Pediatric care is all-encompassing in child healthcare. It’s not just about treating your little one when they get sick. It also involves providing guidance and support for your child’s overall development, from infancy to young adulthood.
Pediatric care calls for working closely with your child’s pediatrician. You will realize it significantly impacts your child’s overall growth and development. In particular, there’s a different type of care for each age and stage of your child’s development.
What is Pediatric Care All About?
Similar to medical professionals who focus on caring for adults, the other end of the spectrum is caring for the youngest individuals in our population.
Pediatric care is a specialized healthcare field that focuses on children’s health and wellness from birth through young adulthood. It involves the physical, emotional, and social health needs of infants, children, adolescents, and young adults.
What Makes Pediatric Care Important?
Children are more than just miniature versions of adults. Babies, children, and adolescents have distinct needs that aren’t comparable to those of adults. The practice of pediatrics addresses these unique needs while providing the best healthcare.
Different from adults, children are constantly changing, be it growth spurts, developmental milestones, or behavioral patterns. Pediatricians take note of these growth and development issues that aren’t present when treating adult patients.
Not just physical growth, but behavioral, developmental, mental, and social issues in children determine the course of pediatric care, especially when a serious illness is involved. The best pediatrician provides comprehensive healthcare for your child.
We at Omega Pediatrics take pride in our expertise. Amidst the demands and complexities of pediatric practice, we strive to provide you with the best possible care for your little ones. Stay on this page as we dig deep into the topic.
Pediatric Care Involves Many Types of Care
Significant growth and development happen during the childhood years. This makes the services of a pediatrician an essential part of not only safeguarding your child’s health but also providing guidance and support throughout their growing years.
There are different types of care for each passing age and your child’s developmental stage. It includes medical, preventive, social, mental, and consultative care.
1. Medical Care
Typically, this is what you should expect from your child’s pediatrician. The medical practitioner you reach out to when your child gets sick. Your pediatrician provides medical care for the sick child and preventive care for the healthy child.
The pediatrician’s care involves the diagnosis and treatment of both acute and chronic conditions, such as infections, injuries, congenital defects, infectious diseases, organ dysfunction, and childhood obesity.
On a macro level, it coordinates with community health to provide comprehensive care focused on children’s benefits and the public healthcare system. It aims to reduce infant and child mortality due to sickness and chronic ailments.
2. Preventive Care
Infants and children are the age groups most vulnerable to contagious diseases, many of which are life-threatening. Hence, pediatricians focus on disease prevention and mitigation of the risks of infant and children’s injuries and deaths.
- Well-Baby Visits
Health care should start in infancy. Newborn health is crucial. Visit your pediatrician once or twice before your baby turns one month old. During these visits, the doctor may also guide parents on important precautions to safeguard the baby’s health.
More importantly, the visits enable the doctor to closely monitor your baby’s growth and development, tracking milestones to ensure your baby is developing normally. Also, the baby’s weight is checked, along with breastfeeding or formula feeding.
After the first month, visits may be every 2–3 months until your baby reaches 2 years old. Thereafter, well-baby visits can be scheduled every 6 months. During the visits, parents may bring up any concerns they may have about their baby’s growth.
- Well-Child Care
Pediatric care continues until your child grows to keep them healthy, treating illnesses and other issues before problems arise. These visits include scheduled immunizations, sleep issues, suspected allergies, and other physical examinations.
These visits also allow the parent to discuss with the doctor the child’s nutrition, behavioral milestones, learning, and social growth. The doctor may give valuable insights and offer advice for continued healthy growth and development.
3. Social and Mental Care
On top of medical care, a pediatrician focuses on your child’s social and mental health. It helps detect, prevent, and effectively manage emotional and developmental concerns.
This includes developmental disorders and delays, learning delays, autism, attention deficit disorder, behavioral problems, and mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, especially in the adolescent age group.
In managing defiant and disruptive behavior among older children, your pediatrician is your first point of contact to get advice and counsel. The doctor may offer initial home remedies and provide age-appropriate screenings and therapy treatments.
A key part is connecting parents with available resources to support their child’s physical, emotional, and mental health.
Your provider at Omega Pediatrics can connect you with subspecialists needed throughout your child’s development. Subspecialties that address specific health issues include adolescent medicine, child abuse, and developmental-behavioral.
4. Consultative Care
From years of medical practice and seeing healthy and sick children, Omega Pediatrics provides consultative care and parent coaching. We understand that raising a healthy child entails working closely with parents, caregivers, and other health professionals.
This includes educating parents on lifestyle and nutrition for their child’s physical well-being. Also, establishing a healthy environment at home conducive to your children’s mental and emotional health is equally important.
Indeed, quality pediatric care is a productive collaboration with parents to help children learn and grow in the best way possible.
Is My Child Too Old for Pediatric Care?
Pediatric care covers a wide age range. Experts would say it starts even before the child is born—that is, from conception through gestation—then onwards to infancy, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.
The age cap was originally at age 18, then raised to age 21 in the 1960s. In 2017, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) eliminated the upper age limit. The experts assert that the transition to adult care should not be an arbitrary number.
Most pediatricians see patients until age 21. The AAP recognizes the 11–21-year-old age group as adolescents. Well-child visits under the government’s Medicaid program cover eligibility until the child is 20 years old.
Your experienced provider at Omega Pediatrics loves taking care of their young patients, who have been with them since childhood, and some even since birth. We strive to be your perfect ally, developing lasting relationships with your children.
As compassionate as we are, we at Omega Pediatrics hate to see our patients go, but we have to, especially when they reach young adulthood. It’s one of our goals to help your adolescent child have a smooth and safe transition to an “adult doctor.”
Preparing Your Child for Adult Care
Your child’s age is something to consider, but determining if they’re ready to take care of their health is more important. The decision to shift to adult care entirely depends on the child patient, the family, and the pediatrician’s assessment.
The transition process starts this way. During the adolescent child’s visits to the pediatrician with their parent, the doctor starts to direct questions to the child rather than the parent. This process hopes to build independence.
Over time, the pediatrician will see the patient without the parent present. Your adolescent is encouraged to visit their pediatrician alone to develop relationships and become comfortable with their doctor.
However, for patients under 18 years old, certain tasks still need parental consent despite this transition. Parents should still be in the know about these procedures, even if their children are already adults. The administration of vaccines is one example.
The pediatrician aims to empower children to take charge of their health, understand their medical condition, and manage their medications or disease. This especially holds for children who are enduring chronic ailments that extend into adulthood.
Children are ready when they can fully take charge of their health, understand their health condition, and know how to manage it. The next step is to see an internal medicine doctor or an adult doctor. The pediatrician can make a referral for this.
Above all, the most important thing is that your child should feel comfortable with whoever adult doctor they see next. We at Omega Pediatrics will be more than happy to see their young patients transition safely to their adult providers.
But in certain instances, when your child isn’t ready up to a certain point, your child’s pediatrician may offer a bridging program, which may require a referral to an adolescent medicine specialist who sees patients up to 25 years old.
Keep Your Child Healthy and Happy with Expert Pediatric Care
As a parent, pediatric care means giving your child all the support and care you can from birth up to young adulthood. Your parenting journey starts the moment you welcome your baby into this world.
Pediatric care is crucial for your newborn baby. You will be having regular visits with your baby’s pediatrician, whether for well- or sick-baby visits.
Pediatric care continues as your baby grows, entering childhood and onwards to adolescence and young adulthood. More than medical care, your pediatrician will focus on your child’s developmental, behavioral, social, emotional, and mental health needs.
For expert pediatric care, choose Omega Pediatrics in Roswell, Georgia. With years of medical practice and experience in all facets of children’s health, we take pride in our expertise and strive to be the best pediatrician for you and your child.
To provide comprehensive care, we believe in productive collaboration with subspecialists to give your child holistic treatment. We work closely with you, as parents and families, to create the most conducive environment that starts at home.
Pediatrics isn’t only a field of study but also an advocacy of compassion toward our babies and children. This is what the core of pediatric care is all about. At Omega Pediatrics, we’re a family committed to raising children healthily.
