Good communication between parents and doctors is the cornerstone of getting good care for the child. Doctors are increasingly pressed for time and appointment visits are shorter than ever. Unfortunately, when time is short, what often suffers is explaining to parents what to expect and why. There is another reason explaining often takes a back seat in parent-physician encounters—they are increasingly encounters between strangers. These days many children rarely see the same doctor twice, and more doctor visits happen in emergency departments and walk-in clinics, places where the doctors and families are strangers to each other. In these conditions parents need to learn how to make the most of their brief time with the doctor. This book will help them do that. This book is not a description of a laundry list of pediatric diseases. There are already plenty of those on bookstore shelves. Rather, it uses specific, familiar examples—things like ear infections, asthma attacks, broken bones, and appendicitis—to explain what is happening inside a child's body as it heals. But the book goes beyond that. It does not simply explain; it demonstrates, using vivid narrative techniques so readers can better visualize the processes being described.