pediatrician
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.)
