Being clear about the edges is part of being trustworthy. These are real limits, not legal throat-clearing.
Founded Parent does not know your child. It has not seen them, does not know their history, their medications, their birth weight, their allergies or their diagnoses. It answers the general question, not your specific one. Guidance that is right for most children may be wrong for yours, and only someone who can actually assess your child can tell you which.
It cannot tell you what is wrong with your child, whether a symptom is serious, or whether you should be worried. Describing symptoms to it will produce general information about those symptoms, which is not the same as an assessment.
If your child is struggling to breathe, unresponsive, having a seizure that will not stop, badly injured, or may have swallowed something harmful, close this page and call your local emergency number or poison control. Founded Parent tries to detect urgent questions and say exactly this, but it will not always catch them, and waiting for an answer costs time you may not have.
The approved sources cover common parenting questions well. Rare conditions, unusual combinations of circumstances, and very new topics are often simply not covered, or are covered only by small studies. When that happens you will see a low evidence grade or an honest Insufficient, which means the research does not support a confident answer, not that the answer is no.
Guidelines are revised. Answers shown here are re-checked on the schedule set out in our editorial policy, so there is a window in which an answer can be behind the newest guidance. Every answer is dated, and every source is linked so you can check the original.
Founded Parent reads paediatric and psychological research, so that is the boundary of what it can answer. Questions about recreational drug use, obtaining controlled substances or other unlawful activity fall outside it, and it will say so rather than improvise.
Substances in the context of a child, pregnancy or breastfeeding are a different matter entirely. Those are ordinary paediatric questions with real guidelines behind them, and they are answered like any other.
Founded Parent is built to refuse to invent sources, and is restricted to an approved list. That removes the most common failure of general chatbots, but it does not make it infallible: it can misread a study, miss an important caveat, or summarise something poorly. The linked sources are there so you never have to take its word for it. If you find an error, please tell us.
Educational information only. Not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and no doctor-patient relationship is created by using this. Founded Parent has not examined your child and does not know their history, so its answers may not apply to you. Never delay or disregard advice from a qualified health professional because of something you read here. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.