Parents' anxiety never stops.
Now in the eyes of parents, everything about children seems to be a "chicken". Needless to say, achievements and specialties, perfect modeling should also start from an early age.
Under this trend, it is not surprising that corrective helmets are popular in China. The little red book alone has more than 2,000 notes related to corrective helmets.
The so-called corrective helmet is actually a kind of skull orthopedic fixator, which limits the growth direction of skull by wearing a helmet.
In other words, if the protruding part of the baby's head is restricted by the helmet, I hope to raise some places and reserve room for growth. In this period of strong skull plasticity, it is possible for a baby's head to be shaped according to this mold.
But the question is, a set of more than 200 grams of corrective helmets, whether it is an imported product of 28,000 yuan or a domestic brand of 6,000 yuan, can really make a baby with a few months old have a perfect head shape?
The doctor suggested "sleeping and watching".
But parents spend 28,000 yuan to "wrap their heads" for their children.
In the second half of this year, in just four months, Schiller took the baby to the children's plastic surgery department of the local hospital three times.
The baby just turned half a year old when I went for the first time. It was midsummer, and Schiller shaved the child's hair clean to keep cool. Without thinking about it, this scrape has become my own heart disease to this day.
"My son turned out to be a bow!" The so-called boat-shaped head looks like a boat with a long head and narrow sides. Recalling the moment when the baby's head shape was found to be problematic, Schiller called it lightning strike.
In fact, the real navicular head is a disease, which is caused by congenital developmental disorder that leads to premature closure of one or more bone seams, thus showing deformity in appearance.
Fortunately, after examination, Schiller's baby is just a simple head shape that is not very beautiful.
To this end, Schiller went to the public hospital twice, and the doctor's advice was to "sleep and watch", that is, to improve the head shape by adjusting the sleeping position. After that, every two months, the doctor judged that the child slept well and the curvature of the back of the head changed.
However, the more Schiller looked at it, the more he felt that the child's head shape had not improved. She seeks medical advice on various social media every day. When she sees many parents wearing corrective helmets for their children, she wants to try it-even if the doctor doesn't recommend it.
"After consulting a lot of materials, I'm still worried that my son will have a crooked face and crooked eyes in the future, and he can't do anything when he grows up," Schiller told China Newsweek.
According to Long, an attending physician of the Pediatric Medical Department of a private hospital named "Future Doctor" and a doctor of the West China Women and Children Union, if a child really needs to wear a helmet after examination, he usually needs to wear it for 23 hours every day, and the wearing cycle lasts 1 ~ 6 months depending on the situation.
Obviously, this is a long torture for both the baby and the parents.
By the end of the year, Schiller finally persuaded his family to take his children to an orthopedic center in another city and customized an imported orthopedic helmet. The one-time price is 28,000 yuan, including the cost of reviewing and polishing the helmet every 2~4 weeks.
Although I will take my children on the high-speed train for three hours every other month or so, it has been gloomy for half a year when I got my helmet, and it seems to be starting to fade.
My honey is my arsenic.
What Schiller didn't notice was that a few months ago, Guigui's mother, who lives in Silicon Valley, gave Guigui a corrective helmet for only three weeks and gave up.
When Guigui was just one month old, Guigui's mother found that the child's head was a little crooked, and the children's doctor who gave Guigui a regular physical examination suggested that she take her child to customize the corrective helmet.
Considering that the tilt of the back of the head may bring inconvenience to children in the future, such as asymmetric ears, the temples on both sides will be long and short in the future, and the tilt of the back of the head may make Guigui unable to wear sports helmets such as skiing. When Guigui was three months old, Ma Gui would take her children to a commercial institution to make an appointment for testing.
After nearly a month, Guigui got her own customized helmet. But the difficulty of wearing it is far beyond Guigui's mother's expectation.
On the one hand, you will get eczema after returning to China. The helmet is covered by hard plastic and the foam structure inside is airtight. In the hot summer of July in California, even if the air conditioner is turned on all day, you will still sweat all over and eczema will be more difficult to control.
On the other hand, due to the problem of polishing, just a few days before wearing the corrective helmet, a piece of skin was worn on the back of the head, and the wound never healed.
Another consequence of improper helmet polishing is that Guigui's forehead is squeezed narrower and narrower, but the back of his head is not tightly attached to the helmet. "This makes the place that should be long not long, and the place that should not be long is still long, and even affects the appearance," Guigui's mother told China Newsweek.
At the same time, as a baby's sleep guide, Guigui's mother introduced that younger babies rely on familiarity to sleep, including changes in sleeping posture, and even changing pajamas will affect sleep.
After polishing the helmet every other week, due to the improper polishing degree, it is often only possible to put on the helmet five days ago and take off the helmet two days later. It's hard to sleep with a helmet on the front, and you have to adapt again when you take it off at the back.
After wearing it for three weeks, Gui Magui found that the child's head shape did not improve, and even the head was more serious. She tested the children in two institutions respectively, and the results confirmed her judgment, so she gave up the correction journey decisively.
Huang Mengru also failed. In her words, her daughter is also a member of correcting the failure of helmet graduation.
Huang Mengru's daughter has a severe crew cut, and the whole back of her head looks down at Ma Pingchuan. The doctor advised her to wear a helmet to correct the child.
But what Huang Mengru didn't expect was that every time he put a helmet on his child, he struggled. The child struggled and cried and refused to cooperate. Huang Mengru is afraid of hurting her children, and has been carefully looking for the right angle and opportunity.
Every day when she takes off her helmet and cleans it, Huang Mengru will see her daughter's head is always red and there is a heat rash on one side. My daughter has a cold and fever more and more frequently.
What makes Huang Mengru unbearable is that such pain only brought her and her children a return in the first month-the review data improved significantly. In the next two months, the child's head shape has hardly changed.
Considering the constant rash and prickly heat on her daughter's head and the deteriorating resistance, Huang Mengru finally decided to give up.
Huang Mengru can't figure out why there are so many successful cases of correcting helmets online, but their children can't. It has been half a year since he took off his helmet, and Huang Mengru still regrets it. If he had persisted, would it have been better for the children?
Abuse under external anxiety
It is worth noting that Huang Mengru's daughter's failure to return to China is not an isolated case. According to Guigui's mother, among the children she knows, helmet correction has failed far more than it has succeeded.
In fact, as early as 20 18, the domestic media reported that a mother of Wang Xing Nanchang was dissatisfied with the head shape of twin boys. When the child was 4 months old, she went to Nanjing Fuertai Orthopedic Center and ordered two corrective helmets, which cost 6600 yuan. I don't think so. Later, the heads of the two children all had different degrees of protrusions, which looked like Altman's head darts in cartoons.
On the one hand, such serious consequences are related to the unreasonable wearing of helmets.
"The head circumference of small-month-old babies is growing rapidly, and the wearing of appliances needs to be constantly adjusted with the growth of babies. This step usually requires professionals to make personalized adjustments according to the focus of the baby's head shape and the change of the head circumference, "Long told China Newsweek.
"If the wrong wearing is not properly adjusted, it will not only fail to achieve the correction effect, but even limit the normal growth of the child's head, which may seriously affect the child's brain development."
On the other hand, it is also related to the irregular operation of orthopedic centers.
According to China's Newsweek, Fuertai Orthopedic Center, which caused the "Altman Head", is still operating normally in cities such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, Changzhou and Guangzhou, and stores update cases of corrective helmets on social media platforms almost every day.
Source: State Administration of Medical Products
In this regard, China Newsweek asked a staff member of Fourtet Helmet Customization Center. However, unlike the previous enthusiastic introduction of the effect and wearing method of the helmet, after being asked about the registration situation, the staff member disappeared directly at the other end of the dialog box.
According to relevant sources, even if the imported corrective helmet has obtained the medical device certificate, the supervision of the corrective institution currently responsible for operation is not clear.
One problem that can't be ignored is that with the expansion of orthopedic institutions and the spread of more and more "successful cases" on the Internet, orthopedic helmets are coming into the sight of more parents in China.
The active or passive improvement of cognition, coupled with propaganda words such as "Don't miss the golden period of head correction, which will affect children's future", is making the corrective helmet gradually abused in parents' "head anxiety".
According to Long Lu Ping, a baby's skull is inherently plastic, thus leaving enough room for the continuous development of the brain. But it also causes the shape of the baby's head to be easily changed by external forces after birth, which affects the appearance of the skull.
Especially in the first half of the year, the most sleep time, long supine position or lateral position in one direction, will cause the child's flat head to tilt.
"Generally speaking, this kind of flat head and migraine is non-pathological, and most of them do not need to wear orthopedic helmets. By changing posture and attention, most of them can correct themselves, "Long Lu Ping told China Newsweek.
Xu Lingmin, chief physician of pediatrics department of Qingpu Branch of Zhongshan Hospital affiliated to Fudan University, also said in an interview: "After excluding congenital genetic diseases and metabolic diseases, most infants' head shapes can be corrected naturally. This is also a normal and healthy way of correction. "
This is also the personal experience of Guigui's mother. After taking off the helmet, with the mastery of turning over becoming more and more skilled, the returned head shape is much better now with the naked eye.
A previous study published in the British Medical Journal also showed that there was no significant difference between children with corrective helmets and children with natural correction, except that their parents' satisfaction was slightly improved and their anxiety was slightly reduced.
These researchers from the Netherlands randomly assigned 84 infants with moderate to severe skull deformation of 5-6 months to wear corrective helmets for 6 months and recover naturally, and followed up the infants at 8, 12 and 24 months. The results show that the orthodontic effect of the two groups is equivalent.
From this point of view, from the popular "sleeping in a flat head" in the past to the pursuit of "wearing a round head" today, it is just a popular change in parents' minds.
Schiller disagrees with this statement. "I am completely for the good of my children." This concept has long been ingrained in her and other parents' minds.
And this is exactly what businesses are most willing to see.
(At the request of the interviewee, Schiller and Huang Mengru are both pseudonyms.)