Sponges
Reflection Piece by Jasmine Holmes - Why I chose pediatrics :
“Children are like sponges,” I’ve heard. Like sponges, they soak up the world around them. I have, in the past, reflected heavily on this statement with my childhood in mind. I’ve thought similarly at length of the dozens of students with whom I’ve worked throughout the years, threading through each experience to find a common seam. What was it the avid learners and the “at-risk” youth had in common? Was it that they had soaked up the world around them?
In many ways my hometown, New Orleans, is similar to the salty Gulf that cradles it. As kids, we grew within literal and figurative mass pollution of our educational, judicial, and healthcare systems—absorbing enough of the brown water in our environments to be permanently stunted, or finding a way to clean any space we can. Thus, it is my experience as an “inner-city youth” that fuels my passion to work intimately with the next generation of growing minds. My mission, however, has always been more than medicine. In reflecting on the redeeming potential of early educational interventions, social support systems, and longitudinal mentorships in my own trajectory, I have a profound and personal appreciation for the importance of changing a child’s entire world.
Yet, I entered my Masters of Public Health program not knowing I wanted to be a pediatrician, and, perhaps worse—not yet convinced that children should be compared to sponges. Over the course of my M.P.H. year, my understanding of the ways which psychosocial stressors and social determinants impact the outcomes of the communities like that in which I grew up evolved beyond anecdotally. For the first time, I connected the dots between my personal trauma and environmental exposures as a child and poor health outcomes in myself, as well in closest friends and relatives. My interest in preventive medicine bloomed, refined as a curiosity in understanding the complexity of developmental potential that makes children so special. So vital yet vulnerable. Here, I gained an appreciation for maximizing the malleability of youthful minds in improving health literacy, increasing mental health promotion, and enriching the world we live in. Maybe, then, ‘sponge,’ isn’t a terrible comparison.
I was not yet sold, however, on the metaphor or on pediatrics as specialty until I realized I had overlooked a critical aspect of both: the dynamic nature of pediatricians…and sponges. In absorbing the world around them, children grow, evolve, and emit. In this vein, pediatrics appears unique to me in that there is no such thing as tangential points of impact with our patients. Furthermore, in working with youth, I am humbled to appreciate that the learning is always reciprocal. I enjoy most the indulgence in working equally close proximity to the limitless potential of children and the boundless enthusiasm of my colleagues. We believe fearlessly in the potential of children we serve, as well as in our own potential to change the world. Among them, I most often feel as though my natural curiosity, eagerness to learn and teach, commitment to holistic patient care, devotion to teamwork, and integrity are appreciated and reciprocated ten-fold. I am at home.
Yes.
Alas, I concede— perhaps children are like sponges. They soak the world around them. It makes sense, then, that pediatricians are superheroes forever aspiring to change those worlds. Therefore, I entered the field of pediatrics with same hope and intention with which many have and will. I want to change the world, and I believe together we can!
