The answer to the question “which direction is my child headed?” is truly everything when it comes to the future of our children’s health!
I’ve been a pediatric and family chiropractor for many years, just short of how long I’ve been a father. Our oldest baby girl Addison was born just before we started our practice. We have four kiddos and we’ve served thousands of kids in the practice, so we have studied everything you could possibly imagine regarding the health of our kids.
The truth is, stress and toxins whether it comes from plastic in a water bottle or a fast food meal, are going to be in our children’s lives. Viruses, germs, and pathogens are going to be there. Mean girls, bullies, breakups, unkind teachers, and terrible bosses aren’t going anywhere.
Stress is always going to be present.
The number one most important thing in the health of our children and family is not how much stress or toxicity they are exposed to, but instead how adaptable and resilient they are to these stresses.
The question of today is which direction is our child headed when it comes to building and growing in their adaptability and resilience.
Which Path Is Your Child Headed Down?
There are two paths that our children can take.
Path number one is what we call The Perfect Storm. The Perfect Storm path will send your child in a direction of chronic sickness, emotional disturbances, learning disabilities, and sensory challenges. The earlier they go through them, the farther down that negative, perfect storm path they get.
It can start with a mom’s maternal stress. If we continue to let our pregnant moms be stuck in this state of fear and anxiety, instead of empowerment and education, their nervous system sets the table for that baby’s nervous system.
If the moment that baby shows up on the outside, it is stressful, intervention-based with lots of physical tension and medical intervention equaling birth trauma, that is all at the heart of the perfect storm.
Over 80% of kids that we see are born already shifted and oftentimes stuck into a state of what’s called fight or flight sympathetic, the protective response of their nervous system. Our protective response is part of the adaptability response, but it is the one that is supposed to be very short-lived. Children are supposed to live in the opposite of that response. Our nervous system is supposed to be moving forward and growing in its adaptability and resilience every single day. In fact, babies develop more neurons per second than we do per day.
If your child is colicky and often falls ill during their early years, particularly if they are given antibiotics or other medications, it can make them less resilient. This can quickly lead to a situation where they are stuck in a ‘perfect storm’ of health issues.
How Can Parents Change the Tide?
What I want as many parents to hear as possible, is that if we choose a different direction and we tie to it as many resilience-building and boosting moves and actions as we can, then our child ends up on that second ideal, optimal path we all want.
Finding out what direction your child is headed is the single most important thing you can do. You need to find out where they are now, but more importantly, what direction they are headed and which will lead to where they end up in the future. As I mentioned, life will always have stress, germs, bullies, etc. Can your child get through it, over it, and past it… or not? This has everything to do with the strength of their nervous system.
In today’s world, there’s a technology called INSiGHT Scans to determine the direction of adaptability and the health and functionality of our child’s brain and neuromotor development system. They are in pediatric chiropractic offices that focus on the nervous system and really are the gold standard of adaptability.
In order to find out what direction your child is headed, you may need to take a new direction with your family’s healthcare, which doesn’t mean leaving the others. We’re not saying you shouldn’t have an amazing pediatrician, holistic nurse practitioner, or medicine on your team. You have to have a medical emergency-ready person on your team, but they’re not in charge of adaptability. They’re in charge of pathology.
The new direction for parents in this generation is to add to their team. You need to add an adaptability-building practitioner to your team by adding a Pediatric, Prenatal, and Family Practitioner.
We train hundreds of Pediatric Chiropractors to be adaptability boosters and builders in your community, check out our PX Docs directory to find your local PX chiropractor.
