Editor's note: Few parents can claim to be child-rearing professionals. In this occasional series, we show what people have learned about parenting from their day jobs. If you have suggestions about other people or jobs to profile, let us know.

Dr. Julie Vails is a board-certified family practitioner, so she can claim professional expertise in child-rearing.

Even so, some of the important parenting lessons the Elk Grove physician has learned didn't come out of formal training.

They came from her experiences as a teen mother, from nearly 25 years as a parent and from eye-opening incidents with patients.

In her office, she often has parents who seem to have excellent relationships with their kids and profess that their teens are open and will tell them everything.

Once the parent is asked to step out of the examining room, "I find out that the teenager's perception is very different," Vails said.

Part of being a teenager is establishing identity and separation. As a result, they aren't going to tell parents everything.

It's not just things like drug use, she said.

They may have issues of sexual identity that they're afraid to broach with parents. Or they may be athletes who don't want to play anymore but are afraid to tell their parents.

"What that taught me when I became a parent of a teenager is humility," Vails said.

In other words, a parent can do everything right but still needs other people on the team.

Vails said she made sure her own kids had a trustworthy physician to talk to, and that they went often.

The doctor won't share the child's secrets with the parents. In fact, that's prohibited.

It's just a matter of knowing that kids have someone who can give them advice from a non-emotional vantage point.

"And then," Vails said, "I let go."

Vails also does something in her practice she thinks is unusual: She makes sure testing and counseling around sexual activity are not limited to girls. She urges parents to have thorough conversations with sons about contraception. These are dicey topics for some, but Vails knows they are critical from personal experience.

She became pregnant at 14 and had her first child on her 15th birthday. Genevieve Vails-Dobson is now 24 and works as Vails' office manager.

Vails said she was a good student at an exclusive private school. She was just ignorant about getting pregnant.

"I was poorly educated about sex and birth control," she said.

From parenting her own children for 25 years, Vails said she has also learned patience and flexibility.

It isn't really something that comes from a particular experience, she said. It's more a matter of maturity and gradually learning what matters and what doesn't.

She still cares about manners and behavior, but she no longer has strict standards on things like what they wear.

"I'm ready to let my children express their uniqueness," she said.

So she lets her 9-year-old wear shorts and cowboy boots if she wants, even if the 24-year-old complains she never got to do that.

"That is so not fair," Vails quoted her eldest as saying.

She still parents her adult daughter, too, but not during work hours, when her child becomes her employee.

She also works with her husband, Tripp Kuehnis, who does business development for her practice.

Theirs is a real blended family, with six kids in the home that are his, hers and theirs, and two grandchildren from her second child.

And that may be the best embodiment of Vails' final lesson: "Parenting never stops."

Call The Bee's Carlos Alcalá, (916) 321-1987.