At my 14-year-old son’s last check-up, his pediatrician, Dr. Edna Pytlak, delievered one of the best anti-drug and alcohol speeches I’ve ever heard.

It was the casualness of her delivery that was so disarming and my son really listened. "Be careful of teen parties in Park Slope," she said moments after asking him to jump up and down 30 times. "Kids are consuming toxic levels of alcohol," she added as she went about his 14-year check-up. "Some of my patients wound up in the hospital last year after drinking much too much. They nearly died."

She talked about the tragic drug overdose of a boy who’d just graduated from Brooklyn Friends in June and the kids who got alcohol poisoning in the PS 321 playground last Spring. She talked, my son listened. She has an easy authority and my son’s well-earned trust.

Dr. Pytlak appears, on first meeting, to be a cross between Mary Poppins and Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus books. But she is really so much more: a whip-smart physician, a great diagnostician, a common sense healer, and an always reliable partner in the event of an emergency.

"With all this IM-ing, kids who weren’t invited to the parties are showing up," Dr. Pytlak, the mother of two grown children, continued knowingly. "At one party, some kids came with heroin (that’s a felony, you know). Heroin is very, very dangerous. It’s very easy to overdose."

I think it was her matter-of-fact, non-judgemental manner that really got the message across. You could say that she used scare tactics but it wasn’t an outdated "Reefer Madness" message which is so easy for kids to discount. She speaks from experience using specific examples from the community we live in. She’s got the facts and she’s not afraid to use them. It doesn’t sound like platitudes or "Just Say No." She seems to understand where the kids are coming from. Like she’s one of the kids herself. But with authority and experience.

With her pretty floral aprons and her sing-songy voice, Dr. Pytlak is beloved by legions of Brooklyn children and parents. When we joined her practice in 1991, she was already a legend in these parts and it was close to impossible to get in. But Dr. Pytlak had just partnered with another great doctor (Brianne O’Connor) and she had room for families with newborns. I guess we got lucky and she has seen us through a host of medical emergencies.

Dr. Pytlak works hard to establish an easy relationship with her young patients and check- ups are fun; the kids actually look forward to them. On the walls of her office are the framed collages she makes of all the holiday photos she receives each year. The kids trust her and really listen to what she has to say. "Your mother and I, we might have had beer, maybe pot at parties," she said while looking in my son’s ears. "But we weren’t drinking alcohol the way these kids are. It’s really quite different."

Dr. Pytlak is a great partner to have during this scary teenage phase.  Somehow she makes it all feel so much less frightening. With her help, maybe we’ll all make it through.