Herbert Renz-Polster

I am a pediatrician by training, but for many years I have been dealing not only with children’s health issues, but above all with child development and its everyday issues, from baby sleep to children’s anger and puberty. I present the topics that I am particularly interested in here. You can find an overview of my scientific work here.

As far as my life is concerned, I was born in 1960 in the then still quite rural “Speckgürtel” of Stuttgart – together with my twin brother Ulrich. A childhood with few hardships during the economic miracle. Abitur 1979. Studied medicine in Giessen, Munich and Tübingen, doctoral thesis in Pakistan and India. Followed by 4 years of training as an editor in a medical book publishing house. From 1995 to 2002, specialist training as a pediatrician and pediatric pneumologist as well as research activities in the USA, research award for work in the field of epidemiology of allergic diseases. 2006 to 2011 research associate at the Mannheim Institute for Public Health(MIPH) at the University of Heidelberg with a research focus on health promotion in childhood, then as an associated, i.e. not permanently employed, scientist; since 2024 affiliated with the Department of Health Services Research at the Clinic for General Pediatrics, Pediatric Cardiology and Neonatology at the University Hospital Düsseldorf. Here is more about my scientific work, and here is a podcast about my path through medicine at Medizin Pioniere. Editor and author of medical textbooks as well as author of several non-fiction books and parenting guides on child development, living with children and health.

In addition and in between, father of four children, who are now , , and years old and some of whom now have children – we are now grandparents of 4 grandchildren, a new, beautiful practice track! I live with my wife Dorothea Polster near Ravensburg (Dorothea is an educator and advises families with small children). At the end of 2016, I fell ill with ME/CFS after an influenza (the disease is not rare and yet many people don’t know it – this has changed with the 2020/2021 pandemic, some of the long Covid courses fall into the ME/CFS category). Since then, I have been broken-winged, although I am grateful that after a bad time in which I was bedridden most of the time, I am able to work about half-time again, although I have had to give up my medical work and most of my lecture tours.