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Raising children is not for the faint of heart. New parents can take one or two beats. So many small but consequential decisions should be based on everyday, if not daily. I also have questions. Many questions.
In a time of misinformation, pediatrician Dr. David Hill is a calm voice of science-based security and reason. He encourages new parents to ask baby pediatrician questions, including advice they find online.
“People always come to me with things,” Hill said, noting the importance of building solid pro-plain relationships. That trust “is going to lead us through this swamp of misinformation and misinformation that’s out there right now,” he said.
Hill is the father of five in a mixed family that has actually existed for over 25 years. He is the assistant medical editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics book, “Care for Your Baby and Young Children: From the Years of 5 to the Eighth Edition,” and will be editor-in-chief of the next edition. He also co-collects the Academy’s podcast, “Pediatrics over the phone.”
“Is this normal for the questions I get most frequently from new parents, and even those who have been involved in it for a while?” Hill said on a podcast by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Medical Correspondent at CNN, recently pursued life.
“As someone who’s probably seen over 10,000 kids… I’m almost always relieved and ‘Yes. It’s okay. They do that. Kids do a lot of weird things, and do a lot of things at their own pace,” Hill said. “It’s usually on the map.”
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Hill said he urged his parents to seek reliable and reliable sources of information for guidance. “We use validated sources, actual data,” he said. “And honestly, talk to your child’s doctor — that’s what we’ve been living our lives.”
Hill works closely with the AAP of information facing the organization’s parent. “I do that because I know decades of experience, so everyone in that group knows that it’s about making sure we do this right. “And that’s really critical. No one believes anyone who’s not wrong, because none of us is perfect.”
Over the decades, Hill actually existed, but he has witnessed several of the babies he saw at the start of his career become the parents themselves. Meanwhile, he has seen the science of child health evolve.
“What I said to these new parents can be the complete opposite of what I said when they were babies!” he said in an email.
Here are the five biggest changes Hill has seen in his career.
Sleep guidelines were literally repeated in 1994, when Hill graduated from medical school. That year, the National Institute of Pediatric Health and Human Development launched its first “Back to Sleep” campaign, urging parents to put their babies to sleep on their backs. Previously, parents were told to put their babies to sleep on their belly to avoid their desires.
But that’s not all. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission banned drop-side cribs from the market in 2011 and warned sloping sleepers in 2019, Hill said. And the Safe Sleep Act, signed into federal law in 2022, completely banned the sale of dropside cribs and crib bumpers that can choke infants.
He had 154 sudden, unexpected infant deaths per 100,000 in 1990, and fell 44% to 86 in 2011 (up to 100 deaths per 100,000 in 2022).
“Although some of these deaths are due to mysterious or inevitable causes,” he said.
Complete evasion occurs and slight exposure.
“I remember in 2015 looking for an outdated toddler feeding handout that could increase the risk of developing a life-threatening food allergy if parents followed them,” Hill said. “These handouts told parents to avoid avoiding anything that contains peanuts and eggs in infants and toddlers until they are at least two years old, even if they had a family history of eczema or allergies.”
However, according to Hill, in 2015, the results of the LEAP trial confirmed what previous studies had suggested. He said.
Currently, parents and guardians are advised to introduce peanut-containing products and eggs along with other solid foods in the first year of their lives, as soon as they consume solids that are about six months old.
Preventing exposure to potential allergens appears to have made the immune system hypersensitive when it was eventually encountered later.
The umbilical cord was once treated with a messy (for doctors) purple “triple” dye. This is a preservative that keeps bacterial infections at bay. Currently, a recommendation in the countries and communities that build resources is to dry out the codes on their own and pay attention to them.
“The purpose of the dye was to prevent potentially dangerous infections of the umbilical cord and surrounding tissue (mo mesentitis),” Hill said. “Then some brave souls, probably tired of their dry cleaning bill, decided to see what happens when they use alcohol instead of dye.
Hill said the next step is to dry the cord alone, be careful not to lock it in wet or dirty diapers for long periods of time, and avoid soaking it during bathing. That practice is where guidance stands today.
Known risk factors for hillitis include low birth weight, long-term rupture or long-term birth of the membrane, maternal infection, non-resistant birth or birth, and inappropriate cord care.
“If the skin around the stomach becomes red or you notice an abnormally foul discharge, you’ll have your baby look,” he advised.
How about taking a bath? Should new parents avoid bathing until the cord drops? “The advice on this is different, but it’s not clear that there is a risk from a shorter immersion than a sponge bath,” he said.
New and better vaccines
Infant and child vaccination schedules have been updated over the years as new shots become available, providing better protection against childhood tragedy.
“My father was also a pediatrician and grew up listening to the horrors of babies suffering from meningitis and sepsis. My father always ran to the hospital to do spinal taps,” recalls Hill. “But this started to change in 1985 when the vaccine came out against one of the most frightening infectious diseases of childhood, Haemophilus Influenza B.
“Early in my training and my career, I saw a terrible infection from another bacteria, pneumococcal pneumonia. These infections became much more rare when the first pneumococcal vaccine came out in 2000,” he said. “Since then, the vaccine has expanded to up to 23 covers, since it covers seven subtypes of pneumococcus.”
Just the past year, Hill said he witnessed another infant infection he feared, RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, and saw a sudden drop in frequency and severity thanks to both a pregnant mother’s vaccine and a baby’s antibody injection.
Another change involves a paradigm shift in the way pediatricians think about health and happiness, Hill said.
“In pediatrics, one of these structural shifts that hit in 1998, the year I started practicing, the year the ACES research came out,” he said. These potentially traumatic events include physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Parental death; mental illness; or household violence or substance abuse can cause toxic stress in children, leading to changes in brain development and affect future mental, physical and emotional health.
“Many people noticed that traumatic events in their childhood seemed to affect their health later on,” Hill said. “The ACES study measured and quantified the extent and duration of these effects, and the results were dramatic and long-lasting than anyone had guessed.”
Hill said the explosion of research continued, leading to a new approach to pediatrics.
“Every child is facing stressful events and is severe enough to affect their health. But the safe and stable upbringing relationships that children build with the adults around them can protect them,” he explained. “Understanding these interactions stimulates trauma-based care, encourages efforts to work with families to cope with life stress and build emotional connections that help children thrive.”
Under this approach, Hill said the pediatrician pivoted from asking, “What’s wrong with you?” Asking “What happened to you, how can we help?”
“The key concept here is “sufficient parents,” he said. “We don’t have a perfect parent, but we don’t need perfection to be safe, stable and foster.”
As a parent herself, Hill said she thought, “I’ll give me a sigh of relief.”
We hope these five tips will help you keep up with the latest parenting guidance. Listen to the full episode here. Join us in a new episode of Chasing Life Podcast next week.
