As pediatricians, we enter patients’ lives at moments of uncertainty. You learn how to listen for what is said and what is not said. You walk guardians through fevers, developmental milestones, and the thousand small worries that come with raising a child. Over time it all feels comfortable. Routine.
Then you become the parent. The questions you have answered so many times drip with new urgency, and your own uncertainty. Sleep, feeding, fevers, topics you could discuss with your eyes closed, are cuts in the battle between your heart and head.
The first years as both a mother and a pediatrician are a lesson in humility. Ultimately, they’ve taught me to marry two truths: the powerful, sometimes detached role of medicine, and the deeply human relationships we must build with parents.
Our roles were shaped by authority, training, and experience. The physician was expected to decide and direct. Patient interactions were no exception to this hierarchy: Guardians were receptive parties to our hard-won knowledge.
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Here’s the rub. Discipline, clinical rigor, and even dichotomy are necessary in health care, but there are limits to the old way of thinking. Paternalistic care dismisses parental intuition, and leaves no room for shared decision-making, cultural context, or the realities of family life.
Today, parents arrive with screenshots, search results, and wearable data. With these come questions and assertions that can feel easy to dismiss. As a first and second year, I might have. Years of hierarchical authority in science and medicine accidentally taught us to.
But with the new world comes nuance. We’re no longer the sole keepers of information. It’s everywhere, conflicting as it may be. Now, the task is to interpret and prioritize. And perhaps most importantly, to symbiotically adapt to each conversation.
This gets harder too with digitalized communications. We meet via telemedicine, chat through patient portals, and plug data into the EHR. Some of these developments are genuinely helpful. Clinical support tools like UpToDate, AI notewriters like Freed, and ever-expanding EHR help us sift through the mounting piles of information. But the other side of these advances has fragmented our roles. We’re always available, yet less connected.
But connection is what we need most. It’s how trust, evidence, and instinct work together.
Parents and guardians are vulnerable, and often afraid. We want vigilance to eliminate uncertainty. Doctors know it cannot. I’ve held these truths in the exam room and now, at my own kitchen table. The last few years have shown me that literature doesn’t eliminate how it feels to be tired, uncertain, and responsible for a life that you love more than words.
Words, it turns out, might be the answer. There’s value in both what we say, and the care in which we say it. Even more, there’s value in listening. It’s a chance to invite the caregivers into an ongoing conversation, where both sides have distinct, but equally important functions.
Pediatrics asks you to care for children. Motherhood reminds you that every child belongs to someone whose world can shift with a diagnosis. It’s in between these two realities that physician mothers can learn to navigate the new and old world of medicine.
To stand at the intersection is to recognize that the best care is both clinically apt and deeply humane. My hope is that in the next few years, we’ll be less separated by the tech meant to connect us. In the meantime, I’ll remind myself that while I may not master both roles perfectly, they can still change me for the better.
The task now is to carry forward what is best from both and to practice in a way that honors not only the child in front of us, but the family holding that child through every uncertain, ordinary, extraordinary day.
The author is an anonymous physician.
