Herbert Renz-Polster, MD

Medicine, development and the everyday child

Herbert Renz-Polster is a pediatrician whose work moves between child health, developmental science, anthropology and evolutionary biology.

He was born near Stuttgart, Germany, in 1960 and studied medicine at universities in Giessen, Munich and Tübingen, all in Germany. His doctoral work took him to Pakistan and India. After four years as an editor in a medical publishing house, he trained in pediatrics and pediatric pulmonology and conducted research in the United States.

From 2006 to 2011 he worked as a staff scientist at the Mannheim Institute of Public Health at Heidelberg University in Mannheim, Germany, and remained associated with research there afterward. Since 2024 he has been affiliated with health-services research in pediatrics at University Hospital Düsseldorf, Germany.

A public voice for children

Herbert is an editor and author of medical textbooks as well as numerous popular books about child development, family life and health. Since 2019 he has written as a family columnist for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The German original of The Treasure Within became one of Europe’s bestselling parenting books. Its central question has guided much of his writing: what changes when adults look for the good reasons behind children’s behavior?

Research

Herbert’s scientific publications include work on childhood allergies, physical activity and public health, deformational plagiocephaly, SIDS, SARS-CoV-2, ME/CFS and Long COVID. Since 2022 he has served on the medical advisory board of the German Society for ME/CFS.

The medical publications are an independent body of work and are presented separately from the parenting book.

Family

Alongside and between all of this, Herbert is a father of four grown children and a grandfather of five. He lives with his wife, Dorothea Polster, near Ravensburg in southern Germany.

Contact: herbert.renz-polster@kinder-verstehen.de