Pediatricians are playing an ever expanding — and challenging — role in the health of children and families. They are often the front-line workers in the nation’s mental health crisis among children and teens. At the same time, pediatricians have continued to face skepticism among some parents for many routine childhood vaccines they have been administering for decades.

Dr. Annemarie Stroustrup, a pediatrician with a clinical and biotechnology background, has been tapped to head Northwell Health’s pediatrics services, headquartered at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park. She and her husband, who grew up in East Northport, have four children between the ages of 12 and 20.

Newsday spoke with Stroustrup about the importance of communication between pediatricians and their patients, earning the trust of parents, and why she’s worried about chemicals in the plastics used in some medical devices.

I was always interested in science ... and I went to college planning on doing molecular biology. After graduation, I took a job working at a biotech startup because I was trying to decide if I wanted to go to graduate school or medical school. At the same time, I volunteered at County General in San Francisco, which at the time was a very under-resourced city hospital. I worked the night shift in the emergency department and I loved every minute of it ... it really gave me a taste of what clinical medicine was like.

One of the real challenges for pediatrics, particularly over the last five years since COVID, has just been trust. There’s lots of information that families get from lots of different sources ... the challenge is that there is so much good information and so much terrible information out there, and it's mixed together in a way that it's really hard to tell what's what. We need to figure out how to make that connection with families over that shared desire for great health for children ... I have had conversations with parents where they’ve said, "I read this on the internet, so how can you tell me that’s not what’s going on?" ... We're trying to increase ways of communication and the locality of the pediatricians close to where families are. I think those things are really important.

There is evidence that has shown that most vaccines are very necessary to protect both the health of an individual child but also the health of the community. ... The vaccines that we have developed in the United States have decreased the child mortality rate by orders of magnitude since they were developed. Engaging in conversation is really the best way to learn and having faith that your pediatrician actually does want the best thing for your child. I think that, you know, there's so much rhetoric these days in lots of different venues that I think we all forget we are actually all on the same side here.

The COVID effects on child mental health are real. It really was a devastating time for our children, even those who weren't sick and whose families weren't directly affected by the illness ... It’s not something that many of us were trained to do ... we are thinking about better ways to treat and support children and, and teens as they grow. We’re growing our behavioral health footprint with a new 100-bed facility for child and adolescent mental health. We have expanded inpatient and ambulatory space. That investment is real and it’s necessary.

The way we care for babies in the neonatal ICU involves a ton of plastics. There’s phthalates in our medical equipment. If you could reduce those levels of exposure, maybe we could reduce some of the disease burden in the preterm population because that's actually totally under our control ... We’ve identified links between phthalate exposure and lung disease, neurodevelopment and growth because they interact with the endocrine system in the body so they have all of these different impacts. But some are pretty safe ... The ultimate goal is to be able to tell manufacturers, "Please use these phthalates and not those." We haven't quite gotten there yet but we are getting closer every day.