“It’s best to let her cry it out.” Easy advice to give, but not always easy to follow. The simplest recommendations from pediatricians can pose great challenges, at least initially, for parents. As trainees in pediatrics, we learn the script, but we do not always understand the reality of implementing our advice. Before becoming a parent, “crying it out” seemed the obvious and easy choice. Now, as a parent, I have felt the desperate necessity of getting a child to fall asleep. Although I would never condone unsafe sleeping practices, I understand what drives parents to such extremes.
When the dreaded 2-month-visit came around, I also felt the angst of intentionally putting your child through pain. Sweat dripped down my forehead and my vision blurred when I first saw the nurse immunize my son. Before this, I had ordered countless vaccinations for other patients, and I heard their screaming every day in the halls of clinic as background noise. Yet, seeing my own son being held down and jabbed with a needle was hard to bear. His high-pitched scream seemed perfectly calibrated to pound me with guilt. Of course, I knew the science and I had no fear of adverse events, but seeing your own child in pain does strange things to you. It strikes the same evolutionary chord that sends parents running into traffic to save their babies.
As trainees, many of us have put off having children until later in life. There is nothing wrong with this choice; however, it means that many of us lack the firsthand experience of parenting. We may not know that something as simple as getting a toddler to sit at the dinner table to eat anything can be a night-long struggle. To better prepare new parents and to better understand seasoned parents, we ought to solicit their experiences during office visits. By simply listening for 2 minutes, we can give parents a chance to vent (often well needed and deserved), and we can store their experiences in our memory for future use. Just as we stow away the image of the lacy rash of Fifth disease, we also should stockpile parenting tidbits. The only way to empathize with people going through something foreign to us is to acquire surrogate experiences. Parents in our clinics carry expansive libraries of these experiences, and we should not waste this opportunity.
By better understanding the realities of parenting, we can learn to frame our recommendations in terms that resonate with parents. We can preface our advice with challenges the parents can expect. We can remind them that parenting is hard, but their struggles are normal. When we better understand parents, they can better understand us.
Dr. Sisk is a pediatrics resident at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. E-mail him at pdnews@frontlinemedcom.com.
