Managing Your Child’s Health and Wellness
Start Your Child’s Health Journey:
Every child deserves to grow up healthy, strong, and supported. Choosing one main high-quality place for your child’s care helps you build a strong relationship with your health care provider and care team. They’ll get to know your child’s health history, follow their growth and development, and be there for both checkups and sick days. Use the buttons below to explore topics on this page.
Choose a Go-To Place for Care
Having one trusted clinic or provider, also known as a medical home, means your child’s team knows their health history, tracks their growth, and helps you make the best choices for their care.
Well-Care
Well-care visits are regular appointments with your child’s primary health care provider, where they focus on keeping your child healthy and happy. Well-care visits are more than just checkups — they are a time to make sure your child is growing and developing the way they should. These visits also help catch small problems early and build a trusting relationship with your child’s health care team.
Recommended Well-Care Visit Schedule
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends regular checkups for all children from birth through the teen years.
Babies and toddlers have visits more often because they are growing and changing quickly. After age 3, children usually have a checkup once a year through age 21. See below for a list of ages when your child should have a well-care visit:
- 3 to 5 days old
- 1 month old
- 2 months old
- 4 months old
- 6 months old
- 9 months old
- 12 months old
- 15 months old
- 18 months old
- 2 years old
- 2 1/2 years old
- 3 years old
- 4 years old
- 5 years old
- 6 years old
- 7 years old
- 8 years old
- 9 years old
- 10 years old
- 11 years
- 12 years old
- 13 years old
- 14 years old
- 15 years old
- 16 years old
- 17 years old
- 18 years old
- 19 years old
- 20 years old
- 21 years old
Attending well-care visits helps your child’s health and development through:
- Preventive care: Prevents illnesses through screenings and conversations with your child’s provider about how to support their health and growth and to learn about vaccinations.
- Early detection of health concerns: Finds potential health problems early and connects your child to services that can reduce the risk of complications and possibly long-term health issues.
- Developmental monitoring and screening: Track your child’s growth and development, ensuring they meet important milestones. Your health care provider will connect you to services if your family needs more support after a screening.
- Expert guidance: Pediatric providers give advice on nutrition, physical activity, rest/sleep, and behavior to help you support your child’s well-being.
- Family support: Provides a place to discuss family dynamics, social barriers, parenting challenges, and any concerns about your child’s behavior or development.
- Education on safety: Providers often share important safety tips for car seats, injury prevention, and childproofing your home.
- Caregiver mental health: Checks in on how you are doing. Remember, your mental and physical well-being are directly linked with your child’s health, which means caring for yourself is the same as caring for your child.
Growth, Development, and Milestones
Watching your child grow, learn, and reach new milestones is such an exciting journey! Many parents look forward to big moments like first words or first steps, but there are so many other wonderful milestones to celebrate along the way. Keeping up with your child’s regular well-care visits is the best way to make sure they are healthy and on track.
You can play an active role in monitoring your child’s growth and development and come prepared to talk about it during well-care visits. Sharing what you notice helps build a strong partnership with your health care team and ensures care that is personalized to your child’s needs.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Learn the Signs. Act Early. Program offers milestone checklists to help caregivers track their child’s development with confidence at no cost.
💛Pro Tip: Track your child’s milestones with the CDC’s no-cost Milestone Tracker app, available for iOS and Android in English and Spanish. Interactive developmental milestone checklists help you know what to look for in your child. Use the app to complete a checklist for your child’s age, share a summary with your child’s health care provider, and get tips for encouraging your child’s development.
Developmental Screening
During certain well-care visits, it is recommended that your provider ask you to complete a questionnaire with questions about how your child plays, learns, talks, and moves. This is called a developmental screening.
It’s a simple way to check if your child might need extra support to grow and develop. Through a screening questionnaire, your health provider can assess your child’s developmental health and determine if your child may need extra support to learn, grow, and do their best.
You know your child best. If something does not feel right, talk to your child’s provider and ask for an additional screening — or contact EarlySteps, Louisiana’s early intervention program for children under age three. They can help you get a free developmental evaluation.
Continue Your Child’s Health Journey with Adolescent Well-Care
Why do well-care visits still matter for older children and teens? Just as early childhood milestones are exciting to watch, the pre-teen and teen years bring their own milestones — new experiences, responsibilities, and opportunities to grow. As kids become more independent, it can be easy to think those yearly checkups are not as important anymore. But adolescent well-care is just as essential as early childhood — sometimes even more so!
Adolescent checkups help prepare your teen to take an active role in their own health and get ready for the transition to managing their care into adulthood. Whether your child has simple or more complex health needs, there are many resources available to support a proactive, smooth, and stress-free transition. Learn more about youth transition by visiting Smoothmovesyht.org or gottransition.org.
💛 Pro Tip: Every stage of growing up comes with new questions, changes, and opportunities to learn. Keeping up with yearly well visits helps your teen stay healthy, confident, and ready for what’s next.
Additional Resources
Family Support
- Families Helping Families is dedicated to enabling and empowering individuals with disabilities and their families by providing information, referrals, education, training, peer support, and advocacy This is a statewide network of nine family-directed and family-staffed regional resource centers that gives support from someone “who has been there.”
- The Family Resource Center is available to support families and children across the state of Louisiana. Experienced staff is available to help identify and connect families to resources and services in their community and state based on their family and child’s specific needs. In addition to health information, they can connect families to resources related to insurance, finances, education, food security, and more.
- 211 is an easy-to-remember telephone number that connects callers to information about critical health and human services available in their community. A single access point for everyday needs and in times of crisis.
- Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) is a program open to women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or have already delivered. Participants in the program can get healthy food, breastfeeding support, nutrition education, and more. Infants and children up to their fifth birthday may also receive benefits.
Caregiver Health Support
- 988 is a call line that gives emergency emotional support. Call, text, or chat online to connect to a 988 specialist who can help. 988 specialists provide free, confidential support, 24/7.
- Postpartum Support International is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting mental health and emotional well-being related to pregnancy and the postpartum period. Its core mission is to promote awareness, prevention, and treatment of mental health issues connected to childbearing — including mood and anxiety disorders during pregnancy and after birth — and to ensure families can access support and care.
Growth Development
- CDC Learn the Signs. Act Early. Developmental Milestone Tracker is an app that helps parents and caregivers track their child’s development.
- Vroom Mobile App is a science-based mobile app with daily brain-building activities for parents and caregivers to do with their children.
- Smooth Moves YHT provides tools to help youth build the skills they need to grow their independence and help them transition to adult health services.
- Healthychildren.org is the official American Academy of Pediatrics parenting website with reliable, expert-reviewed information on children’s health and well-being from infancy through adolescence and young adulthood.
- Exceptional Lives Louisiana helps families navigate disability-related systems and a directory of related services and health providers by zip code.
- EarlySteps provides early intervention (for example, speech therapy) to children from birth to age three.
FamilyHealth@la.gov ›
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