Raising children is no easy task and is filled with constant surprises. Parents often need lots of advice, medical and otherwise, with the internet often being the primary ‘go to’ place for information. Parenting advice varies greatly and despite dispensing health or medical related information, websites still encourage parents to consult their pediatricians. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) found a solution for this quandry launching a new child health website that provides web based medical advice directly from pediatricians.
The AAP is one of America’s leading source of information on infant and child health with other organizations often looking to the group for position statements on developing research. The AAP launched healthychildren.org as a means to bring “pediatrician-approved health information” to the often confusing realm of online medical information. With 57% of Americans reporting they go online for health information, the timing could not be better.
The pediatric group has been online for several years at aap.org but the site attempted to provide parenting information amidst professional and scientific information for it’s 60,000 members. The new site’s emphasis is on common parenting questions from when to treat your sick child, to healthy eating, to potty training; all with a much more parent friendly format than their original site. There is even an option to ask your own question to a team of pediatricians and information on popular pediatric health topics is arranged chronologically so the newest data comes up first.
Upon review of the website, healthychildren.org seems to be a much more generalized, perhaps even watered down, version of the heavily science based aap.org. This is both good and bad because scientific studies can be very difficult for the layperson to interpret yet, largely due to the internet, parents these days are much more empowered and armed with information expecting complex answers to complex questions.
When searching healthychildren.org for information on healthy eating, the website fell short on providing healthy eating guidelines by responding with links to explanations regarding eating disorders. The original website, however, provided multiple links to eating healthy throughout early lifecycle stages as well as general healthy eating guidelines. It seems the best thing to do is to utilize both sites depending on what type of information a parent is seeking and hopefully someday parents will be able to search both sites simultaneously.
Tags: baby health
