an adolescent against the determinism that befalls him—the awareness of a limitation—once the diagnosis is made. Even if Mom has dressed it in happy talk, he gets the gist. He’s been pronounced learning disabled by an occupational therapist and neurodivergent by a neuropsychologist. He no longer has the option to stop being lazy. His sense of efficacy, diminished. A doctor’s official pronouncement means he cannot improve his circumstances on his own. Only science can fix him.[16] Identifying a significant problem is often the right thing to do. Friends who suffered with dyslexia for years have told me that discovering the name for their problem (and the corollary: that no, they weren’t stupid) delivered cascading relief. But I’ve also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping—in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn’t listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was “within normal range.” But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child’s recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagnosis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself. Bad

Many pediatricians and other physicians believe that breastmilk causes higher levels of bilirubin in the first few days of life. Not true. But the reason that some breastfed babies are more jaundiced is that they are not breastfeeding well and are not getting enough breastmilk. That means the baby will also not have substantial enough bowel movements to remove the bilirubin in his intestine and prevent it from being absorbed back into the body. The answer is not to give formula, but to help the mother with the latching on of the baby and making sure he is breastfeeding well (see how this is done earlier in the chapter). Then he will poop more (because colostrum is a laxative) and the bilirubin will decrease. In most cases no supplementation is needed; if it does become necessary it should be given by a lactation aid at the breast, in this order of preference: 1. The mother’s own expressed breastmilk. 2. Banked breastmilk. 3. The mother’s own expressed breastmilk with added 5% glucose so that there is enough volume. 4. Formula. This should be used only if we cannot get the baby breastfeeding well and the first choices do not work. There are other causes of higher-than-average bilirubin levels in the first few days, but none require the mother to stop breastfeeding. Phototherapy

Alternatives to time-out Isolating children for a period of time has become a popular discipline strategy advocated by many child psychologists and pediatricians. However, newly adopted toddlers seem to be more upset than helped by time-outs. Time-outs are intended to provide an opportunity for both parents and children to calm down and change their behaviors, but it isn’t effective for children who do not have self-calming strategies. Isolation can be traumatic for a toddler who is struggling with grief and/or attachment, and so perceives time-out as further rejection. If the child becomes angrier or more withdrawn as a result of being timed-out, try another strategy. One alternative is for parents to impose a brief time-out on themselves by temporarily withdrawing their attention from their child. For example, the parent whose child is throwing toys stops playing, looks away, and firmly tells the child, “I can’t continue playing until you stop throwing your toys.” Sitting passively next to the child may be effective, especially if the child previously was engaged in an enjoyable activity with the parent. Another alternative to parent enforced time-outs is self-determined time-outs, where the child is provided the opportunity to withdraw from a conflict voluntarily or at least have some input into the time-out arrangement. The parent could say, “I understand that you got very upset when you had to go to your room yesterday after you hit Sara. Can you think of a different place you would like to go to calm down if you feel like getting in a fight?” If the child suggests going out on the porch, the next time a battle seems to be brewing, Mom or Dad can say, “Do you need to go outside to the porch and calm down before we talk more?” Some children eventually reach the level of self-control where they remove themselves from a volatile situation without encouragement from Mom or Dad. These types of negotiations usually work better with older preschoolers or school-age children than they do with toddlers because of the reasoning skills involved. As an alternative to being timed-out, toddlers also can be timed-in while in the safety of a parent’s lap. Holding allows parents to talk to their child about why she’s being removed from an activity. For example, the toddler who has thrown her truck at the cat could be picked up and held for a few minutes while being told, “I can’t let you throw your toys at Misty. That hurts her, and in our family we don’t hurt animals. We’ll sit here together until you’re able to calm down.” Calming strategies could incorporate music, back rubs, or encouraging the child to breathe slowly. Objects that children are misusing should also be removed. For example, in the situation just discussed, the truck could be timed-out to a high shelf. If parents still decide to physically remove their child for a time-out, it should never be done in a way or place that frightens a toddler. Toddlers who have been frightened in the past by closed doors, dark rooms, or a particular room such as a bathroom should never be subjected to those settings. I know toddlers who, in their terror, have literally trashed the furniture and broken windows when they were locked in their rooms for a time-out. If parents feel a time-out is essential, it should be very brief, and in a location where the child can be supervised.

The Circumcision Decision If you have a baby boy, chances are you’ll be asked whether or not you want to circumcise him in the hospital. Most of us have inherited a vague sense that circumcision is somehow cleaner or healthier. But these are myths. We’ll share a few facts to jumpstart your research. - The significance of the infant’s pain is often overlooked in circumcision. Hospitals use painful Gomco clamps that sever nerve endings, and most docs make the cut without anesthesia. - Many infants go into shock as a result of the pain they experience in circumcision, and the breastfeeding relationship may be compromised as a result. - The circumcised penis is no cleaner than an intact penis, and requires far more care during the healing process. - “...[P]rofessional societies representing Australian, Canadian, and American pediatricians do not recommend routine circumcision of male newborns.” ~American Medical Association What if you plan to circumcise for reasons of Jewish faith? In Jewish circumcisions, - Boys are circumcised eight days after birth, when natural levels of Vitamin K are the highest. - Anesthetic is traditionally given (in the form of a tiny amount of wine and/or numbing agents). - Mohels (traditional circumcisers) don’t use painful skin clamps. Overheard… After reading up on circumcision, I knew I didn’t want to go through with it. The first reason was medical: the AAP doesn’t recommend routine circumcision. My second reason was emotional. It went against my mama bear instinct to protect my baby. Convincing dad was more difficult. He wanted to have his son like him. (I asked him if he and his dad compared their penises; the answer was no.) My husband watched videos of the procedure being done but had to stop them before they were over. He’d thought it was a simple snip of the ‘extra’ skin, but it’s not. The foreskin is actually fused to the head of the penis, like a fingernail to a nail bed. We took our baby home from the hospital the way he was born, and we haven’t regretted it. ~Lani, mom to Bentley Want to learn more? Check out the Circumcision Resource Center online, a helpful resource filled with medical and psychological literature for those questioning the practice.

There are some infections that definitely require antibiotic treatment, but more often the need for antibiotics is a gray area. A study published in the journal Pediatrics found that pediatricians prescribed antibiotics 62 percent of the time when they perceived that parents expected them to be prescribed, and only 7 percent of the time when they thought parents didn’t, suggesting that the need for antibiotics is almost always optional. It’s not just children who are being overtreated. Two out of every three adults who see a health practitioner for cold or flu symptoms are prescribed antibiotics, which 80 percent of the time don’t meet Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for antibiotic therapy. When I ask my patients about previous antibiotic use, they usually respond that they took “a normal amount,” but after I have them add up every prescription, they’re often shocked to realize just how much “normal” really is.

Not giving the baby enough time to latch on can also prevent self-attachment. It often takes an hour or more of being skin to skin for the baby to crawl to the breast and latch on. Often he just lies on the mother for 20 minutes or more. But hospitals have other priorities: weighing the baby, putting drops or ointment in his eyes, etc. Would it really matter if the baby was weighed an hour or two later? Ointments and drops in the baby’s eyes may also affect his vision, making it harder for him to find the nipple (does he find it more easily because the areola is a different colour?). And what about the pediatrician’s examination to determine the Apgar? Well, if a baby is alert and pink and breathing, and crawling to the breast, I give him a minimum of 9 out of 10. If necessary, one can put a stethoscope on the baby’s chest while he’s on the mother, skin to skin.

In an August 2009 Democracy Now! interview, Dr. David Kessler, author, pediatrician, educator, and former United States Food and Drug Administration commissioner, bluntly compared America’s food industry with Big Tobacco. Kessler claimed that, as far as addicting Americans to deadly products was concerned, the food industry was just as culpable. With the “emotional gloss of advertising,” Kessler explained, the food industry’s successful marketing of unhealthy food products has led to a “profound public-health epidemic” in this country.

There is no simple way to determine when and where to get help. Many factors come into play, including the child’s age, family’s financial status, insurance, knowledge of resources, religious affiliation, availability of services in community, and so on. Parents may seek outside assistance for their adopted child when other factors such as a divorce, job loss, or other stresses compound the family needs. Parents are generally in the best position to determine when to get help, but advice from relatives, family physicians, teachers, and others in a position to know the family should be carefully considered. Services for children with special needs are provided by a variety of professionals. A physician—pediatrician or the family practitioner—is usually the place to begin. Families may be referred to a neurologist for a thorough assessment and diagnosis of neurological functioning (related to cognitive or learning disabilities, seizure disorders or other central nervous system problems). For specific communication difficulties, families may consult with a speech and language therapist, while a physical therapist would develop a treatment plan to enhance motor development. A rehabilitation technologist or an occupational therapist prescribes adaptive aids or activities of daily living. Early childhood educators specializing in working with children with special needs may be called a variety of titles, including Head Start teachers, early childhood special education teacher, or early childhood specialist.

GP, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a surgeon, and

Unfortunately these days, hardly a day goes by without news of an incident of childhood bullying. Some of these are so horrific or tragic that they defy understanding. Those really grab our attention. Others are all too easily dismissed as some sort of rite of passage, an acceptable part of growing up. The truth, though, is that bullying of any kind has the power to change who a child is, the kind of person he or she grows up to be. When ignored, the victim can be scarred for life, emotionally, if not physically. The perpetrator grows up with a skewed value system that suggests it’s perfectly okay to make another person’s life miserable, to feel powerful, even for a moment, at the expense of someone weaker. It’s up to adults—parents, teachers, entire communities—to take a stand, to say bullying is not okay, not ever, not by anyone! And that’s exactly what happens in Serenity when schoolteacher Laura Reed and pediatrician J. C. Fullerton realize a student is being bullied. Both Laura and J.C. have experienced the damaging effects of bullying, so what’s happening to Misty Dawson is personal and unacceptable. While there are often subtle messages tucked away in my stories, I hope the message in Catching Fireflies is loud and clear. There is nothing cute or normal or acceptable about bullying, whether it’s a toddler on the playground or a teenager using the internet to torment a classmate. Pay attention to what may be happening to your children, no matter how young or how old. Pay even closer attention to how they’re treating others. Bullying is wrong. It needs to stop. And alert parents and teachers and a united community can make that happen. I hope you’ll enjoy spending time with all the Sweet Magnolias once more, and that you’ll take their message—and mine—to heart. All best, Sherryl

She sometimes felt less like a primary-care pediatrician and more like a battlefield surgeon, patching up her patients and sending them back to war.

Yet the concerns of pediatricians continued to be drowned out by advocacy from expert groups, the government, and the media for a diet low in fat. By 1995, a survey of about a thousand mothers found that 88 percent of them believed that a low-fat diet was “important” or “very important” for their infants, and 83 percent responded that they sometimes or always avoided giving fatty foods to their children.

Her parents had always been blind to the things that plagued their children: being teased at school for the color of their skin or for the funny things their mother occasionally put into their lunch boxes, potato curry sandwiches that tinted Wonderbread green. What could there possibly be to be unhappy about? her parents would have thought. "Depression" was a foreign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering.

six, and by then, according to the doctor, she’d be covered with the itchy rash that was now confined to her belly and chest. It was going around, the pediatrician had said. It would run its course. Easy for him to say, Spence thought. It wasn’t his daughter whose eyes were teary. It wasn’t his baby with a hundred-and-one-degree

Heal is a smartphone app similar to the on-demand car service Uber, but instead of a car, a doctor shows up at your door. Users download the app and then type in a few details such as address and the reason for the visit. After adding a credit card and a request for a family doctor or a pediatrician, the physician arrives in 20 to 60 minutes for a flat fee of $99. Heal began in Los Angeles in February, recently expanded to San

Debbie is a mom from Uxbridge, Massachusetts. She was in the examination room when the pediatrician asked her five-year-old, “Does Daddy own a gun?”1 When the little girl said yes, the doctor began grilling her and her mom about the number and types of guns, how they are stored, etc. If the incident had ended there, it would have merely been annoying. But Debbie got mad when a friend in law enforcement told her that the doctor had filed a report with the police (about her family’s [entirely legal] gun ownership). Maybe this doctor should have asked about the family bathtubs instead of the family guns. Because, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), 346 children under age five drowned in bathtubs between 2006 and 2010.2 By contrast, only ninety-four children under five died from accidental gunshots over the same period.3 That is a difference of nearly a factor of four. In fact, more children under five died from drowning in bathtubs than children under ten or even under fifteen from accidental gun shots (167 and 291 respectively).

The pediatrician Paul Offit mentioned to me, during an interview about his work, that he had recently seen two children hospitalized with influenza. Both had been immunized against everything on the childhood schedule except the flu, and both ended up on heart and lung machines. One lived, and the other died. “And then the next day, when someone comes into your office and says, ‘I don’t want to get that vaccine,’ you’re supposed to respect that decision?” Offit asked me. “You can respect the fear. The fear of vaccines is understandable. But you can’t respect the decision—it’s an unnecessary risk.

Mel,” she said tentatively. “I’m a little worried about…” “What?” She took a breath. “Gossip. Everyone talking about us.” Mel’s eyes twinkled and she smiled. “Abby, you’re an unmarried woman pregnant with twins and you’ve been spending time with our pediatrician. He never misses a chance to sit by you at Jack’s. Surrender. The gossip is way ahead of you.” Abby gasped. She leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially. “Do they think there’s something to us? Like a relationship?” One of Mel’s light brows lifted in amusement. “They hope.” “Oh God!” “Yeah, I’ve been there,” Mel said. “The whole town had me married to Jack before I had my first really good kiss with him.” She waved a hand. “Ah, hell, go with it. At least they’re not malicious. Just very nosey. I got through it. You can, too.” Heavy

22 ESFP Extraverted, Sensing, Feeling, Perceiving “Don’t Worry — Be Happy!” Profile 1: Larry “If the sky were the limit and I could do anything, I’d do just what I’m doing now.” Larry is a forty-one-year-old pediatrician specializing in childhood arthritis. He keeps the thank-you notes and letters he has received from patients and their families. It’s one of the ways he knows that he’s doing a good job. But the living testimonial he uses is the story of the child

CLS, or Chronic Lycanthropy Syndrome, seemed to be the latest step in the evolution of impulsivity disorders, and it soon became the new diagnostic darling of the pediatrician and child psychiatrists’ offices. Children displayed the full range of symptoms by early adolescence, and often those that couldn’t be cured or drugged into submission would just disappear or end up in the correctional system.

authors included developmental biologists, pediatricians, obstetricians, midwives, and lay persons. The report concluded that, “Connections from the periphery to the cortex [higher brain] are not intact before 24 weeks of gestation….The lack of cortical connections before 24 weeks, therefore, implies that pain is not possible until after 24 weeks.”8

Loss is not just what’s gone in the present but all of the future plans. The trips booked. The imagined graduation events. The holidays not celebrated together. Life falls apart in shudders, in emails from lawyers, drained bank accounts, trips to the ATM, new forms to fill out at the pediatrician, new boxes to check. Life falls apart in music stations no longer listened to, restaurants not gone to, food no longer eaten, dishes not ordered. Habits. Clothes. Preferences. Washed away.

Next up, the fact that Gavin wasn’t talking. At almost two he had only a handful of words and was delayed in his motor skills too. A pediatrician-directed evaluation revealed he had a 25 percent speech delay. It was enough to be a concern but not enough to qualify for state-provided therapies. “Get out more,” the doctor suggested. “A playgroup, instead of being carried around by older siblings, will go a long way.” Katie discovered a cat who’d snuck into the house, delivered a litter of kittens beneath her bed. She cried over having watched the cat eat the afterbirth, sure the bloody licking would soon include the mewing kittens.

Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even, to assert a kind of spurious decency. “Basically I am a very good person.” This from the latest serial killer—destined for the chair, they say—who, with incarnadine axe, recently dispatched half a dozen registered nurses in Texas. I have followed his case with interest in the papers. But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am a spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it’s simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way, our Texan friend being a case in point. What we did was terrible, but still I don’t think any of us were bad, exactly; chalk it up to weakness on my part, hubris on Henry’s, too much Greek prose composition— whatever you like.

Get other parents involved Get other parents involved in the healthy play movement. The more parents who practice it, the more kids can be free to play together in non-adult-led activities. Pediatricians in the U.S. have developed guidelines to persuade parents that play is healthy. It is valuable for children and should be encouraged and discussed with others. Avoid intervening too quickly Try not to judge the other kids too harshly and intervene too quickly because you want to protect your kids from others. Sometimes it is learning how to deal with the more difficult children that provides them the biggest lessons in self-control and resilience. Let go Let your kids do things by themselves. When you feel the need to “save” them, step back and take a breath. Remember that they are learning some of the most important skills to take them through life.

The unexamined life is not worth living,' said my pediatrician, quoting Socrates.

Action Exercise: Take out a pen and paper. Either bullet point, or brainstorm all of your goals in this life – no matter how insignificant they may seem. Now, on the other side of the paper, write all of the things you seek from the hereafter (the next life). When writing all of these goals out, make sure that you are very specific. For example: “I want to become a doctor” is not a sufficient goal. Rather you should write something more like: “I want to become a pediatrician in 5 years working in New York City”. This goal is specific and measurable – this is the difference between a tangible goal, and a wishy-washy dream. 3. Next, number each goal according to how important it is to you. If a certain goal is a priority, list it higher up. You are now looking at your priority list: this list is golden. It tells you where you should begin your pursuit for purpose – or perhaps, where you left off.

think,” he said slowly, “Ryan may be autistic.” I think Ryan may be autistic. All Cat and I could do was stare at him. My stomach knotted up and all of a sudden I could barely breathe. The blood drained from Cat’s cheeks, and the room closed in around us. Ryan stood by our side, his expression glazed and unfocused. We knew he couldn’t talk—we’d even grown concerned enough to talk to his pediatrician—but we’d convinced ourselves that it wasn’t anything serious. He’ll grow out of it, we’d been told. He’ll be fine. But this? They were, I still think, among the most frightening words a parent can hear. We both knew about autism—who hadn’t seen Rain Man? Or read about autism in news magazines or seen shows about it on television? I stared at Ryan. Was that our son? Our child? Our baby? No, I immediately thought, the doctor was wrong. Ryan wasn’t autistic. He couldn’t be. He was fine. I’m not going to believe it. I can’t believe it. But . . . Deep down, I knew there was something wrong with him. Both Cat and I had known he wasn’t right for months. But we had never imagined it could be this serious.