Reddit Wants To Know What Terrible Secrets You Lie To Your Pediatrician About

Do you ever lie to your pediatrician? It’s a tricky road to walk; your child’s doctor needs to be fully informed to help you make the best decisions and give you the best advice about the care your child needs. But at the same time, doctors are human beings, and sometimes human beings are mean, condescending, judgmental jerks.

A thread on a parenting subreddit has delved into the murky world of face-saving lies that Redditors have told to evade judgment, unwanted advice, or lectures from their kids’ pediatricians, and the results are interesting. The half-truths, omissions, and outright fairy tales that these parents claim to have spun include the mostly inoffensive and probably harmless pretension that a picky eater is not subsisting on a diet composed primarily of pretzels:

To the well-hashed viewpoint that what the doctor doesn’t know about the family’s bed-sharing won’t hurt him:

To yet another parent’s insistence that his or her son’s discomfort over being in a rear-facing car seat trumps the fact that his tiny forward-facing body could get decapitated in a crash:

To the parent who hides behind a burner account to claim that he or she secretly and oh-so-illicitly gives a two-year-old child melatonin supplements to knock him out for a good four hours:

I am not a doctor, but I have a helpful tip: when you decide to give your toddler a drug that hasn’t really been tested in children so far and that may have an effect on the hormones involved in sexual maturation, maybe your pediatrician is a good person to at least have a quick chat about dosing with? (Yes, even if the substance is super duper “natural” as melatonin is touted to be by proponents.)

On top of all the secret-sharing, the thread also gets into some inter-Redditor judging of exactly the sort that people are trying to avoid by lying to doctors. But one person does cut through with some words of actual wisdom about a better alternative to feeling the need to lie to your pediatrician about your parenting:

Sure, you shouldn’t go shopping for a doctor that will just pay lip service to all of your parenting choices and give you high-fives as you skip vaccinations, pour potato chips through a funnel into your kid’s gullet, and strap them into your car sans car seat. But for those of us who are lucky enough to have some options when it comes to choosing a pediatrician, it’s good to realize that you don’t have to settle for the first doctor you visit, especially if that doctor is a condescending jerkbucket to you.

What about it, Mommyish? What, if anything, have you lied to your pediatrician about? Or have you ever felt judged by your family doctor for the things you did confess?

(Image: Ruslan Guzov/Shutterstock)