Podcast #4
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[00:00:00] My goal for this podcast is for it to be a collection of ideas and knowledge on how to promote healthy growth and development in babies and children. I want it to be a place that we can come to for inspiration and help with our first children or with our fourth children who are not following the recipe that worked with our other kids, for example.
As a parent, a lot of what we think about during the first years of our children's lives and what we need help with is in promoting a child's development by enriching their environment in a way that is appropriate for their age and their level of neurologic development, as well as being aware of lifestyle factors that may be negatively impacting their growth and development.
65% of your child's neurologic development, which is the development of both their [00:01:00] brain and their nervous system occurs during the first year of their lives. So being aware of ways to promote and not inhibit this development is really important. We often don't think very specifically about the development of our children's brain and nervous system.
It just sort of happens without us doing much, and we monitor it by looking at whether they're meeting their developmental milestones within what can sometimes be a huge range of different times, depending on who you're listening to. The truth is that. The brain and the nervous system are built based on environmental stimulation of our senses, and there are really important ways to keep an eye on and monitor whether a child who can't speak yet to tell us how they're doing is developing optimally [00:02:00] inside the most important system in their body.
The building of the brain and the nervous system happens in layers the same way a house is built in layers. First, the house needs a foundation, then it needs the framework built. After that, it needs pipes and electricity and then the walls. And at this point I've come to the end of my knowledge about house building.
Luckily I know more than that about brain building. So. When the brain and the nervous system are developing, the foundation of it all are the primitive reflexes. Some of these reflexes are ones that the infant is born with. They assist them in the birth process in exiting the birth canal, there are others that assist their ability to breastfeed right after birth.
And a delay or a problem with these initial primitive reflexes can affect the newborn's birth because of things like having low [00:03:00] muscle tone or the inability to push and move themselves down through the birth canal. Stuff like this can often end up in an emergency C-section, or problems with breastfeeding due to a reduced sucking reflex or muscle strength in the mouth or the throat that affects their ability to breastfeed properly and successfully.
And these things are often not checked in the hospital after the birth unless there are serious complications. Other primitive reflexes show up throughout the first year of life and their function is to assist in the development of motor skills that will eventually allow an infant to go from, you know, only being able to lay on their back to.
Rolling from their back to their stomach and their stomach to their back, pulling themselves in all kinds of configurations and directions across the floor to crawling, to [00:04:00] pulling themselves up, to stand next to any and everything they can find, and eventually being able to walk on their own and if development and growth of the brain and the nervous system are happening as they should.
These primitive reflexes become integrated and disappear, and the postural reflexes take over. These are the next layer of the brain that now needs to be built. These postural reflexes, like the one where the doctor taps below your kneecap with the reflex hammer and your leg extends like you're unintentionally trying to kick the doctor is one example of a postural reflex.
There are many. Postural reflexes help kids go from walking on two legs, but looking like Frankenstein, who's had three glasses of wine to being able to run and to skip and to bicycle. And you name it for the [00:05:00] weird stuff that kids do at those ages. And all of it is assisting them in building coordination and balance and strength.
So. When your 2-year-old won't stop spinning around and around and around until they get dizzy and fall over, or your 4-year-old insists on doing headstands in your sofa, that is what they're really doing and it is all great for their development. Two really important things happen during this stage in the layer building.
One is that the nervous system, which has been sympathetic dominant. It starts to move towards being more parasympathetic dominant, and this means that the primary dominance of the nervous system during the first 12 months of life is the sympathetic or the fight or flight nervous system. A baby's breathing rate is [00:06:00] fast, their heart rate is fast, their digestive system is not fully developed.
And when kids start walking on two legs, the parasympathetic system takes more and more control like it does for adults. This decreases the heart rate. It decreases the number of breaths we take per minute. It lowers blood pressure and it allows for better and more mature digestion. So why am I telling you this?
Because babies who have a delayed integration of primitive reflexes. Or a motor developmental delay will very often have digestive issues. Digestive issues and trying to navigate breastfeeding, bottle feeding, introducing solid foods and all of the subsequent effects of these things on how a child's digestive system is functioning and how they feel [00:07:00] and how they act as a result of how they feel is a full-time job for most parents with really young kids, and they can make themselves crazy trying to figure out if their child has.
Analogy or a sensitivity to something that is causing them digestive issues. But something I see every single day in my practice is that when the layers of the brain and nervous system are being billed properly. And any delays or imbalances are being addressed. This often helps a lot with digestive symptoms that the child is having, and too few health practitioners who work with children are aware of this or are thinking about the effect of the nervous system on how digestion is functioning.
It's not just about what we're eating or just about. Um. How our digestive tract is able to function, but it's also about the nervous system's ability to control [00:08:00] that system. Another really important layer to the brain begins to be built at the same time, and that's the language abilities of the child.
When primitive reflexes are becoming fully integrated and the postal reflexes are being built, this is when language development really takes off. I have rarely seen a child in my practice with a speech delay who doesn't also have a motor developmental delay. And you of course need to be aware of issues with their hearing as well and not miss a hearing impairment that will naturally affect speech development.
But with that aside, healthy language development is dependent on healthy motor development. And the next layer in healthy development involves the development of social interaction skills and emotional regulation, which is, you know, learning to read other people's facial [00:09:00] expressions and body language and the tone of voice for what's being said and what is left unsaid, and how to regulate behavior and emotion and to facilitate.
Developing relationships and friendships with same age peers. Along the same lines, as we discussed when we talked about developing speech and how healthy and proper motor development is vital to speech development. Healthy and proper motor development and speech development is vital to developing healthy and proper social interaction skills and emotional regulation.
And each area of the brain helps to build and support the next area of the brain in functioning optimally. If you haven't developed your brain properly to move correctly, it's more difficult to develop the ability to read facial expressions or to understand unsaid social [00:10:00] clues for developing healthy play with other children.
That helps kids make friends and become included in the group. And of course, being able to keep themselves safe by being able to read. Unsafe or threatening body language or behavior. And parents aren't always thinking about the way something like your child not learning to crawl or walking first when they're 18 months old, can set them up for challenges and making friends.
'cause they can't, you know, read the room in quotation marks to the degree that a three or four or 5-year-old should be able to read the room right. But it makes it hard to make friends. If you are four or five years old and you don't get it when the other kids you wanna play with tell you two or three times, they want you to stop throwing sand in their eyes in the sandbox.
Their next move is to stop playing with you because you couldn't pick up that [00:11:00] enough was enough from what was being said. And those social rough spots that all young kids have can quickly turn into something for. A child in that situation where they really have trouble making friends at school and end up on the outside of things socially.
And it's really, really hard for someone with great social skills to teach a kid how to have better social skills when they haven't built that foundation correctly when they were younger. We all know adults who can't read the room very well either. But they have the advantage of interacting with other adults who will often, you know, make exceptions for someone who has less skill there.
But kids are a tougher crowd and they don't usually do that. They're all trying to figure things out for themselves as well. They're in a different situation than adults. And the last layer, and obviously you know, these layers [00:12:00] develop and run into each other. They're not hard and fast lines like Legos where one has to be fully in place before you put the other one on top.
That's of course not how it works. Development happens in coordination and fluidity all the time. We're developing motor skills while we're becoming better at language and learning to read social cues and facial expressions all at the same time. But a four month old isn't gonna be able to jump rope because you know the hardware isn't there yet.
Right? Some things need to be in place first for the next piece to be able to happen. So the next layer during childhood has to do with development of cognitive function and learning, and. We see this through watching our children and seeing how they're performing at school. Are they learning to read and write?
Can they do math at the level they should be able to for their age? And from there are, you know, more complex [00:13:00] versions of these things like. Not only being able to read the words, but being able to read and understand what you've read and reflect on what the characters in the book may have been thinking or feeling that was not written on the page.
And then maybe write your own version of a continuation of that story from your own creativity and imagination. And again here, there's a strong correlation between things like dyslexia and, and those children having had motor or sensory developmental delays when they were younger. And of course the last piece is the development of our executive function in the front part of our brains.
And those are notoriously poorly developed in children with. A lack of understanding of consequences for their actions and poor planning abilities and difficulty predicting future outcomes and making good choices today that you will reap the benefits of in the future. [00:14:00] But this area of the brain is still developing past the time we think of as childhood.
About the time you get to pay less for your car insurance is when. The executive functioning areas of the brain are deemed fully developed, and that's earlier for girls and later for boys. And it is definitely a fact that some people can live a very long life with a poorly developed prefrontal cortex compared to others who have better executive function and development in that part of their brains and can make better choices for themselves even when they're much younger.
It really. Has been my experience that talking to my patients who are parents about how the brain and the nervous system develops and thinking about it in layers, that allows us to. Understand that each layer is really important and develops a stability for the next layer that's being built, is really helpful to not be scared if [00:15:00] something is off, but to find help and resources to work on that thing.
'cause it's important for our kids' development and really hard sometimes for them to do anything about it later in life. When these, um. Tendencies and these habits and these, , areas of the brain are become more hardwired than they are during the time when they're developing the wait and see how it goes.
Model that some healthcare practitioners incorporate isn't very helpful from a preventative point of view that is looking to always promote healthy development and to not wait until there's a problem and see if that problem solves itself or not. When it comes to the brain and the nervous system, being proactive and working on healthy development is so much easier than changing a hardwired program.
And for parents being able to understand where their child is, not only [00:16:00] based on their age, but also based on the level of their development and be stimulating their children's environment in a way that. Allows them to help their kids be developing better. Function and a and a more stable layer for the next layer to be built upon is something that we can all be learning more about and be doing on a regular basis for our kids.
So I hope this information can be useful to you in promoting the health of your own family. There's so much more to come on all of this in this podcast in the future, and I look forward to the next time. Until then. Be well.
