Clinical Pediatrics 50(8) 729 –737

Knowledge about child development is believed to be important in influencing how parents attempt to meet their children’s needs, although the relationship between knowledge and parenting behavior is complex.1 The assumption that greater knowledge leads to better par-enting nevertheless lies at the root of most educational campaigns and programs, as well as pediatricians’ emphasis on anticipatory guidance. Most parents are keenly aware that rearing children is a difficult job and seek assistance from multiple sources, including health care professionals, family and friends, books and magazines, and other media. However, most parents expect their pediatricians to be their prinicipal source of knowledge about their children’s health and about a broad range of other issues as well. Guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) rec-ognize the provision of such information as central, call-ing anticipatory guidance (“routine parent and child education and counseling regarding feeding and nutri-tion, sleeping, nurturing, injury prevention, growth, learning, behavior, discipline, communication, language development, and toileting”) the “cornerstone to child health supervision visits.2,3 This broad approach to anticipatory guidance represents an expansion of earlier approaches that were designed to prevent specific nega-tive outcomes to a broader approach of helping children realize their full potential over the life course.4 Surveys of diverse samples of parents using various methodologies in the past 25 years report consistently that parents value anticipatory guidance about a range of child development and health topics (Table 1). These studies consist of interviews conducted in pediatric waiting rooms,5,6 representative national telephone sur-veys,7-10 self-administered questionnaires to inner-city parents,11 in-home interviews,12 a focus group study,1