National Pediatrician Day Date in the current year: January 28, 2024

A pediatrician (also spelled paediatrician) is a medical doctor who specializes in pediatrics, i.e. the branch of medicine that focuses on the medical care of infants, children, adolescents, and young adults. In the United States, pediatricians usually care for patients aged up to 21, although doctors specializing in certain subspecialties of pediatrics may care for patients up to 25 years of age.

It would be wrong to treat children as “little adults” from a physiological standpoint because their bodies aren’t just smaller than the bodies of adults; there is a substantial difference in how they function. There are many issues that pediatricians have to deal with more often than adult physicians. In addition, children often cannot properly describe their symptoms because they are unable to find the right words or cannot speak yet, and pediatricians have to take this into account as well.

Already ancient scholars such as Aristotle, Celsus and Hippocrates understood that children needed to be treated differently from adults, but pediatrics didn’t emerge as a medical specialty until the 18th century. The person credited with founding modern pediatrics is Swedish physician Nils Rosén von Rosenstein. The term pediatrics was coined by German physician Abraham Jacobi, the world’s first dedicated professor of pediatrics, in the mid-19th century.

Like all branches of medicine, pediatrics requires extensive studies and training. To become a pediatrician in the United States, one needs to get an undergraduate degree in any field, as long as they complete certain required science courses, attend four years of medical school, and then complete three years of residency training and get certified. If a newly certified pediatrician wishes to focus on a certain subspecialty of pediatrics, they need to complete a three-year fellowship in addition to residency.

Pediatrics has many subspecialties, most of which are also considered subspecialties of other branches of medicine; for example, pediatric anesthesiology lies at the intersection of pediatrics and anesthesiology. Pediatric subspecialties include, but are not limited to, adolescent medicine, child abuse pediatrics, neonatology, pediatric cardiology, pediatric endocrinology, pediatric hematology/oncology, and others.

The origins of National Pediatrician Day are unclear, and the holiday does not have any official status. However, it hard to deny that pediatricians deserve recognition, so don’t let the holiday’s unofficial status stop you from reaching out to the pediatricians you know and expressing gratitude for their hard work and dedication. Send your kid’s doctor a card or a small gift as a thanks and spread the word about the holiday on social media with the hashtags #NationalPediatricianDay and #PediatricianDay.