Parents Guild Blog

Where do you go for parenting advice? Parenting is often a stressful and confusing occupation. When my wife began working 80+ hour weeks as a pediatrics resident I got the job of staying home with twin four month-old boys and a very high spirited three-year-old daughter, so I have some experience with how stressful parenting can be. We all run into problems from time to time and need advice, and we all have a list of people we might turn to. If you’re a parent and you don’t have people to turn to you might want to come up with a list now, before you need it.

For a lot of people your pediatrician is one of the people on that list. Your pediatrician may even top the list. If you’re a new parent you’ve probably been seeing your pediatrician since your child was born, and depending on how your hospital does things maybe even even before that. Early on you met with your pediatrician frequently and he or she would tell you about what to expect: when your new baby would start to get more cranky (or, sometimes, less cranky), when (not) to expect junior to sleep through the night, etc. You’d learn all about “milestones,” and you’d hear a laundry list of dos and don’ts. Your pediatrician may not have said so outright, but you could probably tell when he or she thought you were being conscientious parents. Or maybe you weren’t measuring up to your pediatrician’s standards and you could tell that too — although that’s not the sort of thing that was said in so many words. Of course, your pediatrician may not have actually thought you were a bad parent, but how many of us have never once been worried about our pediatrician’s opinion of our parenting? Those of us who have had a few more kids may have gotten past the emotional roller coaster of being a first time parent, but the system has still trained us from early on to look to the pediatrician for advice on all things child related.

But why is that? Pediatricians don’t go to parenting school, they go to medical school. They spend years learning all kinds of things about diseases, nutrition, and terrifying syndromes that hopefully you and your kid will never have to face. They know the physical and mental changes that are going on in your child as he or she grows up, and, yes, they know all the developmental achievements (“milestones”) that your child will probably be making, and about when to start looking for them. And it’s very important that a pediatrician know these things: repeated failure to meet milestones, or failure to behave in an age-appropriate way, can be an early warning sign of a medical problem that the pediatrician would have to address.

Notice how this works: NONE of a pediatrician’s training is specifically about parenting. But from the parent’s perspective it can look a lot like parenting expertise. Pediatricians have a list of things that researchers have studied and shown to be beneficial (or harmful) to kids. Their knowledge of child development can sometimes allow them to predict what your child will do before you see it yourself — as if your pediatrician knows your child better than you do! All of this can make us think that pediatricians are parenting experts, whether or not they really are. Add to that the emotional vulnerability of new parents and it’s no surprise that many people see pediatricians as parenting experts. That’s not to say that your pediatrician isn’t a decent source of parenting advice. But that’s not a result of training, nor is some kind of magical medical mojo.

It’s unlikely that your pediatrician went into the field because that’s where the big bucks are made — pediatricians are the lowest paid of the primary care doctors, and primary care isn’t where the big money is made to begin with (here’s a pdf with numbers from 2005). You become a pediatrician because you like kids. And once you are a pediatrician you get to see lots and lots of kids, and you get to hear all about their problems in school, and at home. You get to hear about little Johnny’s problems making friends, and about Maggie’s problem with her temper. As a pediatrician you hear about these things partly because it’s your job. But probably you also hear about them because you’re genuinely interested. And, last but definitely not least, you hear about them because many parents expect pediatricians to be parenting experts, and so they tell their pediatrician all about their parenting problems. Pediatricians become parenting experts because parents expect them to be.

And often that’s all a parent needs: a voice of authority giving out a bit of ordinary common sense. Pediatricians have the authority because we parents give it to them. So when a pediatrician is able to give us a common sense answer to a problem and gets us to stop worrying about it the problem will often go away. Whether it was the common sense solution or our own reduced stress levels that solved the problem is hard to say.

That’s when the parent/pediatrician dynamic works well. But it can also misfire, when parents lose the self confidence to parent their children. A parent who takes too much to heart the message that pediatricians are the parenting experts and who doubts his or her own ability to parent isn’t going to be as effective a parent. Such a parent is going to be more stressed, less consistent, and less willing to trust our own inbuilt parenting instincts. A good pediatrician will always be working to build up the confidence of new parents for exactly this reason. But parents bear a portion of the responsibility for this problem as well, because we’ve forgotten that we’re the real parenting experts.

So the answer to the question “Are pediatricians parenting experts?” is yes, they often are. But it’s not magical medical mojo. They got their parenting expertise, if they have it, the same way the rest of us did: experience and a natural empathy for children. So by all means go to your pediatrician for advice on parenting. But when you do make sure you treat your pediatrician as what he or she really is: your colleague. On medical issues your pediatrician is the expert and we parents are not, no question. But when it comes to parenting, you’re an expert too. And when it comes to your own kids, you’re hands down the world’s greatest expert.