Podcast #7
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[00:00:00] I wanna talk today about the five foundational pillars to creating thriving health in children. In previous podcasts, I have talked about there being a recipe. For creating health in humans. I used the example of the zookeeper and talked about how, you know, there's, there's a person who works at the zoo who knows the exact recipe for how to keep giraffes healthy and thriving.
They know how much room the giraffes need, how much space they need in their environment. They know how many other giraffes they need to be with in order to be healthy and happy and thriving. They know what they need to eat. They know how much they need to move. They [00:01:00] know everything they need to know about keeping the giraffes healthy.
And the recipe for keeping the giraffes healthy is not. The same recipe that it is for the one who is concerned with keeping the elephants healthy and happy and thriving. There's a different recipe for the elephants. I assume. I know nothing about, uh, working at the zoo, but the people who are in charge with keeping these animals safe and thriving, they know exactly what elements need to be there in order to do that.
And the same way there is a recipe for what elephants need to thrive or giraffes need to thrive. There is a recipe that humans need in order to thrive as well. I think of a, like a path where certain foundational elements are present on this path, [00:02:00] and we as human beings, we need these elements to be a regular.
Stable part of our lives, we can veer a little bit off the path, and there may be times in our lives where we veer too far off the path, but returning to health and to wholeness means that we need to stay pretty close to the path most of the time. These are a lot of times the things that we think about when people talk about making lifestyle changes to support better health.
We as adults do things like we go out and we buy an aura ring to monitor our sleep patterns, or we cut out processed foods or sugar, or we buy ourselves a pair of. Blue light blocking glasses for when we have to sit in front of our computers closer to bedtime than we know we should. And I'm not downplaying any of these things.
I do them. I have all of these things as well. [00:03:00] But for some reason, a lot of us think that kids' physiology is somehow immune to these lifestyle factors getting out of balance or that they are. Less dependent on staying on or close to the path that supports health in humans and they aren't. I would argue that they need it even more than we as adults do.
Especially during the first years of their lives where we as their parents can set a good foundation before they will inevitably move out of our houses and spend a few years, or a lot of years not being as concerned about caring for their own health, as I'm sure all of us who've been 23 years old can remember.
So. Today I wanna talk about the foundational pillars to create thriving health in children. [00:04:00] There are five of them. The first pillar is building and supporting a healthy neurological foundation. And I'm gonna go more into detail on each of these, but just to start with the list building and supporting a healthy neurological foundation.
The second pillar is moving their bodies often. And a lot and in new ways, preferably outside. The third pillar is building and practicing healthy relationships with themselves and with others. Pillar number four is a good nutritional foundation to support their growth and development. And the fifth pillar is building healthy sleep hygiene.
So. Let's get into these a little bit more. The first pillar, building and supporting a healthy neurological foundation. [00:05:00] This really has been the foundation of what I do in my practice with babies and children. And I already have a few podcasts talking about developmental neurology, and there are many more to come in the future, but.
If I were going to summarize what I mean by building and supporting a healthy neurological foundation, I would say this. We as parents need to be aware that we build the brain in layers, and each layer is dependent on the previous layer to be built well and in a stable way in order for the next layer to be built well and in a stable way.
We have so much influence over the development and the growth of our children's brain and nervous system, and we don't need to have a degree in neurology in order to be a good influence. We just need to have a basic understanding of how it works and what [00:06:00] we should be seeing as our children grow and mature.
The important building blocks of childhood neurology. Is that when babies are born, their brains are primarily controlled by primitive reflexes, which are automatic and non-voluntary, and they help babies to facilitate movement in order to do things that help them to, number one, stay alive, and number two, develop the pathways necessary to be able to move in more mature and sophisticated ways.
Some of these reflexes are there from birth. Some appear throughout the first year of life, and if development is happening as it should, and growth is happening as it should, as the brain matures, all of these reflexes should be inhibited by the more mature areas of the brain. These are the areas that the primitive reflexes have helped to develop because those primitive movement patterns are now no longer [00:07:00] necessary.
I often describe it as training wheels for the nervous system to parents. In my practice, you need them to develop the skill to ride a bike, but you shouldn't need training wheels on your 10 speed. During the time. Babies are moving from the stages of being primarily controlled by primitive reflexes into more mature movement patterns.
They are also developing their. Vestibular function, which means they're developing their balance, their eye movements, their posture, and their ability to navigate their body while moving. This is incredibly important. I. Some really important things to think about during this time is that we need to give babies the space and the freedom to be on the floor trying to move on their own, trying to get ahold of their toys, letting them explore the world in a safe environment that we have set up for [00:08:00] them.
The more we tie them into things like car seats and bouncy chairs and seats that. Help them to sit up long before they are actually strong enough to sit on their own. And all of the hundreds of other contraptions that are marketed to new parents that are designed to contain these babies, the more we limit their time and their ability to be moving freely.
In these things, the more that we have limited their time and their ability to be developing their motor skills, and there is nothing more excruciating as a mother than seeing your four or five month old. Stuck halfway in the position to roll on from their stomach onto their back, unable to get their leg over, or their foot is stuck in a blanket or something is in their way so they can't get all the way over or [00:09:00] whatever it is.
And. This is causing them extreme frustration and irritation, and we know exactly how easy it would be for us as the mother to come and just rescue them and save the day. Just roll them over so they finally are, you know, happy and quiet for a second. It makes them happy, eases their frustration. We don't have to hear them being frustrated for the seventh thousandth time that day, and it's nine 30 in the morning.
You know, you get the idea. But here's my suggestion that I give all parents, give them a minute. Just be there and watch and give them a minute. See if they can figure it out. Give them space to navigate the movement pattern to get to where they're attempting to go. And I'm not saying leave babies on the floor to cry.
Of course. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that [00:10:00] the frustration they go through from about four or five months until they start to have much better control of their movements at, you know, 8, 9, 10 months, it's the driving force to get them to the next level of motor development. If we never let them get frustrated and try to figure it out, if we rob them of the lesson that if you keep working at this, you will get it.
And if you know those repetitive movements that frustrate them to no end, the repetitions are necessary to build new pathways. They need them. And I tell all of the parents who see me that this is, it is totally normal to be at the end of your rope as a mother during this time. The second you take two steps away to go pick up your coffee cup or even think you are gonna run to the bathroom alone for 35 seconds, they are crying and [00:11:00] frustrated over the toy that is just out of their reach and they can't get to it.
And it feels like you spend all day pulling them out from underneath the table. They backed under and got scared when it was dark under there. That was my youngest before she started crawling, she had a period of time where she could only push herself backwards, which meant whatever she was trying to get ahold of was only getting farther and farther away.
So that was fun. I had to pull her out from underneath. Everything you can imagine. It was very effective at keeping things from getting dusty underneath beds and in all the corners. So once children are about a year old, the primitive reflexes should be, you know, be inhibited at that point. And they are now building and developing more of their.
Vestibular function and their balance and their posture, reflexes, and strength and coordination of building [00:12:00] more advanced movement patterns. You see this when you see the difference in how a 13 month old looks when they walk, which reminds us of, I've said it before, but Frankenstein after two glasses of wine and a 3-year-old who is running and jumping and doing all kinds of movement that requires.
More skilled balance and eye movements and strength and coordination. So this brings us to the foundational pillar, number two, which is creating movement for their bodies. Often a lot of movement, a variation of movement, and preferably outside. This phase of development that is focused on moving their bodies actually lasts for their entire childhood, but it entails [00:13:00] us as parents making time and space for a lot of movement and ideally trying a lot of new things.
And this could look like more complicated things like putting little kids in a gymnastics class or something. But it definitely doesn't have to be organized or cost money. Take your kids outside every chance you get. Go to the park, go to the beach. Go outside in your own backyard. Go to the playground at a local school.
You can put kids into just about any environment and before too long their creativity kicks in and they're off. And if you live in a cold place like I do here in Norway, that can be everything from taking them sledding or taking them ice skating. And um, you know, by the way, just a quick note on thinking, you have to buy all kinds of gear for kids to learn different sports.
You [00:14:00] know when kids are trying new things and not sure if this is something that they like doing or they wanna continue doing. Buying gear that's used is absolutely fine. Both of my kids, they, they snowboard a lot and they play soccer during the spring and summer and fall. And these are things that they've done for years.
So we know that they like it and we know that they're gonna continue doing it, but. Neither one of them, despite living in a frozen country, is particularly interested in ice skating. They ice skate a little bit at school and they, some of their friends do it and we've gone ice skating sometimes, but neither one of them has ever had a new pair of skates.
They are always used because I know they're gonna to use them. A maximum of 10 times during the winter, and they're gonna need a new size next year when their feet grow. And I'm just not interested in committing to that cost. So you don't need to make it expensive or complicated, but you just need to [00:15:00] try to work to expose them to varied environments and try to let them try new things when possible.
And also that provides the, you know, learning experience of them. Not being intimidated by learning new things or trying new things and being bad at them in the beginning. That's a really important phase of development to work through is when they get really frustrated because everybody else is making something look easy, but when they actually put on the snowboard or they put on the skates or they get the bike, it's hard and working through.
You know, being, being familiar in that environment and knowing that none of us knows how to ride a bike before we've practiced riding that bike and fallen off that bike. That's how it works. These are really important things during early childhood. The third foundational pillar to creating thriving health for children is to [00:16:00] build healthy relationships.
They need to be building healthy relationships, both with themselves and with other people. Early in childhood this. Focus of this pillar is about creating healthy attachments in the parent child relationship. We, as parents, being responsive and attentive to our children's needs. There are two quotes that I think are really fitting when it comes to our role as parents and creating healthy attachments and relationships with our children.
The first is from Naomi Aldot and she says. Children do not need us to shape them. They need us to respond to who they are. The other is from John Bowlby and he says Life is best organized as a series of daring Ventures from a secure base. I think both of these quotes are really [00:17:00] fitting as to our role as parents.
We need to be emotionally available to our children so that they early on learn that they're safe with us and that we see them. A lot of the things that our children do, we as parents can think that what we're seeing is behavior, but what we are actually seeing is a display of their current neurology, and children are always doing the best they can.
With the neural connections that they've built up to this point. So if we look at, especially those early years, less as a period of time where we need to mold children's behavior into how we want it to be, and we think of it more like we are there to create a feeling of connection and safety and calm presence for our children that will en enable them to be.
You know, better able to [00:18:00] regulate their own emotions and their own nervous system from a place of growth and development in their brain and nervous system, rather than them doing something we want them to do in order to avoid negative consequences, but not because of a choice they make themselves. If we think of our role as one of creating this secure base that.
John Bowlby described in the quote that I read. Then we allow our children to have these daring ventures in their lives where they do not have to be anxious or afraid about what will meet them when they come home, in addition to being anxious or afraid about trying new and scary things out in their lives, which, if we're honest, a lot of childhood is about.
Just that it's, it's easier to be in new situations and attempt scary things and grow as a [00:19:00] person when we know we have a safe, secure, loving base in our closest relationships To come back to, I. And practical applications of this during the early years for our children are to remember that our children are born with a nervous system that is immature and more dominant in the sympathetic or the flight, fight or flight nervous system.
And it matures over many years, and the way that it does that is partly because of normal growth and development of the nervous system. That naturally moves more into parasympathetic dominance once children get to be about a year old and start walking upright and other pieces of the development happen and the practice of co-regulating with adults.
So part of it is in the growth and development, and part of it is in the practice of [00:20:00] co-regulation. Our children are not born knowing how to calm down. They need to have that modeled and taught to them through us as parents being in that state ourselves, and our children borrow that state from our nervous system.
And over time, this allows them to easier and easier, find that state of safe, calm, relaxed connection and regulation more and more on their own. But this takes years of practice. It isn't something that's ever really done. It's just that we as adults are more familiar with the process of bringing ourselves from a state of stress or fear or anger or frustration back to calm.
We don't remember learning it, and some of us definitely had better models of how to do it in our parents than others had. But it is a skill that we learned, not something we or our children are born [00:21:00] knowing how to do. I think another really important piece of this foundational pillar is to help our kids learn the tools they need to fix it when it's broken, which means that we all know that none of us get it right every time.
We as parents, don't, they as children don't. Not with us and not with their friends. So showing them how to do it when we need to apologize to them as adults and explaining things in a way that they can understand, depending on their age, you know, telling them what was happening inside our heads and our bodies when we.
Didn't do a good job of regulating our own nervous system and talking about what we wish we would've done instead, and how we feel bad about the way we responded, or how we acted, and how we wanna do it differently next time we get into the same situation. These [00:22:00] conversations help them to learn the process of self-reflection, saying we're sorry and being quick to repair when something happens in a relationship.
And we can also help our kids talk about and think about how to repair things in their friendships. If something happens, we don't have to do it for them, although sometimes with really little kids, they need our help and actually getting there. But as they get a little bit older, we can spend time talking about how things happen and how the other kid could have been feeling and how whatever we said or did could have been perceived and.
To talk about examples of when something like this has happened for us as adults so that our kids understand they don't need to feel shame over something happening in the relationship. It happens to all of us kids and adults. There's nothing to be ashamed of if we didn't act the way we wish we would have.
We just need to be able to see it and to [00:23:00] be good at getting comfortable with the hard and usually awkward process of working to repair it. So again, when they're little, it's about being present to their needs and practicing co-regulation through our breathing, through the calmness of our voice, our facial expressions, how it feels to be around us, our presence.
For really young children, you know, not trying to logic or reason with them when they're in a state of dysregulation. None of us likes to hear, you need to calm down or you're being unreasonable, or this makes no sense. When we ourselves are really upset, whatever we're doing in our dysregulated state of being really upset usually makes perfect sense to us in the moment.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be ranting about whatever the thing is. And it's the same for kids. You can't appease dysregulation with logic in the moment. You need to first work on getting the nervous system back to a state of calm, creating a safe base for our [00:24:00] children in those first years of life and seeing who they are and responding to their needs.
And from there we work on modeling to them how healthy relationships work, both in the good times and in the tough times. And we will get into specific tools that you can use with kids of different ages to help them with nervous system regulation and a lot of practical things that can be done. But for now, just knowing that this is an essential foundational pillar.
The fourth pillar is building a good nutritional foundation to support their growth and their development. We need to think of nutrition. Not as fuel, but as information and building blocks to give growing brains and growing bodies the information they need in order to build everything from neurotransmitters and a [00:25:00] healthy immune system and to repair tissue and grow new cells in the body.
And if you think about food as the material the body takes and then turns into every single cell in the little. Human body in front of you, then you wanna make sure that you're giving each of those cells the best of what it needs in order to build a healthy, growing human being. And this doesn't have to be as complicated as a lot of big food companies would like you to believe if you concentrate on putting.
Whole foods and a variety of whole foods on your plate while you're pregnant and breastfeeding, and a variety of whole foods on your child's plate. Once they start eating solid foods, you have really done most of the job. Think about what meals looked like back before they started making [00:26:00] processed and packaged foods in factories.
They looked like some kind of meat or chicken or fish and some kind of vegetables and maybe some kind of fruit and some kind of full fat dairy. If you and your kids tolerate dairy. And if there was bread or something baked, it was made by hand and it didn't have an ingredient list of 17 things. The majority being chemicals and preservatives that we know in a lot of cases can really wreak havoc on our bodies, and even more so on small growing bodies.
So don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. Give your kids foods that you that have one ingredient. The ingredient is the food itself. And try to make sure that each meal contains a combination of protein and healthy fats and vegetables and or fruits. And the reason for this is [00:27:00] in order to keep their blood sugar as stable as possible throughout the day, protein and healthy fats help to put the breaks on big fluctuations in blood sugar.
And, you know, try to vary what they're used to seeing on their plate. So they get used to new things and not being, you know, afraid of something that they haven't seen before, showing up on their plate. They need to see new things all the time, and they need to try them a lot of times before they decide whether or not they like them.
We need a lot of exposure. Some kids more than others. Some kids are willing to try something new right away. Some kids need to see it on the plate. 30 times before they're willing to, to try it and take a bite. Try to make sure that, you know, breads and baked goods are either,, made at home or made in a way that doesn't fill them with chemicals.
And be conscious of the [00:28:00] fact that pesticides sprayed on our foods are harmful chemicals to human bodies, and even more so to growing human bodies and hormones and chemicals given to the animals that we eat will affect our human bodies in the same way they affected those animals. So just be aware of how it works and do the best that you can do.
I see a lot of kids in my office who have trouble concentrating or trouble regulating their emotions for the age that they are, or have a hard time in social situations or have a hard time learning new things at school, and when they make a change to their diets to promote a more whole foods diet. Eat less sugar.
Combine things in a way that limits how much their blood sugar spikes after meals by again, combining protein and healthy fats into every single meal. So much of what was challenging for these kids can just, you know, [00:29:00] really improve and get a lot better. And I tell parents all the time that we can spend a lot of time trying to make a change in a child's nervous system that is actually just a response to either the lack of nutrients that they're trying to deal with or the blood sugar dysregulation roller coaster that they spend every day on because of their diet.
So, so let's not make life harder for ourselves than it needs to be. And let's think about a healthy diet and nutritional foundation. As a huge gift we give to our children that they can take with them throughout their entire lives. Does it take more time and more work for us as adults to buy and to prepare healthy whole foods?
Maybe, but I think we save that time in. The good health and the healthier neurological development and healthier behavioral patterns that, that our kids get to have throughout their childhood. So that's how I [00:30:00] look at it anyway. And the fifth and the final foundational pillar to creating thriving health for children is in building healthy sleep hygiene.
We as adults are the bosses of bedtime, and the earlier our kids understand that the better it is for all of us. It is our job early on to create and facilitate an environment and a routine that helps them to find a feeling of safety and calm and connection before bed that helps their nervous system to find the place where sleep comes.
Kids are not born knowing how to sleep. It's actually a skill that we all learned. We just can't remember doing it as adults. Babies and young children have an immature brain and nervous system, like we talked about in pillar three, about how the nervous system is more [00:31:00] sympathetic or more fight or flight dominant when we're born and as we grow, we move into a more parasympathetic dominant state.
That makes it easier to find safety and calm and connection within ourselves. But this is a process that takes time and it also has to be practiced and learned. We facilitate this through creating a routine around bedtime that our babies and young children can recognize and understand this is what we're doing, just like we did yesterday, just like we did the day before.
And it's gonna look different in every family, but it could be something like dimming the lights in the house and turning off. You know, screens and TVs an hour or so before bedtime. You could maybe play some calming music in the house, or you could run some essential oils through diffuser if you want.
You could have the same bathtime routine every night with the lights dimmed in the bathroom, and really focus on [00:32:00] making that time calm and relaxing. Could be that you sing the same four songs while you put on pajamas and brush teeth. You could. Read them the same two books in the same order after they get into bed.
Whatever works for your family and whatever feels right to you is the correct way to do it. And it will of course, look very different for your first child than if it's your third or your fourth child, of course, because depends on the amount of time you have and your family's routine and schedule, but.
I think it's really important to have a certain amount of time before bed where the brain and the nervous system has a chance to wind down, and even really young babies can recognize that, ah, yes, we've done this before. It's bedtime. This is what we do. And as children get older, this will obviously look a lot different, but the principle remains.
Even with older children, we all sleep easier and better. If we have some time before bed without a lot of [00:33:00] sensory stimulation and in a calm, safe environment, and our kids need us to help facilitate that through how we are in our own nervous system that they're borrowing from or co-regulating with us and through the environment or the routines that we choose to do in the evenings before bed.
Kids need a lot of sleep and. It's one of the most important things you can do to really work to get them to understand that some things are a democracy and negotiable, but bedtime isn't one of them. And I have talked a lot more about sleep in a previous podcast, but I am not a proponent of sleep training in the sense that we train our children to fall asleep by themselves often by going through a period of time where they're in their rooms and.
Crying and we're coming and going as they learn to fall back asleep on their own. I talked more about that in the Sleep [00:34:00] podcast, but it's completely normal for babies and young children and even sometimes older children to wake up during the night. That's a sign of an immature nervous system that's scanning for safety before they fall back asleep, and it's, it's not a sign of anything but normalcy if they need.
Help co-regulating from an adult to get back to sleep for a period of time before they have practiced it for long enough to be able to do it more often for themselves. The evenings and in the night is one of the main times that we can be practicing and facilitating, helping them to regulate their nervous system back into a state of calm that they need to be in and need for.
The learning of how to do this on their own and developing better and better nervous system regulation for themselves. But I do not mean that there needs to be a circus happening every night. Not at all. Everyone needs to be getting as much sleep as [00:35:00] possible every night, and that includes the parents.
So it's important to be there for our children and to help them find that. Place of safety and calm at bedtime and at night when they need it. But they also need to learn that when it's nighttime, we don't play. We don't get up, we don't turn on lights, we sleep. And there is no big party going on here in the middle of the night that you're missing out on, so you can just go back to sleep.
But this does take some time and it takes some patience and. Realistic expectations from us as parents about what kids should be able to do based on how much practice their nervous systems have had at doing it, not at what age they are. Thinking about it that way is also helpful because there really is no magic age at which your kids should be able to go to sleep on their own and stay asleep throughout the night.
It's less black and white than that, and there are a lot of things like. [00:36:00] Stages of development and things that are happening in their lives and teething and sickness and being in a new place or time changes in the spring and the fall. All kinds of things can rock the boat for little kids in their sleep and.
I think it's just important that we try to not also be in the boat that's rocking. If we can help it and, and just know that this is something we practice and we build it over time and it will get easier, but we really need to be the, the boss and the leader of the routines and the practices and not the one being bossed.
So this is again, an overview of. The five foundational pillars to create thriving health for babies and for children. And I always feel at the end of every podcast that there's so much more to say on each of these, and we will continue to do that in future podcast episodes. [00:37:00] I want to say thank you for being here, and thank you for spending time with me today.
I look forward to the next time.
