Episode 13
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[00:00:00] You know how once you have kids, you inevitably find yourself in a situation where you have no idea what to do, like you just feel lost and you find yourself repeating that familiar phrase. We've all heard someone say, I wish kids came with an instruction manual. Well, if you have ever heard yourself say that this episode is for you.
Welcome to the Create Thriving Families Podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Peterson. I'm a doctor of chiropractic and I've been in private practice for 20 years seeing mostly women, babies, and children. The Create Thriving Families Podcast is a place for us to have a conversation about how we can help our children become the healthiest, most vibrant and aligned version of themselves.
The full expression of who they came here to be. The quality of our [00:01:00] lives and the quality of our relationships is dependent on the quality of our health, and I believe that the greatest gift any of us could give to our children is the best start possible when it comes to their own health. I can't wait to see where this journey takes us.
Let's get started.
I spent a lot of years getting my doctorate degree in chiropractic and hundreds of hours in the time since then doing post-doctorate courses studying functional neurology, specifically childhood neurologic developmental disorders. Functional neurology is different than structural neurology, which is what we sort of traditionally think of as neurology, in that it is looking to improve how the brain functions by assessing the connections or the pathways in the brain and the nervous system and working to.
[00:02:00] Strengthen those connections by using motor, sensory, cognitive, and metabolic therapies or approaches. I have spent a lot of time learning from some of the very best in that field. In particular, Dr. Robert Malillo, who really just changed the entire way that I thought about the nervous system and the way I practiced in my office.
He has. Trained so many doctors in the functional neurology and his method. He has done so much amazing research in this area. He's written textbooks, he's written books for parents, and he's changed countless lives with his own patients. I can't tell you how much I've learned from his training, but one thing was always really clear to me even from the time I was just finishing my chiropractic education, and that is that.
Preventing something from ever happening or being [00:03:00] able to reduce the impact that that dysfunction or disorder in the body can have is so much easier and so much better of an idea than having to treat or rehabilitate a child or an adult once they've been walking the path of something not working.
Properly for years, we hear so much about fixing symptoms and what to do to help children who are struggling. But if I asked most parents the question, what has to happen for a child to build a healthy, well-functioning brain and nervous system, how do you do it? They wouldn't really know what to say, and there is nothing strange about that because how in the world would, you know, nobody talks about it.
We talk about behavioral strategies for kids with A DHD or optimizing diet and detox pathways for [00:04:00] kids with autism or prescribing SSRIs for children with OCD. But there is never a conversation happening about what's going on in the brain and the nervous system of children with these conditions. My education and my experience in the last more than 20 years in practice has shown me that the diagnosis of A DHD or OCD, or Asperger's or dyslexia or whatever the diagnosis is, comes years after there have been clear signs of functional disconnection in the brain and the nervous system.
Maybe these signs are things like motor developmental delays or sensory processing disorders, speech delays, having a hard time regulating emotions or understanding body language and tone of voice. But there are always signs along the way that something isn't [00:05:00] progressing normally or optimally. But what are parents supposed to do?
Often those concerns are swept under the rug by healthcare providers or family. And the famous, let's just wait and see what happens. Uh, method is definitely used liberally and this often allows children to continue down a path where their body is having to find a way to compensate for this. They're developing in a way that isn't optimal.
And so what if we could do it all differently? What if we could teach parents that normal development should look a specific way when it comes to the development of the brain and the nervous system, and how they can do things themselves at home to promote healthy development and give them information about why these things are so important at the very beginning of their child's life.
What kinds [00:06:00] of things could we prevent from ever happening if we started to focus more on how to cultivate healthy development? I tell mothers in my practice all the time, that the brain is built in layers and each layer needs to be built properly. In order to be a stable foundation for the next layer to be built.
And I know it sounds like building a house out of Legos, and it's definitely an oversimplification because the brain is developing motor skills and balance and proprioception and language skills and all of these things sort of at the same time, but the concept holds nonetheless. You. Build good language skills on top of a foundation of the primitive reflexes having been integrated and the child then being able to start building more complex movement patterns.
All of the children I have [00:07:00] seen who have been older than 18 months who are not yet walking are also delayed in their speech. And this is just one example. A child can't learn to read words and sentences in a book if their eye movements have not been built in a way that allows them to coordinate with each other and track the words in the book from left to right.
A child can't build strong friendships if they never learn to read facial expressions and understand body language and be able to pick up on the social cues that make other kids wanna hang out with you. For years in my office, I've been working to help kids who are in a difficult situation. Some obviously more difficult than others, but in the back of my mind, I always, always wonder how would this have been different if this kid got here earlier?
And I tell every single mother who comes [00:08:00] in with a new baby that the choice is obviously theirs for how long they wanna stay in my care. But if it's up to me, they will bring their child in to see me regularly throughout their childhood so that we can make sure their child is healthy and developing as they should be.
Because no one else is doing that. Everyone else is waiting for symptoms waiting to be able to put a label on whatever is happening instead of keeping their eyes open to keep kids on the path that we know brings them good health. And issues come up when you come in with a new baby, you can't even see what's waiting down the line because it's, you, you, you're not even sure what situations you can end up in as a, as a new parent.
And it's so important to have a support team around yourself and your child who are there to promote health [00:09:00] and to not just waiting to treat symptoms that come up. So the title of this podcast is You need a Guidebook for motherhood, and here are some of the things it should include. And why do I think we need a book?
Uh, a book that we create ourselves? Nonetheless, that's because all of the time we are learning new things, hearing great ideas. Reading great books, getting some really good advice, and then we have 75,000 other things happening in the same time in our lives, and we forget, or we don't forget. We do. We get some good advice.
We build a really good routine around that advice, and then somebody gets sick or we go on vacation or something happens and we get out of the good routine, or we move to a new house and things get reorganized or we didn't even. [00:10:00] Have on our radar that there was something that we needed to be aware of and to discuss with our partners regarding our children's health.
And the two of us never thought about it or looked into it or much less agreed on what to do about it, or one of the other million reasons. It's a good idea to have a plan written down somewhere. And that maybe sounds ridiculous to some people. I don't need a guidebook to know how to parent my child.
Well, that's lucky for them because I forget to follow up on important things all the time. I read something or I see something so smart and then I forget where I saved it, or I forget that I even saw it and that I wanted to start doing that thing with my kids or for my kids. And one very big advantage that.
I have had is that I have a very strong foundational health philosophy and the father [00:11:00] of my children, and I share that philosophy, which means we agree on the approach we wanna use when it comes to creating and maintaining good health for our kids. That really helps us a lot, but we have that shared foundation because we share this profession.
And we both felt the way that we do about health long before we even met each other. Most people don't have that. They've grown up in different families who've had different approaches and done things differently, and they need to decide how they wanna do things together. And create a plan for that.
Some of us have good examples we can bring with, you know, for our kids that we're a part of our own childhood and some of us have things that we definitely don't wanna do, that were the norm when we grew up. I think it's really important for parents to get good, solid [00:12:00] neurology based information because the brain and the nervous system control everything else in the body.
You build good digestion on the foundation of a healthy brain and nervous system. You build good immune function on the foundation of a well-functioning brain and nervous system. You can't. You can't control anything in the body without it coming from the function of the brain and the function of the nervous system.
And it's less complicated than it sounds. But if you can get the, the basics and the foundation of healthy. Brain and nervous system function that can make a lot of otherwise complicated things feel a lot easier. I personally think it's important that this guidebook has a focus on holistic health, and by that I mean I do facilitate what the body needs to keep itself healthy.[00:13:00]
Not which drugs or interventions should I do when things go wrong, although I do not disagree that sometimes those interventions have a time and a place. But if you have the knowledge and the tools about how to facilitate good health, you can get yourself or your kids out of many a sticky situation so much easier than you could if you didn't have that information or have those tools and.
So often health decisions are made when the house is on fire and when the house is on fire. Your nervous system isn't always a calm, regulated place to be to make good decisions. You feel anxious or worried, and you can feel really lost in trying to figure out how to navigate. So. Making good decisions upfront and having a plan about the things that you wanna focus on doing so that the [00:14:00] house doesn't ever catch on fire is, in my opinion, worth your time and worth your effort.
And at least if the house does catch on fire, you know that you've built the foundation for good health for your child and that makes putting out any fire a much easier task. And I also, I think it's important for mothers to take that information and those tools and make them their own to feel in their bodies what is relevant and what is right for their children and their families, and to create a guidebook that feels empowering and it feels right for them.
I can't give you the recipe for what I did with my kids because there will undoubtedly be parts of that that just aren't right for you. And that is the case with everyone out there giving advice and, and information on healthy development for our kids. It won't all fit or it won't all be right. Uh, at least [00:15:00] maybe for right now, it might be right later on, but it, it doesn't all.
Fit at this moment in time, it won't all be possible, but anything that you can do that works to promote health in your children is better than not doing those things. So what exactly needs to be in the guidebook? I often describe it to my patients as pillars of health or staying on the pathway of health.
They're probably tired of hearing me say it, but certain things that every single human body needs to be able to express health. And I talk about there being a pathway to creating health in humans. And some human bodies need extra things on their pathway because of environmental, uh, factors or genetic issues, but you know, it was maybe some other bodies don't need those extra things.
But all of us need the basics to be found on that pathway. So [00:16:00] what are the basics? The first is. I think it's really important for parents to know about the stages of neurologic development and be able to assess whether their child is following them as they should be. This includes being aware of and assessing primitive reflexes.
Which are the reflexes that babies are born with that help them build the foundation for more mature motor development as they grow. It's the only way we have to assess in a baby who can't talk and tell us how they're doing, that their brain is growing the way that it should be. It includes assessing balance, proprioception, and core stability.
To see that your child is developing their, their vestibular function, their balance, and their body awareness, and it involves following your child's strength and motor development to see that they're developing the motor skills and the core strength that let us [00:17:00] know that the brain and the nervous system are maturing and growing and developing like they should be.
The second pillar involves understanding nutrition and knowing what your baby and your child needs to feed the cells of their bodies to produce healthy neurotransmitters, to have healthy levels of vitamins and minerals for brain function, and to develop their immune system and just so much more. The third pillar is having an understanding of how children build nervous system regulation and how that affects everything from their attachment to their sleep, to how well their digestion works, to how well their immune system functions.
It is the foundational piece to building emotional regulation and good relationships, and it affects everything about how well our bodies are able to function. Parents spend [00:18:00] so much time thinking about discipline or how to get kids to behave in a certain way when what they actually need to be thinking about is how to help kids learn how to have better regulation in their nervous system.
That solves 95% of behavioral and and discipline issues. The fourth pillar is learning about the development of healthy sleep. For kids. This piece is so foundational and everyone who's had a newborn gets it. Babies need help learning how to sleep and how to sleep well, and some babies need it more so than others.
It ties into nervous system regulation. All the pillars of health tie into each other, and most parents are really at a loss when it comes to getting this piece of the puzzle to work. If something is off and the last. Pillar when it comes to childhood building health for our children [00:19:00] is about us. As parents.
We need to understand that parenthood, motherhood in particular, I think calls for an identity shift. It calls on us to step up and to be the leader of the ship when it comes to making decisions about what's right for our children's health. When my, when my son was little, when he was trying to figure out who was in charge of something, he would ask, is that the decider?
And I always thought that was funny and cute and I often used it as the reason for why he had to do something that I said. I would say, 'cause I'm the decider. And that was such an effective statement for a while. It doesn't get me as far with him these days. He's 14, but I sometimes still pull it out occasionally to get half of a smile out of him.
But the point is we can't. We have to be the decider. We can't leave the decision making about what's right for our children up to somebody else. We just can't, that person will never know our [00:20:00] children the way that we do. They will never have the intuition about what our kid needs. They will never be as invested in getting to the root of the problem, and they aren't the ones who are going to be there.
In the years to come who have to live in the consequences, the good or the bad consequences of the decision. We need to decide the standards we're gonna have for the health of the people who are in our families, who are in our homes, and then we need to use that as the foundation for the choices that we make.
And I don't mean that we will never be in a situation where something serious is happening, and that's just beyond the scope of what we alone can make a decision about, where we just need to trust the person in front of us, the provider who's in front of us. Of course, situations like that will happen, but treating an acute infection or an injury or.
You know, getting advice in the treatment of a chronic health condition that needs follow up is [00:21:00] not the thing that informs the everyday choices that we make in our homes. That allow our kids to have the highest expression of health that they possibly can. Acute or chronic medical treatment isn't focused on creating more health for our kids.
It's focused on managing the symptoms, the acute or the chronic symptoms. Creating more health for our kids is something we have to do ourselves, and so. I hope that this gives you something to think about. Whether you're in a situation where you are about to become a parent, or you already are a parent of young kids and you're in the middle of it and realizing how many things you needed to be thinking about and making decisions about that you didn't even know existed.
It can be really overwhelming. And unfortunately, sometimes we can be made to feel like if we don't have a degree in medicine, we aren't smart enough to be able to make those decisions. That is ridiculous. And if anyone [00:22:00] ever makes you feel like that, you're in the wrong office, in my opinion. It took me a lot of years to realize something, but once I did, I've really lived my life by the principle and that is that.
When someone says something that's true, it just vibrates differently in your body. You can feel truth, you can feel what that whatever they said is the truth for you. In my experience, it often feels like remembering something you'd forgotten. It feels familiar and you wanna find people to listen to and to learn from that feel like that to be around.
Someone who's reminding you of something that was already in your intuition that was already, that you already knew, a deep truth inside of you that they're reminding you of. Not somebody who makes you feel bad or who makes you feel less than, especially not when it [00:23:00] comes to your kids, if. Learning more about these pillars of health and creating a guidebook for yourself is something that interests you.
I have a course coming out very soon, which does exactly that. It teaches the in-depth foundations and information about each of these pillars of health. And then we work together to create your very own guidebook so that at the end of the course you've created your own manual. The one that everyone says they wish came with kids when they were born.
Here it is. We are creating yours together. And you get to keep it. You get to use it, change it, adopt it, whatever you wanna do for new phases of growth, new phases of development as your kids get older, and that you will just be able to use it to feel a sense of agency and a sense of control over your child's health that you maybe [00:24:00] didn't have before.
This is a tool that I think will help mothers to change the entire trajectory of health for their kids, and that can really change the whole picture for the coming generation. So if this sounds like something that you wanna know more about, there will be a link in the show notes. You can get yourself on the wait list.
I can send you more information once we're getting started, and I would love to have you join me. So until next time, be well.
Thank you again for joining me today for this episode. I hope you found something valuable in the time we spent together, and I hope you'll join me again next week on the Create Thriving Families Podcast. Until then, be well.
I.
