Since newborns can have certain things go surprisingly and quickly wrong with them, and new parents are, well, new parents, babies are expected to have a health care provider who can do well-baby checkups; your health care provider for the birth will encourage you to select one before the baby is born. If you have a family practice M.D., (perhaps the one who will attend your birth, if you are very lucky) that person may serve. You do not need to have a pediatrician; a family practice M.D. with a subspecialty in pediatrics will be just fine. If you already see a naturopath, you could find out if they do well-baby checkups. You might want to interview the provider you choose, if you do not already have a relationship with them. It’s important that you feel confidence in this person, and that you feel you share similar values. You may be able to get a sense of this quite quickly in an interview with a few open-ended questions about their style of practice, rather than laundry-listing them with detailed scenarios.
The sections of this work where I have most dramatically changed my mind are the ones I did not write much in while I was pregnant.
Your health care provider during the pregnancy and birth will pressure you to find a pediatrician or other health care provider for your baby before you even have the baby. Books and midwives/doctors/etc. urge you to make an appointment with your proposed health care provider in advance of the birth to make sure you are comfortable with them. It all sounds quite reasonable. Maybe it is.
Pediatricians write a lot of the how-to-take-care-of-your-baby books, many of which have been responsible for propagating a lot of bad parenting strategies and expectation. You're looking for someone to trust, who is knowledgeable. You could be turning to parents you like and trust, whose children you see growing into strong, healthy, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, authentic adults. The recommendations of pediatricians often seem more meaningful, more weighty, more scientific or otherwise compelling. It's a dangerous illusion.
In practice, if you intend to hunker down and nest for the first six weeks (as I did my best to do, and strongly urge others to do as well, so we can reset our cultural expectations of new mothers, new parents and new families to something sane), all those well baby visits are just going to take up a lot of time and energy that you could be spending bonding with your baby. The midwives visited us, which we appreciated. House calls may seem to be a thing of the past, but you might be able to arrange something similar.
The Shady History of Pediatrics or, How Your Pediatrician May Impact Breastfeeding
A Look Ahead: Well Baby Visits
Copyright 2005 by Rebecca Allen
Created May 20, 2005 Updated March 8, 2006