Overprotective parent?

Asher and his toy elephant
Originally uploaded by karmakeda.

We went to the ECHC (Early Childhood Health Centre) for Asher's 4 month check on Wednesday. When I made the appointment the only ECH nurse who had time was the one I like less but since I don't have any concerns about his growth or development I didn't feel the need for an in depth conversation with my preferred nurse. The visit went fine, he is measuring 62.5cm and 6.35kg which is a pretty dramatic growth for a small born baby. At birth he was just 48cm and 2.66kg.

Anyhow, Asher was atypically unsettled and crying (I don't think he liked the nurse!) the ECH nurse checked his hips and then gave him a hard plastic rattle to check that he can grasp things. Now, I watch him grabbing things one handed, bringing his hands together to grab something (he loves doing this with the soft little orange elephant I balance on his chest) bringing things to his mouth, watching and copying our mouth movements and other developmentally appropriate 'tricks' so I'm quite confident that there is no problem there, but I know the nurse has to see it to tick the little boxes. Anyhow, he was already unhappy and when she gave him the hard plastic rattle he whacked himself in the head with it and started to really cry. I got his soft monkey off his stroller, pried the hard plastic rattle out of his vice-like grip and let him take the monkey while cooing to him that it might better not to bonk himself in the head with something hard. The ECH nurse muttered something about overprotective parenting and that was pretty much the end of the visit.

I didn't think about it much at the time, I felt put out because I don't consider myself overprotective and I was focused on getting out of there and having coffee with Sanjay and the baby at my local cafe haunt but it's been playing on my mind more and more. Am I, in fact, overprotective? I assume that most people, even those that I consider overprotective would think of themselves as just being careful, so where does that leave me? I guess overprotectiveness is just more paranoid and careful than whatever the norm is. But obviously those norms are different for people in different situations - we all heard the refrain of 'we never bothered with that in my day and my kids turned out ok' (I always think, but what about the kids who didn't turn out ok, because they weren't strapped into carseats or whatever).

Aaaaanyway, that is more tangential than I wanted to get. This post was just meant crow about my boy's excellent growth and development and whinge about nutty ECH nurses.

That's my update, have a great day.