Why health care providers often FAIL to help

The majority of health professionals, this includes doctors and nurses, are educated or trained using a medical model. A medical model is ideally suited to guide health professionals to treat and care for sick or disabled children. For the parents of both ill and healthy children, it also provides an excellent source of information on how to prevent illness and promote healthy growth and development.

HOWEVER... where health professionals using only this model of care often fail parents and their HEALTHY infants is the way in which difficult infant BEHAVIOR is viewed and therefore managed.

Behavior frequently displayed by distressed, yet healthy, thriving infants includes:-

• persistent crying
• screaming
• straining
• pulling up legs
• vomiting
• back arching
• flailing arm and leg movements
• feeding difficulties
• wakefulness

These behaviors are commonly mistaken as signs of pain or discomfort, due to a physical problem or underlying medical condition, which may potentially be treated by medications and/or dietary changes. If treatments fails, as is often the case for HEALTHY infants, parents may be told that there is nothing more that can be done but wait until their child outgrows the problem.

Studies have shown distressed behavior in healthy infants is SELDOM due to a medical problem and is more commonly due to NON-medical reasons such as:-

• gastric discomfort directly related to way feeding is managed
• over-stimulation and/or
• the most common reason of all - overtiredness

In these situations medications and/or dietary changes will have little or no effect on an infant's behavior. To deal with these problems, the single most influential way in which parents can encourage their healthy infant's contentment, is by making minor changes to way they provide care.

When faced with difficult infant behavior, it is always wise to have your child thoroughly examined by doctor as a first line approach. However where he/she has been unable to provide a solution, you may need to look beyond a medical problem for an explanation of your infant's behavior.

BabycareAdvice.com consultants are among a small number of health professionals worldwide, who are educated to understand the complexities of healthy babies and children based on MEDICAL and BEHAVIORAL MODELS of care. This means they understand NORMAL infant behavior (including distressed behavior) and are able to providing a DEPTH of parenting advice (tailored individually for each child and each family) that FEW health professionals can.