FARMINGTON – Dr. Iris Silverstein has touched thousands of children’s lives in her 22 years in Maine. Now she’s moving on to practice medicine at Children’s Hospital in Boston to pursue her interest in helping kids understand themselves.

As a primary care pediatrician, she has watched children grow up in the Franklin County area.

“I feel it’s a real privilege to be a primary care pediatrician for a family. You get to share in their lives,” Silverstein said, “It’s really unique and I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss the relationship with the kids and their parents. I know each of them as an individual person. It’s like having a friend. So you lose a part of your everyday life in losing them.”

Silverstein, a pediatrician in Farmington for 19 years, is leaving Maine on Tuesday to set up her apartment in Brookline, Mass., two miles from Children’s Hospital.

She’s going to direct the pediatric medical care of patients on the inpatient psychiatry unit, an 18-bed unit, and also work in the Developmental Medicine Center.

Silverstein will work with children and adolescents with severe mental health problems who need hospitalization.

Some of those children will have no complex medical problems and some of them will, she said.

“I really wanted a new intellectual and professional challenge,” Silverstein said. “And, I’ve been doing a lot of work and seeing kids with school problems and emotional difficulties. This is an opportunity to work with people who are doing what I’m really interested in.”

For years she has been building a developmental-behavioral emphasis into her practice. She has worked with kids with depression and behavioral problems.

“I really enjoy working with kids who have that kind of difficulty,” Silverstein said. “I like helping kids understand themselves so that they understand the things they’re good at and the gifts they bring to other people and the skills they have and help them figure out whatever life dealt them in terms of challenges.”

A lot of learning and behavioral difficulties and emotional problems stem from biological and neurological sources, she said.

Some kids are born with the genetics to read well and become a terrific reader, and some kids are not.

“It’s the luck of the draw for them,” she said. “They’re good at other things.”

She’ll be part of a psychiatry team in her new job and will be doing pediatrics, not psychiatry.

Silverstein said she likes to challenge herself.

She went to Kumasi, Ghana, in 2002 to learn more about medicine in a developing country and to do whatever she could to help the children there.

She collected medical supplies before she went to West Africa and brought as many as she could carry to the doctors there.

She had said then that her goal when she retires is to go to a developing country to work there, but she doesn’t have any plans to retire soon.

The new challenge in Boston that begins Oct. 25 gives her mixed emotions, she said.

It’s a huge change, she said.

“I mean it’s scary. It’s very hard to leave. I have a lot of good friends,” she said. “I think the medical community here is quite unique and has wonderful physicians.”

But she’ll be taking care of kids and meeting with parents; she just won’t be following them over time in primary care.

She’ll also be working two half-days a week at an outpatient service with kids with developmental and behavioral problems.

“It will be a nice balance,” she said.