Mar López, pediatrician and tiktoker: "Putting a screen on children before they are three years old delays their language"

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Maternity encouraged

(Palma de Mallorca, February 28, 1987), a Primary Care pediatrician in Mallorca, to share her first

on social networks.

Many of her parents already told her in consultation: "I've seen it on the internet."

And she thought: "But I wouldn't tell it that way or I wouldn't explain it that way, besides, what source is behind it?"

Mar López accumulates 600,000 followers on Tik Tok, where she gives advice to parents.Laura Jaume

Given her own example as a mother and after years of specialization, first studying Medicine at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and later with a master's degree in Primary Care Pediatrics and another in Child Nutrition, she wanted to shed light on dissemination.

"Solutions to doubts about the little one".

And the pandemic arrived, which triggered her accounts with

to the impossibility of going to the doctor in person.

Now, she puts all of them in order in the book

(Ed. Grijalbo).

We all have a coach inside us, especially if it is our soccer team.

Can the eloquent phrase also be applied to the pediatrician and do we all know what happens to the child except the doctor? I had never heard of it!, but it happens every day.

Just yesterday I heard: "I knew something was wrong with the child, we went to the emergency room and they sent him an antibiotic. I'm not going to give him that."

I said: And then?

Where do we stay if what they have given you generates distrust?

It is important to trust the criteria of the pediatrician who cares for you so that his advice is worth it.

Unfortunately, regarding external opinions, we are not going to stop doing it or suffering it.

The important thing is to make the decisions between the two, your criteria as a parent and your trusted pediatrician.

Medicine is not paternalistic, we tell you that we believe that this is the best,

very different from the face-to-face ones?

Do the same issues repeat themselves and do they worry about the same thing? No, in face-to-face consultations they stick more to the physical.

They focus a lot on the skin and pain.

Through networks are other types of questions related to food, sleep, tantrum management... Of course, my mobile phone is full of photos of baby poop [laughs].

Unfortunately, in consultation there is no time for this type of issue that does arise in networks. Content creators are blamed for an intellectual vacuum or that they usually contribute little to society.

Do you feel proud to represent the most positive part of social networks with a professional profile that reaches a lot of people? Yes.

I always thought about being able to inform families in my own way,

so that my patients also knew how I do nasal washings or how I recommend putting Ventolin.

I started with a blog, almost without realizing it.

I am amused that sometimes it seems that I am at home, breaking ties or guiding.

And the book is so that parents don't have to look for the needle in the haystack and have everything organized, because many times

they get lost and just when you need it you have to go way down.

Why does the more information available, the more lost a beginner feel? It depends on the way of being.

It helps me that they give me details of things but it scares other people.

I have made a video with five things that yes or yes should make you take the child to the doctor, for example, a blow to the head from more than one meter in height in a child under one year of age.

And many parents tell me: "Now I only think that the child does not fall out."

In general, it is about making them feel accompanied.

In my case I have done pediatrics but there are people who have gotten pregnant without any previous contact with children and they do not have nephews either.

Suddenly, your son has a fever and you don't know if he is dangerous or not.

That's why I explain clearly, if you don't understand it, it's useless.

Although he loves his job, he has asked for a leave of absence.

Is reconciliation possible? I work about seven hours on content in the mornings, while the girl is at school, and then another three hours at night when she falls asleep.

I not only think of videos and edit them, but I create courses, I prepare information that I send them by mail, I study what is new that is coming out, I answer

Now I prepare a talk for families at a congress, I answer direct messages... And I dedicate the afternoons to my daughter, because we need to be together.

Between the snack, the bath or the shower, there is hardly any time left to play.

It is a pity that we barely spend three hours a day dedicated body and soul to our children.

And that means without the mobile.

When I feel like I have to be in person, I'll be back.

Right now my reconciliation is this. Why does everyone comment on breastfeeding?

Shouldn't it be strictly a mother's decision? It's common.

Even I have been told how I should carry my breastfeeding and people in my family.

Sometimes they forget that you are a pediatrician and they only think that you are a friend or sister or wife of.

There will always be people who think that you should do it differently.

Parenting is not black or white, there is a huge gray scale.

The important thing is what you feel is best for you and for the baby, based on what your pediatrician explains to you based on scientific evidence.

There are as many options as there are families and sometimes what works for you today won't work for two months from now.

You need something else, or you start working and you have to adapt.

You will hear this and that or you will say it yourself without meaning to, but everything is respectable.

Psychology talks about how a child who has developed an anxious attachment during childhood tends to be insecure and self-critical in adulthood.

I imagine that parents are very afraid of anything they can do. In fact, you are overwhelmed that any decision could affect them in the future.

You have to know that what happens on a specific day and never usually happens will not create trauma for a child.

With care, of course.

One day you let a child cry a little more than necessary because you have gastroenteritis or because you are attending to the second and third in the meantime and when you can you go.

But if, in general, you attend to the child and respect him as an adult, it will be more decisive.

The important thing is what you do most of the time.

Now it has returned to the speech of "a slap in time."

What do you think? Before, he stuck to the children and it was seen as something normal.

The other day I saw on social networks that José Mota made people laugh by taking off a belt, insinuating that he was going to hit a child who got bad grades.

No one would think of making a video like that with a woman.

Why a child yes?

And he has thousands of followers.

We must not downplay the matter or send these messages to the population because our childhood or someone else's was like that.

Before, there were no rights for children, relying on the "I educate them like this."

It's my property and I yell at it if I want to.

The child grows up in a repressed environment and becomes an adult who does not tolerate a tantrum from a completely normal child because he thinks it embarrasses him.

All children need to express themselves and we are the ones who have the problem with what we think is so bad.

There is so much depression and anxiety because we were raised not to express our emotions.

They taught us to cover them.

Even without knowing how to speak, children touch the television as if it were a tablet and it is not uncommon to see them in restaurants with the drawings on their mobile phones.

From your point of view, should technology be limited at a very early age?

How does this early contact affect them? The evidence says, based on many studies,

which is not good under two years.

Now it is recommended up to three.

Because?

Putting a screen on children before they are three years old delays their language, they do not interact in the same way with other children, they have higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), it causes sleep problems, sight problems... children do not learn in front of a

, but when they interact with you at dinner.

But of course, if I put the drawings they leave me alone.

We can put non-toxic plasticine on them or help you cook carefully.

There are many repercussions of the screens, although putting the drawings on it one day is not bad. With the incorporation of women into the world of work, grandparents are having a very bad time.

And there are those who don't even have grandparents to pull from in this juggling game.

How do you take that tough battle?

Many mothers write to me telling me that, like me, they have taken leave of absence because they earn a thousand and little and the person who takes care of her child or the nursery school costs them almost the same.

In the end you neither earn money nor are you with your son, especially the first year when they are always bad at kindergarten.

In other countries they grant days if your child gets sick, that is something very important.

Now we raise in solitude, not in community.

Grandparents are retiring later and later.

Why does a mother have to have a worse salary by reducing her workday or giving up her career so that this child grows up healthier and generates less spending on public health?

The time we dedicate to a child has an impact on her psychological and physical well-being and causes less spending on health and this is something that is not taken into account.

For example, they didn't let me breastfeed because the type of contract changed and I found myself in a dead end after four months.

Who breastfeeds my son?

If your child sees you eat fruit, does he eat fruit?Without a doubt, parents having a healthy diet generates imitation on their part.

I cut the fruit into sticks and she, being older, said that she wanted to eat it like dad, in bites.

When you eat healthy, your child sees it as normal.

Also if you give him natural sour yoghurt he gets used to it, as for many adults it tastes like lightning without sugar.

A healthy diet for children is not so difficult, what we lack is the habit because they gave us anything and they chased us with the Nutella sandwich.

Normally, a child eats half a banana, or not even the whole tangerine.

Why do we give him a sweetened liquid yogurt with three fruits?

Pacifier or thumb sucking is another of the great problems of parents.

Do you have any advice? I sucked it myself until I was nine years old on the sly.

My daughter has never even wanted a pacifier but I'm always uneasy with small parts.

Children have a very strong oral phase up to the age of four in which they need to put things in their mouths.

Pediatric dentists recommend removing it at the age of two so that problems with the palate and bite can be corrected, although it depends on the intensity with which they suck and the time they are there each day.

There are no recipes and it is usually very complicated.

Sometimes they are the ones who stop loving it.

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