Vulnerable Sibling: Hyponatremia From Caries Prevention

Abstract

Parental actions and beliefs shape every aspect of a child's health and development. Green and Solnit described a vulnerable child syndrome in which the child's development was impaired when the parents treated him or her in an inappropriate fashion because they had an unreasonable expectation that he or she would die. We recently cared for a child who suffered a life-threatening event (status epilepticus due to hyponatremia) because the parents were trying to avoid reproducing a serious, but not life-threatening, problem (nursing bottle caries) that had occurred in the older sibling. This distortion of professional advice created vulnerability to significant neurologic problems.