Episode#14
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[00:00:00] There is a mountain of evidence linking motor development, cognition, and executive function, and there's also extensive research connecting primitive reflexes, ocular-motor development, balance center development, and learning. It used to be considered fringe to talk about. Things like kids who never crawled developing reading difficulties later on.
But now most parents have heard about how important motor milestones like crawling are to a developing child's brain when it comes to crawling in this example. Ability to coordinate eye movements across both sides of the body helps you later on so that your eyes can track from, [00:01:00] you know, when you're reading from the start of the sentence on the left side of the page, so that you can follow the words all the way across to the right side of the page.
And then coordinate your eye movements to quickly be able to move back to the left side of the page in one line down. And it makes reading a really difficult task to perform if there's a lack of coordination of the eye movements and the foundation for being able to do that is something that gets laid years before you're picking up your first book.
We develop systems during the first year of life and those systems are what help all of us to develop more sophisticated motor skills. And that helps us develop more advanced abilities to learn and to improve our cognitive development and eventually our executive function as adults. When we talk [00:02:00] about executive function, it can kind of be one of those diffuse things we say, and we all assume that we know what it means and what everybody's talking about, but for the sake of being sure.
Let's talk a little bit about what executive function actually is. You can think of executive function in the brain as the air traffic control system. It manages things like planning, decision making, impulse control, working memory, and emotional regulation, and it helps us to do things like. Adjust to new situations or changing demands, and it helps us set goals and create strategies for how we are are going to achieve those goals.
It helps us with the motivation to start something new and to control and hold our focus on that. It helps us communicate with other [00:03:00] people to plan ahead, to use our time wisely. Having a healthy, well-functioning prefrontal cortex that controls our executive function is the difference between having a life that you want and that feels easy, or feeling like you're always struggling.
So. If we think about people we know who struggle with motivation or who have social anxiety, or they struggle with new situations or abrupt changes in the plan or the situation, or it's, you know, somebody who can never plan their time accordingly and they miss deadlines or they don't show up to plans they've made, or they forget to follow up on a promise that they made to you.
Or someone who can never seem to make a decision or to take a stand and move forward on something in [00:04:00] their life, and they seem to have no drive or no ambition to help themselves out of a situation that they don't like in their lives. Do any, do any of these sound familiar? Right. In life, it can feel like you are dealing with someone who has some kind of personality quirk or a block in their lives, or a lack of awareness.
But what you're really seeing is that person's neurology and their brain connections in action. When you're seeing people who procrastinate or who have a lack of forethought or difficulty learning from past errors, or who are disorganized or somebody who has a short attention span, you're seeing the outward reflection of the function of their prefrontal cortex and their executive function.
And we build our brains. None of us are born with a well-developed [00:05:00] prefrontal cortex and you know, full speed in our executive function. You can ask anybody who's had a 10-year-old boy. The wildest ideas can seem like a really good idea to a 10-year-old. We as parents, we need to understand that if we want our children to grow up and to be able to have a life that isn't much harder than it needs to be, excellent.
Executive function is an enormous gift, and it isn't. Built solely on teaching your kids good life lessons or how to work on emotional control and empathy in everyday life, or teaching them time management or how the consequences of our actions affect other people or that. You know, the more we make life easier for our tomorrow selves, the better life gets to be.
Although all of those lessons [00:06:00] and many more lessons are obviously very important for us as parents to be teaching our kids. But if the layers of development haven't been built properly. In order for that information and those lessons to truly integrate it isn't going to make much difference. You can teach all the lessons and you can still have a child who grows up to become an adult who struggles with anxiety or motivation or disorganization or being reliable at work or reliable for their families.
They're being able to understand the consequences of their actions or their inactions. You get the idea if the connections that will be building this part of the brain are not built properly. It really makes it difficult for our kids as they get older and become adults. [00:07:00] And this is a huge reason why I wanna teach as many mothers and as many parents as I can about how to build a healthy brain and a nervous system from the very beginning so that kids don't have to grow up to be adults who need to try to fix themselves from things that.
You know, often get to be perceived as a personality flaw or a weakness that's actually just a lack of neurological development. So many kids grow up discouraged because they see things that other kids are able to do easily, that they themselves really struggle with. And yes, we're all different and we each have our natural abilities and you know, the areas that we struggle more with.
But. That's another reason to be aware of how neurology works and how much we actually can develop and change about ourselves. [00:08:00] So when we're looking at our child's development, I think we need to be less afraid of looking at what's going on if something isn't progressing like it should. I've said this on previous podcasts.
I don't have enough hands to count or enough fingers to count all the times that mothers have told me over the years that someone told them that their babies were just a little bit lazy when it came to motor development that wasn't progressing like it should. And listen, you don't have a baby who is too lazy.
To turn their head as far to the right as they turn it to the left. That's just not how it works. You don't have a baby who's too lazy to cross crawl properly, so they scoot on their butts, or they pull themselves along the floor with one leg that they bend and one leg that is [00:09:00] stretched out and being pulled behind them.
They aren't too lazy to bend the other knee. That isn't what's going on. What you're seeing is a child who has not developed the foundations of more skilled motor development, and they're instead adapting and trying to compensate for that lack of motor skill in whatever way that they can. And if your child isn't achieving their motor milestones at the appropriate time, they aren't building the foundation for more skilled motor development that they need.
In order to have a stable foundation for learning and a stable foundation for cognition and for subsequent executive function, these things matter because they're necessary for future skills and for future abilities. We can take crawling as an example. In 2022, the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics removed [00:10:00] crawling from the list of developmental milestones because many babies skip traditional hands and knees crawling, and they only army crawl, or they only scoot on their butts.
And so. While both the CDC and the Academy of Pediatrics agree still that crawling is important, there are enough babies who aren't doing it, that they've removed it from the list, and they said that as long as your baby is doing other things, like pulling themselves up to stand, it's fine. And when the decision to remove crawling from the list in 2022 was made, one of the reasons that was given is that crawling isn't a functional skill that's used in adulthood.
Adults sit, they reach for things and they walk, but they don't crawl. So it's. Was looked at as nothing more than a [00:11:00] temporary solution for infants who are motivated to be moving themselves around, but they don't have the postural control for upright mobility. They can't stand yet, but they wanna be getting around and they argue that you don't have to crawl in order to walk.
For all of these babies who didn't crawl first, they're still walking, but. What if crawling isn't just about getting us up on two feet, but what if we think about the fact that it's developing parts of the brain that are imperative to other areas of function besides just being able to walk? What is.
Actually happening in the brain of a child who's learning and practicing crawling. Crawling really occupies a uniquely important place in functional neurology or the [00:12:00] development of the brain and the nervous system because it's not just a motor accomplishment, it's a full body neurological integration event.
When a baby moves through, you know, army crawling on their bellies and then starts cross crawling on their hands and their knees, the developing nervous system is integrating a. Primitive reflexes. It's building connectivity. It's building communication between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain.
It's organizing the balance centers and proprioception maps, which is, you know, the combination of balance and control of the parts of the body, and it's laying the foundation for later. Social engagement, attention and learning. And when this milestone is skipped or when it's performed atypically, the downstream effect frequently [00:13:00] appear years later.
And there there's just a huge amount of research. That I would like to link to in the show notes for anybody who's more interested in diving into what these papers and books and bodies of work say about all of the ways that crawling and that sort of framework for. An experience of, , motor development that requires a high level of precision in these important areas of the brain that are being built.
, Making that for, precision in timing and a precision in communication. In order for crawling to occur and the way that it builds and develops subsequent areas of the brain that we need [00:14:00] for learning and for cognition and for, for building the areas of the brain that will allow us to have good executive function later in life.
I'm gonna link. Everything that I have found really helpful and really interesting from some of the researchers and some of the books that I think are, are absolutely worth your time to look more into and to get a better understanding of how these motor milestones crawling being one of them, but not the only one.
Um. You know where we see that a lack of development or lack of meeting, those milestones can show us elevated rates of reading difficulties and clumsiness and attention problems and emotional dysregulation and, [00:15:00] and just. They're impairing our ability to lay the stable foundation for how we learn, how we think, how we relate to other people, and how we're able to run our lives later on as adults.
And so the functional neurology case for crawling is both. Something that's looked at as a way that it, it helps integrate primitive reflexes into postural reflexes. It helps us to move our bodies in a more. Mature and sophisticated way. It helps the right side and the left side of the brain to communicate with each other, and it develops timing in the cerebellum.
That helps later on in life with reading and writing and attention and executive function. It helps us to develop our balance. It helps us to develop. [00:16:00] I. Ocular motor skills where we're looking when we're on the floor, we're looking at our hands as we're crawling and we're lifting up our heads and we're looking at our environment to see.
If anything's on our way or where we're crawling to. It helps with postural stability. It helps build the muscles of the spine and of the, of the shoulders and of the hips and, and helps us, which, you know, these help us for later in life, find motor skills and handwriting and being strong enough to be able to, to eventually stand on two feet and.
, Clinically, this is why so many practitioners are using these functional neurology frameworks to, to treat a history of, of mist or atypical crawling as a meaningful risk marker. It's something that I ask every single patient about in my office, and we see that. [00:17:00] So many interventions for A DHD and dyslexia and anxiety and sensory processing disorders and so many other things often end up having the child, regardless of their age, back down on the floor, doing cross crawl patterns, working to integrate some of these reflexes and these movement patterns and sort of build them.
Again, after the fact in order to work on , these disorders, and again, the sources and the papers and the books that I've found to be really helpful will be listed in the show notes if anything has sparked your interest. And my point here is really that changing the standards to fit a population that's less able to meet them.
Is, it's something that's been done for a very long time in so many different [00:18:00] ways when it comes to how modern medicine struggles, maybe to set a high bar and then work to optimize the health of the population versus lowering the bar and. Not really acting until something has enough symptoms that it can be named and given a diagnosis.
And I think this case of crawling is a, a perfect example. We can, we, you know, we see deviation from ability and so we lower the bar and we suddenly. Normalize something that has previously been a, a, a red flag that something could be going on with your child's development. And , those red flags and those signals that something is going on are so much easier to do something about when they're eight months old or 10 months old than it is when they're 11 years old.
So instead of only thinking about [00:19:00] these milestones as a means to. Get a child eventually up on two feet. I think we need to think about them as signs and signals that the brain is developing the way that it should be doing in that incredibly important first year of life, and that those milestones each have a responsibility in building the foundation that later on gives us adults who don't have to struggle with.
Not having the foundation to support the development of a strong prefrontal cortex, that acts like a very efficient air traffic control system, like we talked about at the very beginning when the air traffic control system runs smoothly, life gets to feel easy. I have a PDF linked in the show notes of information that I give out in my office. About crawling and you're welcome to download that if you'd like a condensed version of the information specifically [00:20:00] about that. I just, I think that there needs to be a clear distinction between normal and optimal, and I think we need to raise our standards, not lower the bar. We as parents are responsible for growing the brains of the next generation. And I know when I say it that way, it sounds like the most scary, daunting task.
But the truth is that that's exactly what we signed up for when we had kids. We have been doing that the whole time. We just maybe haven't been as conscious of what we were doing as we should have been. And we definitely have not been given enough tools and enough information to help us to understand that change and improvement of function in the brain and the nervous system.
These are things that are within our control. We build our brains and our lives are. Better. And the world, I would [00:21:00] argue is a better place when it's full of people with excellent executive function in their prefrontal cortices. And all of us want that for our kids. We want them to have a good life and helping them with being able to know more about neurology and understand what's happening and that it's important to watch their stages of development and be aware when something is lagging or absent.
Sometimes these are things that we can help progress from home with tools like the ones I'm giving you here. And sometimes we need help from the outside with someone who can test our children's primitive reflexes and run tests to see how their oxygen levels are and their inflammatory markers. And. To be able to look and know whether they're getting enough of the proper energy to their brains.
But everything that we learn about neurology helps because it's the foundation of everything concerning our health. [00:22:00] And if you would like to know more about neurologic development and the other pillars of health that are so foundational to building thriving health for our kids, you can download my masterclass that goes into a lot more detail.
On each of these areas, it's 90 minutes long, so you need to come, prepare to spend a bit of time, but it goes more into detail on the foundations necessary to build and to cultivate good health. So the link to download the class will be in the show notes. I wanna say thank you again for being here. Thank you for spending the time for listening and for caring about your child's development.
It is such a big job being a parent, and I know so many moms who work so hard to do it all, and I really. I hope that this information and these tools can help to make the road smoother and to give you peace of mind knowing that you have what it takes to be your child's [00:23:00] best advocate and to work to build a thriving family.
So thank you again for being here.
