Hi, my name is Dr. Erin Jamen-Esposito, I'm a pediatrician here with the University of Chicago Medical Group. I've been in practice since about 2009.

I decided to go into pediatrics because I was exposed to my mom a lot with kids, because she's a teacher in Chicago. And so it was a great experience for me to be able to watch her interact with her students and have these great relationships. And my mom really wanted me to be a teacher growing up, so I think she's probably one of the only parents out there who was disappointed that I went a different route and became a doctor instead.

The one thing I'd like to make sure I do in my clinic is to make sure everybody is involved. You can't make changes with anybody, whether it be the child or the parent, without involving both of them. It's a joint effort. And so making sure that the family is always on board and that everyone understands what the plan is and everybody's ready for the plan is very important in my practice.

I think over the last couple of years, I've definitely seen a shift in my practice since becoming a mom myself. I always had the skill set, just from all of my training that I've had over the last couple of years. But since becoming a mom, I truly understand the extra layers of stress that parents have, and how we want the best for our kids, and how we truly sometimes struggle to find out what we need to do to provide that care for them.

And now that I have my own family and my own kids, I really want to make sure that my parents enjoy their time with their children and that I can provide them the care to help them function better as moms as well, because that's a whole thing that tends to get missed. Moms don't usually go to the doctor and talk to their own doctors about how they struggle it through motherhood. And it is a struggle some days, and I really want my patients' moms to understand that it's not just them, and they're not alone on that.

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