This may come off as a rant but I'm annoyed by how infantilizing everything in the world is today.
Story time. My wife and I had another child a few months ago. When we take our daughter to her checkups the receptionist hands us this tablet and we have to answer a bunch of questions before we can even go back. It proceeds to ask us questions like:
Do you have any guns in the house? (None of your fucking business)
If so, how are they stored? (Again, none of your fucking business)
Name three things you love about your child (Why am I having to answer open response questions?)
What makes this organization think they have the right to ask me these invasive questions? It feels like everything is this way now. Every company or organization treats you with this infantilizing tone like they have to guide you through life.
I don't remember it being this way when I was younger. Has anyone else noticed this shift?
The gun questions are likely mandated by your or the doc's insurance provider. Modern primary care has all these byzantine funding formulas & incentives where docs don't get paid to actually treat your Chief Complaint. But instead get reimbursed for putting you through totally unrelated health screening protocols as though these overeducated health professionals make a living conducting Internet surveys.
The "tell me 3 things you love about your child" is really wacky though. Never heard of that one, nor can I imagine it's part of any insurer-mandated paid screening survey.
I would imagine it directly created by the presumably female pediatrician, as a way to be a quirky chungus.
All the pediatricians I ever worked alongside were all certified loons. I think it's sort of an offshoot of the woman problem, that it breaks one's brain when their primary purpose is to solely interact with children on their level.
I recall working alongside one whale of a pediatrician where we treating extremely sick children. She would literally Google anything that stumped her and choose the child's course of action whatever the 1st SEO hit was, no matter how sketchy.
Those questions are all part of the national pediatrics board's recommendations, and every one is designed for them to use as a pretense to red flag you and use CPS to steal your kids from you.
I think the question about loving our child was to screen for post-partum depression. The survey was supposed to be for her but she was feeding and I was blazing though it so we could head back.
Loving your child as a specific question would only screen for a ,"We Need to Talk about Kevin" situation. PPD screening is very different.
https://screening.mhanational.org/screening-tools/postpartum-depression/
Yeah, I hadn't considered the PPD angle , but agree that the screening questions don't fit the vibe.
I suspect it's a general question to keep on file to generate rapport. So that the doc can have a little reference in your child's file about personal details about their life that they can bring up randomly at a later date to surprise you and fake that they remember your kid or actually give a shit about them.
I started refusing the questions at my own appointments because I realized I don't think in ratings from 1-10, and I was just making up answers. Then I realized they were documenting my made up answers. How is that helping me, or them?!
The open answer questions are because medical professionals don't spend enough time with patients to put any personality traits in the chart. So, they have to get it from the patient or the parent depending on the age.