My name is Stephen Cowan, and I'm a Developmental Pediatrician. For the last 30 odd years, I've been working with children and parents on their journey, on all different levels, from normal development to development that's gone off track, and it's been the greatest joy of my life. 

I have two beautiful grown children who forced me into a new way of looking at child development because when I was in training, they didn't talk about different styles of development. I never learned that. And in my education, and my education from children, the more and more I saw different kinds of kids growing up, the more questions that parents asked, I kept going to specialists and saying, “that must mean something.” Nobody said, “no, no. It's just their temperament. No, no. It's just…” and for me it must mean something. So that became a big part of my practice.

My hopes for my children are that they feel open to this journey of learning in the most elevated way possible of understanding who they are, what gifts they have to share with the world, and how to grow, to continue growing, to never stop growing. That is really all I can ask,  that they are as excited about their life going forward into adulthood as I am about them growing up. When you hold a new baby, that's what you hope for is that they feel that kind of excitement at every step of the way.