What’s the most unhinged/blatantly untrue thing you’ve been told by a health visitor?

[claudiawinklemansfringetrimmer]

Inspired by the health visitor who confidently told me yesterday that “Pom bears have more saturated fat than a Big Mac” and the ones on a birth preparation course who stated “breast fed babies are 70% more intelligent” and “they didn’t have formula in dinosaur times!” (The latter is technically true I suppose…)

Mine told me to turn DS forward facing in his car seat at 9 months old else he'd be bored!

Strangely I told them we didn't require their services with DC2...

@C8H10N4O2 I completely agree. Womens experiences need to be listened to and taken seriously, before any action can be taken. Unfortunately defensive practice is commonplace in the NHS and patients are often labelled ‘difficult’, rather than any responsibility being taken or reflected upon.

I see this in my line of work, in the NHS, all the time. It is a systemic issue which cannot be solved with training alone IMO. I live and work in Scotland now and things are worse than in England as there is no PALS here so it is even more difficult for patients complaints/feedback to be raised, let alone investigated.

Mine told me that babies don't like the smell of hand sanitiser and I should stop using it. I used it after changing my newborns nappies ( this was pre covid .oh my how the times did change when everyone was advised to use it!)

This is a really interesting thread. I thought I was just unlucky with my hv.
I was struggling with exclusive breast feeding and she said she had a mum bf triplets so twins should be easy. Next visit she spotted the bottles of formula and was very annoyed with me.

Wouldn't it be interesting if we could meet and interact our former HV's with our fifty/sixty something heads on rather than our twenty/thirty something heads on and at our most vulnerable?

Just to add to this... I realise this thread is intended to provoke negativity about health visitors, but just to show the flip side, I had good experience with both of mine. One listened to me about my concerns of potential autism for my then 2 year old, noted how he didn't respond to his name, did some other checks and interactions with him and referred him to the relevant places. Diagnosed ASD with severe LD aged 3. The other saw I was struggling with my newborn second DS and caring for my oldest whose needs were increasingly challenging and kindly sat and listened, gently talked to me about PND, and made sure to catch up with me at every weigh in. I bumped into them a year or so ago and they remembered my now 10 year olds name and enquired after him.

Mine told me not to give my DS baby rice to supplement my milk, despite the fact that he was always hungry at 6 months old. I did anyway and he slept through for the first time. Then she said he was getting chubby and would end up overweight. He is 6' 4" tall and very slim and healthy. This was forty years ago and she was the only chubby one.

With all respect, this may be true for many women, but not all.

Speaking from personal experience.

It's a shame so many of them are utterly unempathetic and thick as mince then, isn't it?

I didn't need a health visitor, but I've worked with many vulnerable women who'd have been utterly done in by some of your awful colleagues.

Vulnerable women need better treatment, not worse!

Brush babies gums with Colgate…. Luckily my husband and I both work in dentistry so we didn’t do that

This thread is primarily women talking about their negative experiences with hv's. There have been some positive anecdotes too.

Any hv's on here who are doubting said experiences. Well, I'm doubting you.

I used to be a teacher. As such, I am well aware that there are many awful teachers out there, adults in fact who should not be working with children at all.

How, in this professional field, are you saying that there aren't some bloody awful ones about?

And if there are, then why are you questioning these first hand experiences?

They should be acknowledged as a first step to making improvements!

To be fair to the health visitor Poms Bears have 2.6 per 100g versus a macdonalds burger being at 3.4g per 100g. So whilst she was wrong that it isn't more it isn't that much less.

It is a completely normal phrase. The fact that you haven't seen it anywhere else doesn't change that.

Still cringe

Here’s the thing, this is a forum on the internet. Yes we all know that, so we all know as well not to believe everything we read on the internet. That’s the first thing.

Secondly, in case you aren’t aware, HVs are considered the devil incarnate on here. There are countless threads on Mumsnet slating HVs. It’s almost a sport on here, possibly only just beaten into second place by hatred of MIL threads, with dog hating threads snapping at the heels of the HVs.

This is Mumsnet, that’s how it is on here, welcome to Internet forums.

Just to check, do you think everyone with a bad experience of their HV is lying, or do you think we’re all misremembering?

It might be vaguely close per 100g (although from what you’ve written, a burger contains 30% more saturated fat per 100g than Pom Bears so not that close) but given that a bag of Pom bears is 13g and a Big Mac is 220g, you’d have to eat about 16 bags of Pom bears to get anywhere near the same total

Are you a hv? Because your simplistic, patronising attitude is exactly what many are complaining about!

My friend is French and an artist and made me the most exquisite hamper of baby things, mainly beautiful French clothes and a few toiletries. Honestly it was beautiful.

First meeting with HV, she walked in with a face like a slapped arse, looked at the hamper, extracted the baby powder and said well THAT will be going straight in the bin.

So incredibly rude, I actually had no intention of using the powder anyway!

No toddler is eating a whole big mac through are they????

I was told not to do tummy time at all because of a condition which in no way impacted my baby’s ability to do tummy time, so I just smiled and carried on.

@SunSeaSangria- I'm not surprised at this because ARFID didn't become an official diagnosis till approx 2013 and remains relatively unknown.

My son has a prescription for Fortijuce which, luckily, he will take (a lot of children with ARFID refuse supplementary drinks). He's had some therapy to encourage him to eat bigger portions but it wasn't very successful. We don't put any pressure on him to eat new foods, but we do make sure he sticks to three meals a day and always has two Fortijuce. He's still underweight, but he's out of the danger zone now. He's also weighed regularly by his GP to ensure he's maintaining or putting on weight.

I didn't realise - until my son ended up in treatment at the Maudsley - the impact of low weight on the body, particularly in children. So it would be worth taking your daughter to the GP to check that she's OK.

My nephew's health visitor reported him to SS for being less than the 1% percentile and wouldn't listen that he had been born 3 months prematurely and was still under the hospital consultancy

(she obviously hadn't adjusted the chart for prematurity)

That I shouldn't carry baby in a sling, because a baby in my street died just the year before, suffocated between its mother's breasts.

That if baby got a stuffy nose I should take her straight to A&E, because babies can't breathe through their mouths.

My youngest was adopted at 11 months, and HV turned up once. She clearly knew nothing about adoption, but was keen to help, so I asked if she had any info on sleep training that was suitable for newly adopted toddlers. I said clearly that there was no way I'd be leaving a newly adopted baby to cry it out, but I needed to do something as foster carer had just let baby sleep where she fell. Next day, HV dropped round a leaflet on the Ferber method.

When my DD was having her 2 year check up the health visitor noted that she refused to do any of the tasks given to her. “She doesn’t listen and does her own thing.” Was her comment as she looked at us both with disappointment. My daughter, now 8, was diagnosed with ASC at 4. I’d like to think there are systems in place to identify any symptoms now or at least not be so dismissive when a two year old doesn’t want to draw a shape or thread beads. Subsequent HVs were lovely and supportive though so my faith was quickly restored.