Well Child Visits

Preventive care, also known as checkups, physicals, or well-child visits, form the foundation of our health relationship with you and your child. They are essential to maintaining your child’s optimal health and well-being. While we see children often when they are sick, it is only at checkups that we fully evaluate every aspect of your child’s health. In addition to performing a full physical exam, we also carefully monitor your child’s growth and physical development, as well as his or her mental, emotional and social development. We address academic and behavioral issues, perform screening tests for physical and developmental problems, test hearing and vision, and provide vaccines to keep your child healthy. We provide information on safety, nutrition, parenting, development, behavior and a variety of other topics, including parenting challenges and opportunities faced at each stage of your child’s development.

Many camps and sports programs require regular physical exams and forms to complete, and we take care of these as part of our regular well child visits. The full schedule of recommended well visits is available below.

We believe that regular well-child visits are an essential part of providing the best medical care to children. Consequently, we will not give routine vaccinations and other preventive care without being up to date on physicals. Also, children with chronic diseases must have regular physicals if we are to continue to prescribe medications and manage the chronic illness.

The best time to schedule physicals for school age children is in the summer, when the child is out of school and our office is not swamped with sick children.

Parents often want to know the whole sequence of well child visits. Well, here it is! Don’t worry; you don’t need to memorize it, because we tell you at each visit when the next one should be. The schedule applies to most children; in some cases, the schedule may vary somewhat due to chronic medical conditions, etc.

The schedule of check-ups and the vaccine schedule are closely related but not exactly the same; there will be some well child visits where no immunizations are given. You should schedule these visits as well. The schedule is designed so that children are seen often enough to detect serious problems at an early stage as they develop; children are seen more often during critical periods of growth and development and when they are at higher risks of serious diseases.

Listed below is the typical schedule, along with some of what is usually done at each visit, in addition to a complete physical exam and assessment of growth and development done at every visit.  At certain visits, a more thorough developmental screening is performed.