Lucía, my pediatrician: "I don't share the Estivill method: you shouldn't let the baby cry"

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(Editorial Planeta) dedicated to couples who haven't slept for days, to parents of teenagers and, above all, to those who never give up.

What is life about?

To live it freely without guilt with everything it gives us, what it takes away from us, with our mistakes and our successes.

Living without guilt seems easy, but it is not.

When you are a mother, you are always blaming yourself for what your children do.

Guilt is something you really discover when you become a mother.

Before having children, who felt guilty?

It is an emotion that catches you by surprise that is experienced with a lot of loneliness and frustration.

It is everyone's responsibility to work guilt.

We are not in this life to be perfect.

When you learn to sweep away that guilt, you find a kinder world.

In the book you do not mind admitting that you have made many mistakes, what would be the main one?

Surround myself with the wrong people.

This disappointment that you take with people to whom you give a lot and discover that you have wasted a very beautiful time in your life.

There is a mixture of sorrow, guilt and shame.

But I have decided to forgive myself and look forward. You assure me that wanting is not always power and that we are not going to achieve many goals even if we have fought for them.

Yes, it is hard to accept.

But it is the truth.

They always sell us the idea that if you fight for something, in the end, you will achieve it.

It is that false positivism that does a lot of damage.

You can't tell your children or your co-workers or your family that whoever follows it gets it.

That is terribly cruel for millions of people who have not achieved their goals, starting with health.

But what is clear is that if you don't fight for it, you won't get it.

I prefer to educate my children in a spirit of struggle and resilience rather than in that of those who follow it and achieve it.

Disappointments can be very big and can take you to the dark side of life.

Almost nothing has turned out as you imagined it 20 years ago.

How did you imagine it? I imagined myself happily married to the man of my life with perfect children who had never given me a scare or gone through any of the tunnels we had to go through.

You imagine a storybook life.

It's nothing like what I had imagined, but I love the life I have.

You have walked paths where you said you would never go.

The "I never" of the parents.

That then you swallow them all with potatoes.

One behind the other.

You get divorced and say: "I, from now on, will never share my life with any man."

And then you fall in love again to the bars and you get excited.

Alerts that we must take care of mothers who leave the hospital with a baby and a backpack full of fears. For the newborn there are plenty of hands and for the new mother, there are none.

Everyone thinks that the one who needs care is the newborn and the one who needs it is the mother.

This feeling of loneliness is experienced by many mothers, who feel physically and emotionally unwell.

It was for me in its day, despite the great support I had from my parents, but that's how I felt.

I still see him in the office every time I see those mothers with that absent look.

As soon as you ask them: "And how are you?"

They break down in tears and admit that you are the first person to ask them.

The sleep of the babies is one of the main dispute problems in couples.

"

but today's parents need other types of resources from accompanimentYou are not in favor of letting the baby cry.

Absolutely not.

The child must always accompany him and go to the cry always.

We must offer him our unconditional love.

But you have to set clear limits.

In adolescence, parents often lose the papers.

Do you have to feel guilty or do they earn it? My feeling is that parents reach adolescence like crazy, bareback, without having read anything at all.

When you have a baby, you read everything.

But we reach adolescence without having read anything.

The shock is very great because the adolescent has very little to do with the child that she was.

Her brain and his body are changing.

It is very important that parents inform themselves about adolescence and then they will understand their child much better and, above all, they will help him much better to understand himself.

How is it possible for children not to lose respect for their parents? Not by losing it with them.

Sometimes in the consultation I see parents who come for that reason and I discover that they are parents who have been yelling at them all their lives and giving them whips and smacks.

"Honey, if I don't yell at you, you don't yell at me. If I've never insulted you, you don't insult me."

The adolescent needs to understand that what we are saying is fair and consistent.

Do not try to educate him from the "this is done here because I say so" because you will not get anything.

The most important thing of that time is the example.

Parents have to work hard on self-control,

patience and good education.

If you see that you are going to lose control, it is better to walk away.

You maintain that more communication and less authoritarianism are needed.

But, hasn't the paternal authority fallen to the ground? The authority that has been lost may be due to the fact that we have sinned with an excess of overprotection.

If we overprotect our children during their childhood, we leave them unprotected in life.

In the end, we have some teenagers who are disrespectful and tyrannical and who spend their entire childhood thinking: "I'm the one in charge here."

At the age of 14, they believe they are the kings of the mambo because no one has put a limit on their lives.

Children have to learn to fall and we have to let them fall.

You say that we talk about setting limits for children and, sometimes, we don't know how to manage our own.

How do we do it? Working on assertiveness.

This is something that is learned over the years.

When you're young, you say yes to everything because you feel bad about saying no.

We have to learn to say no without messing up our hair and with a smile.

For example, to your mother-in-law: "I know you want to come bathe the baby, but today is not the best day because I don't feel well. We'll let you know next week."

It's about saying what you think without hurting others.

How do we apply it to children? We also have to teach them to be assertive.

If they are insulted at school and called fat or four-eyed, instead of fighting back violently or not saying anything, they have to reply: "Look, Manolito, I don't like it when you talk to me like that. You're hurting me."

It is important for children to return attacks assertively because it educates and builds their self-esteem.

Choosing battles is just as important as knowing how to stop them in time.

When do you have to stop them?

This is a teaching that I had with my son Carlos.

The adolescent is very prone to fighting and fighting and once you get into the loop, you don't know how to stop.

Retreat on time is a victory.

When do you have to stop?

When your mental health is in danger.

There is nothing in this life that is worth losing your mental health.

No love deserves to be lived if it shakes your foundations as a person.

As much as you love your job, if it causes you anxiety disorder, depression, or chronic insomnia, you don't deserve to be in that place.

You complain that in Medicine you study a lot of theory, but little empathy with the patient.

Very little.

You learn it over the years, many times based on blunders or inappropriate comments... It strikes me that there are not entire subjects on psychology and communication with the patient.

In the Faculty of Medicine they teach you to discover diseases, to save lives and to put on many little medals.

But they don't teach you to tell parents that they have to say goodbye to their son because you can't do anything for him anymore.

I have missed him a lot.

It is true that sometimes doctors release very hard things with tremendous coldness.

Besides, that patient is going to remember that for the rest of his life.

Yes, they are phrases that stay with you.

As much as you try to fix it, you will not succeed.

The patient often does not remember the exact words, but he does remember how you made him feel.

That is why I say it a lot to doctors who are starting out: It is preferable that your patient see you doubt from humility and sensitivity than for you to tell him a truth that you consider immovable from coldness.

You don't have to always be right.

The first thing you have to do is connect with your patient.

We should go further down to the ground and be at their level or one step below.

Being a doctor does not make you a better person.

What difficult decisions have you had to make to safeguard your mental health? Changing jobs and hospitals several times and breaking personal relationships.

Now you have set up your own centre, haven't you? Yes, we are in Alicante and Elche and this year Growing is opening in Madrid.

How is the change from working in a hospital to your own center? Setting up your own project with the people you love,

With your way of seeing medicine from physical and mental health, working with psychologists, pediatricians, psychiatrists all together is a dream.

Behind a child with problems there are parents who suffer.

It is a paradigm shift to treat the family as a whole with all the specialists within their reach.

Watching Covid patients die alone broke you in two.

Yes, because the reason I chose pediatrics is so that no child would suffer the loneliness of the disease that I suffered in his day when I had a serious illness.

I was hospitalized, isolated and completely alone in a room.

When I got out I told my parents that when I grew up I wanted to be a pediatrician so that no child would suffer like this.

Suddenly, thirty-odd years later, you see that everything returns to that starting point and that the sick die alone.

I found it devastating.

Thinking of the millions of people who have died without that hand and that family member by their side moved me a lot.

I hope that if we have learned anything, it is that this can never happen again.

Nothing should justify leaving a sick person alone to die.

Well, it still happens.

There are relatives who still cannot say goodbye.

I do not understand why it is not reported because that does not worsen mortality.

Now we know how to handle that disease.

It seems inhuman to me.

In these two years of pandemic, has primary care been strengthened? It is worse.

They've had two years to do it and they haven't.

My Primary colleagues are doing administrative and bureaucratic tasks, signing up and down, the only thing they do is take time away from the really sick.

There are tremendous waiting lists.

It could have been done infinitely better.

This situation is suffered by colleagues and patients who do not have quick access to their doctor.

Making an appointment with your doctor is almost a privilege.

So much talk about the lessons learned... The toilets have a lot to do with getting their day forward.

Politicians are not at the foot of the canyon nor do they know how it works.

If, in the end, the decisions are made by people who have not managed an agenda of 80 people in one morning, it is difficult for the right decisions to be made.

Maybe they had to spend a few days in a health center to see the reality that my colleagues are experiencing.

Politicians are not at the foot of the canyon nor do they know how it works.

If, in the end, the decisions are made by people who have not managed an agenda of 80 people in one morning, it is difficult for the right decisions to be made.

Maybe they had to spend a few days in a health center to see the reality that my colleagues are experiencing.

Politicians are not at the foot of the canyon nor do they know how it works.

If, in the end, the decisions are made by people who have not managed an agenda of 80 people in one morning, it is difficult for the right decisions to be made.

Maybe they had to spend a few days in a health center to see the reality that my colleagues are experiencing.

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