A reflection from Dr. Marie Jean-Baptiste, Rising Star Pediatrics I spend my clinic days watching parents make space in their lives for a person they have not yet met. Cribs get assembled, playlists curated, pantry shelves reorganized—each gesture a small promise that you belong here. One of the quietest, least celebrated preparations is the practice…
It’s been only a few weeks since the children returned to school here in Florida, and already my practice is filled with the season’s first chorus of fevers. It happens every year—the mingling of classrooms, the trading of crayons and coughs, the simple fact that children carry both joy and germs with equal generosity. Fever…
There is something about water that calls to children. It is vast but knowable, dangerous but inviting—a thing to be mastered, to be played with, to be conquered, but also feared. And so, when Summer comes, and the pools glisten beneath the sun, children do what they have always done: they leap in. Parents watch,…
There is a quiet tragedy in how industrialized medicine today treats children—not as full human beings with stories and struggles, but as entries in a billing system, as numbers shuffled between insurance codes and waiting rooms. The industrialized model of healthcare has turned the most sacred of relationships—the trust between a parent, a child, and…
There is a quiet war being waged in the hallways of our schools. Not the kind waged with fists or words, but the kind that moves in silence—undiagnosed illnesses, unchecked asthma, the slow creep of anxiety and depression, the weight of chronic conditions carried by children too young to understand why their bodies betray them….
Will My Baby Forget Me? Understanding Infant Memory and Object Permanence My husband asked a simple question. A heartfelt one. A question wrapped in longing, in the delicate hope of recognition. “Will she remember me?” he asked as our 7-month-old great-niece left for a two-week vacation. And in that moment, I understood. It was not…
At Rising Star Pediatrics, we believe in the weight of a child’s story—how their health, their growth, their very breath, is intertwined with the life they will one day lead. We know that the body is a history book, that every ache, every unchecked allergy, every developmental delay is a whisper from the past, shaping…