"When you have a 10-year-old who weighs 160 pounds walk into your examining room, you know it's not just the act of overeating at the core of that problem," says Rosemary Fernandez Stein, MD. "It's a bigger behavioral issue. And that means parenting skills, too."
Fernandez Stein is the founder of International Family Clinic (IFC), a pediatric practice in Burlington, N.C., with five bilingual physicians that the Dominican Republic native built to serve the local low-income, low-education Hispanic population. In 2012, she started incorporating behavioral health parenting sessions into her practice.
"Over the years, I kept seeing poor behavior in the kids, a lack of self-control and self-esteem. It was getting worse, not better. This was contributing to poor health. Everything was connected," she says.
Since 2014, the pediatrician says she spends roughly 70% of her clinical time with patient families working on behavioral health. With the help of her military-trained physician husband, and after a few years on rocky financial terrain, she's figured out how to code and bill for her time ā including Medicaid ā and in turn help her patients.
Many of the mothers IFC sees with their kids are constantly struggling to handle just the logistics of life, Fernandez Stein says.
"Children respond to parenting, period. Whether it's good parenting or bad parenting. Children yearn for structure and priorities," says Fernandez Stein, a mother herself to 14-year-old Hannah. "It's not so much about being strict. It's about being smart."
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