We're now parents for just 3 weeks and we already learned to take the experts on parenting and child health care not that serious. We already didn't had much faith in the world of medicine because my wife already had her share of conflicting medical advises, but this surprised us both. In that 3 weeks we already had loads of advises that were wrong or conflicted with others. I'll name a few:

• "Don't breastfeed your child too much"
  My wife read a lot about breast feeding before we got our baby. This was a major advantage in hospital, because she knew that as soon as the baby is born, you have to get the milk production started. You do that by offering your baby your breast very often. The nurse however, thought that this was way too much and that that would damage the skin in such a way that it would be too painful to continue breastfeeding in just a few days. Guess what happened: nothing. The skin of nipples will not be damaged because of too much breastfeeding but because of bad breastfeeding techniques.
  
• "Shall I give the baby a little bit of water?"
  This was another question of another nurse on the evening of my wife's second day in hospital. Our baby had peed just once that day and it should've been two. Now, giving water to a baby is not a crime, but as long there's no risk of dehydration there's no need to. The only thing you achieve is that the very little baby stomach is filled with water instead of milk. Later that evening our baby peed a second time by the way.
  
• "Just let the baby cry for half an hour. They have to learn to cope with their own little problems."
  This advice may be true for some other babies, but not for ours. We consider ourselves lucky parents: we have a baby that doesn't cry for a reason. Every time our child cries or behaves fussy, we almost always discovered the reason for that behavior within an hour. So ignoring her crying doesn't help. It only makes our child more frustrated. So we think we shouldn't ignore our baby's crying. We just have to find the solution to our baby's problem faster. We still can ignore her in case we cannot find the solution.
  
• Differences between "schools"
  Some people favor breastfeeding the baby on a schedule, others think it's best to give milk when your child asks for it. You can get advice from people from both schools. Most of the times we consider the pros and cons and choose one school or ignore them altogether.

Some of the advices we got weren't wrong. They were just not fit for our situation or the person who gave the advice didn't think through. Oh, and by the way. In case you didn't know already: I'm no expert at all so you should take my advices with a very big grain of salt. I'm still learning to be parent.

Labels: medical