The Experience Miracles Podcast

Q&A | Why Some Kids Have Struggles After Birth Trauma (And Others Don’t)

May 8, 2026

Why Some Kids Struggle After Birth Trauma and Others Don’t

Experience Miracles Podcast: Ask Dr. Tony Q&A | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Duration: 53 min

Key Takeaways

  • Whether a child struggles after birth trauma depends less on the intervention itself and more on the strength of the child’s nervous system foundation going into birth, its resilience, adaptability, and reserve capacity.
  • The same birth intervention (C-section, forceps, vacuum, induction) can produce very different outcomes in different children, because no two C-sections involve the same degree of physical force, and no two babies enter birth with the same neurological resilience.
  • Stress that begins before birth matters: maternal distress, toxin exposure, and fetal distress during pregnancy can weaken a baby’s nervous system foundation before the birth intervention ever happens, since both cortisol and environmental toxins cross the placenta.
  • Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is the one INSiGHT Scan measure that reveals a child’s underlying resilience, and a child can have a difficult case history with “green” HRV, signaling they are still adaptable and likely to respond well to care.
  • A child who starts care with strong HRV tends to respond two to three times faster, but a weaker starting point does not mean a child won’t heal, it generally means the work takes more time.

Why Do Some Kids Struggle After Birth Trauma While Others Don’t?

Whether a child develops chronic struggles after birth trauma is determined primarily by the strength of their nervous system before the birth intervention occurred, not by the intervention alone. Dr. Tony Ebel frames this with a “house and storm” analogy: a birth intervention is the storm, and the child’s nervous system is the house. A strong house with a solid foundation can take a hit and stay standing, while a fragile house with pre-existing weak points may sustain lasting damage from the same storm.

This is why two children can have the identical box checked on their paperwork, both delivered by C-section, for example, and have completely different outcomes. One latches, soothes, and sleeps without issue, while the other immediately struggles to latch, has digestive problems, and shows signs of neuroinflammation. The intervention was real for both. The difference lies in each child’s resilience, adaptability, and reserve capacity heading into that stress, along with the actual severity of the intervention itself, since the physical force involved in a C-section, forceps, or vacuum delivery exists on a wide spectrum.

For parents, the point is not blame. A weak foundation is rarely anyone’s fault, it can trace back to the overmedicalization of pregnancy and birth, to unavoidable circumstances, or to factors that remain unexplained. Understanding why a child struggled is what unlocks knowing what to do next. The good news is that resilience and reserve capacity can be built and rebuilt, and they can be measured directly through INSiGHT Scans rather than guessed at.

Birth Trauma Is Real, And the Data Proves It [05:58 – 10:57]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Let’s start right here. Birth trauma is really real. Adverse reactions to vaccines, really real. Adverse reactions to antibiotics, absolutely real, just read the label and the side effects. Birth interventions leading to short- and long-term negative health outcomes for our kids is an extremely real conversation. We can’t just dismiss this and say I’m making more out of it than there really is. Look at the malpractice rates for OBGYNs. Look at how many law firms specialize in birth trauma.

If you don’t think this is a real problem, go into the science of actuarial data. Actuaries are the scientists who set insurance rates. There are no emotions, no politics, no context to a spreadsheet. There’s just data, just truth, just facts. Malpractice rates are set entirely based on your safety track record. An OBGYN’s malpractice insurance is through the roof, on average, the research I can find puts it around $60,000 to $100,000 a year.

Now, I’m a pediatric chiropractor having this conversation, and I know the obvious: making an adjustment is not the same as performing surgery, so I’m not putting apples to apples in terms of the risk in the job. But the average pediatric chiropractor has malpractice insurance of a couple thousand dollars a year. So when people get on Instagram and Facebook and call it quackery or pseudoscience, that just means you don’t know how to read the science of today without bias.

“There’s no emotions, there’s no politics, there’s no context to spreadsheets. There’s just data, there’s just truth, there’s just facts.”

I never avoid the question of why this happened to a child, because I’m a parent who had a child with a chronic illness. I’ve gone through it with my own kiddo. The only way we can move forward and get our kids healthy is if we spend the right amount of mental bandwidth going backwards and asking, “Why did this happen?” If you don’t know the why, you don’t know what to do going forward to get them better.

The House and Storm Analogy: Why Foundation Matters Most [14:34 – 22:55]

Dr. Tony Ebel: To really get you a better understanding, I want to use what I call the house and storm analogy. I grew up in Northwest Iowa, where there’s not a single tree for hundreds of miles, it’s corn, soybean, and cattle land. Most everybody took down every tree and building deemed unnecessary so they could plant more corn. And that means there’s nothing to stop the wind. The wind just destroys your soul when you’re trying to stay warm in a place where it can’t be blocked.

Then I married a suburban Chicago gal and ended up living on a farm full of trees and hills, with buildings everywhere. Even though the temperature gets just as cold by the number on my phone, it never feels that cold, because the wind doesn’t rip through our house. Same temperature, very different experience, because of what’s there to absorb the stress.

Here’s where the analogy brings the answer home. Storms happen for a lot of our kiddos. We did not plan for a hypoxic brain injury and a traumatic brainstem and vagus nerve injury for our son, Oliver. I printed out a birth plan and brought it into the hospital. And if there’s any part of life where you go in with a plan and it does not go according to plan, it’s birth. Millions of you planned for a natural birth, a water birth, a home birth, and something happened that turned it into a birth that required medical intervention.

“We never get to control the weather. Storms exist. We do not always get to control how strong the storm is. But we can control how strong we build the house.”

When we get into this birth conversation, you have to know that the only outcome the medical world primarily cares about is survival. The gap between a baby surviving birth and thriving and being healthy after birth is significantly large. The direction and severity of life-alteration from a medical intervention has everything to do with the strength of the house that was there before the storm hit. How strong was the foundation? How strong were the walls? What was that house designed and built to withstand?

People on the Gulf shore build houses on stilts by design, because they know storms are normal and they prepare. Some kids at birth have nervous systems that are already dysregulated. Other kids at birth have nervous systems already built strong, with a solid foundation of regulation and connection.

How Stress Before Birth Weakens the Foundation [22:55 – 31:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Oliver would actually be the latter, built strong, because of how much we did to prepare the health of my wife Christina, and even myself, before we got pregnant. Our fertility journey, our conception, the entire pregnancy, her nervous system, nourishment, mindset, prayer, and fitness. And yet he still had the intervention, the seizures, the surgeries, the medications. Christina and I felt a lot like many of you: we blamed ourselves. What did we do wrong? How was this our outcome when we were so prepared?

I’ll give you a parallel. We were researching everything when Oliver needed heart-lung bypass, and I listened to an interview with a cardiothoracic surgeon who said he could determine the long-term outcomes of his patients, even with the same surgery and the same intervention, based on how healthy they were before they got on his table. Some patients were physically fit with great nutrition, but they were so stressed, with crazy jobs and divorces, that they struggled in the third component of health: neurological and nervous system health. Our babies are the same.

“Health is multifaceted. Two people can have the same surgery, and the difference in their outcome comes down to how strong they were before they got on the table.”

We don’t start the timeline at birth. The fertility and prenatal journey is essential for neurodevelopment. When a pregnancy is overmedicalized, when mom is living in a state of stress, tension, and anxiety, when mom is exposed to toxins, we know that cortisol, our stress hormone, crosses from mom’s nervous system to baby, and that toxins, whether inhaled, ingested, or injected, cross the placenta. That child is going through what we call fetal distress neurologically.

There’s now technology to track this, called fetal, infant, and maternal Heart Rate Variability. Chiropractically, we adjust mom not only to keep her nervous system calm, resilient, and regulated, but also to make sure her pelvis, lumbosacral region, and entire structural system are aligned, because physical constraints can affect the baby too. So when we isolate birth interventions in a case history, we also look upstream: Was there a loss of a previous baby? Is mom seeing a high-risk OBGYN? You don’t see a high-risk OBGYN without high levels of stress and anxiety.

Not All C-Sections Are the Same [31:00 – 38:43]

Dr. Tony Ebel: We never get to control whether the storm comes, and we don’t always control how strong it is. An emergency C-section, forceps, vacuum, cord wrap, breech presentation, or significant decelerations that put mom and baby’s life at risk, those are far more severely traumatic births than maybe a scheduled C-section. Even induction is one people wave off as no big deal because they use Pitocin all the time. Yeah, it’s a big deal. There are different strengths and severities to these storms.

So if a kiddo had a C-section and is fine, and another kiddo had a C-section and immediately struggled to latch, soothe, and sleep, had digestive issues, and was on the path to the Perfect Storm, what’s the difference? They both had a C-section. You have to dig deeper. When we do an intake, we don’t just check the box. We ask, with full empathy and no blame, “Are you okay if we dig all the way into the C-section?” Often we need dad involved, because mom is behind the curtain, under anesthesia, and doesn’t see the details.

“If you saw how much physical strain, twisting, and pulling was going on at your baby’s neck, you might wonder for the rest of your life whether it could cause issues.”

One reason they don’t let you take videos is the sheer physical force involved. I have undergrad friends who became OBGYNs, and an incredible doctor who delivered three of my kids, I’ve talked to him about this a thousand times. The spectrum of severity of physical force, twisting, torsion, and pulling, just around a C-section alone, is significant.

So there are multiple variables, and each one individually matters in determining a child’s outcome and its severity. If those variables all stack the deck against a child, a high-stress pregnancy, a lot of Perfect Storm factors, then that child’s neurological house, foundation, walls, and windows simply are not as strong, and they have far more susceptibility to stressors.

The Answer Is “It Depends”, And Why That’s Hopeful [38:43 – 40:42]

Dr. Tony Ebel: So every intervention, including birth intervention, the answer to the question point blank is: it depends. Some children who went through that intervention with an already strong foundation have a stronger likelihood of being okay, healing and recovering optimally, often fully, on the other side. They’ll be “okay” despite having the same box checked on the paperwork. And for other kids, the opposite could be true.

The house is your child’s nervous system and its ability to handle stress. That’s adaptability, reserve capacity, and resilience, I want you to Google the heck out of those terms and live in that space, because that’s your journey out of the storm, and the proactive journey to prevent one.

“Why one child handles birth trauma better than another doesn’t mean the storm wasn’t real. It means the house had a stronger foundation and fewer pre-existing weak points.”

The storm matters, its severity, its timing, and all the variables within it matter. But what matters most is the structure, the foundation, the resilience. A strong house takes a hit better than a fragile one. And a resilient, adaptable nervous system can handle more stress than one carrying subluxation, dysregulation, and dysfunction that are already undermining its resilience. Those pre-existing weak points are what we’d call subluxations.

What INSiGHT Scans Reveal About Resilience [40:42 – 47:48]

Dr. Tony Ebel: We focus entirely, obsessively, relentlessly on what we can control, our lifestyle, our environment, and rebuilding, repairing, and restoring the foundation of nervous system function. And we can find out whether your child’s nervous system truly lacks reserve capacity. We do an intake through the case history, then we run our INSiGHT Scans.

Infrared thermal scans measure the more acute, current status of stress on the nervous system, the visceral, neuroinflammation, and neuroendocrine picture. They tell us this kid’s gut is a mess, or their immune system is struggling right now. It’s a recency effect: here’s what to handle right now. EMG scans look at neuromuscular and sensory-motor function, how the child is moving. The third scan, HRV, measures global total reserve capacity and adaptability.

“We can’t measure resilience on labs. You cannot measure adaptability with a hair analysis or a stool sample. That is the business of the INSiGHT Scans.”

Here’s where we deal hope. A lot of times we take in a kiddo whose paperwork says level three autism, profound autoimmune challenges, seizures, motor ticks, anxiety, ADHD. We dig into the case history and there’s often the total Perfect Storm, high-stress fertility and pregnancy, birth interventions, colic, forceps, vaccines. Their thermal scans are a mess. Their EMG scans are a mess. Our other neurological checks are a mess. But then we look at their HRV, and it’s in the green.

On the HRV image there’s a green circle, an orange warning circle, and a red circle. When that little white dot, which plots a child’s heart rate variability, their adaptability and resiliency, lands in the green even while everything else is a mess, it tells us that underneath it all there’s still a strong foundation. That child is still resilient, still adaptable, still ready to respond to care.

Kids whose HRV is green when we start care respond two to three times faster. That doesn’t mean kids without a strong HRV don’t get better, it just means it tends to take more work over time. And nothing wrecks resilience like emotional distress, which is why a family’s confidence, positivity, and emotional fortitude directly support both their own HRV and their child’s.

It’s Not Your Fault: Moving Forward With Clarity [48:23 – 52:30]

Dr. Tony Ebel: In case you don’t fully understand these words, adaptability, reserve capacity, resilience, it simply means this: some kids can compensate better for a while. That doesn’t mean nothing happened. It doesn’t mean the birth intervention didn’t stress their nervous system. It just means they were better able to respond, recover, repair, and rebuild resilience on the other side.

One thing within that: sometimes a birth intervention, especially induction, is like an adverse vaccine reaction, we can’t just track it for 72 hours and call it good. Sometimes the stress has burrowed deeper into the foundation. On the outside the house still looks fine, but cracks are forming, and the windows and walls are getting a little off-kilter. So if your kiddo had a birth intervention and you wonder whether there was birth trauma, don’t guess and don’t leave it as “I don’t know.” Go get it tested. Go get those INSiGHT Scans and an HRV exam, because no labs, hair analysis, or stool sample can measure the resilience and reserve capacity of the most important system in the body, the nervous system.

“It’s not your fault. You didn’t miss anything. Don’t go backwards into blame, go forward with gratitude and clarity, because now you know what to do.”

You must remember, as we take this home: it’s not your fault. You didn’t miss anything. Sometimes the blame falls on the overmedicalization of the system, sometimes the interventions could possibly have been avoided, and sometimes, like in my son’s case, it was simply unavoidable. But no matter what, those interventions carry an increased likelihood of negative outcomes, and the thing that increases the likelihood of a positive outcome is how strong your child’s nervous system function and foundation were going in.

So don’t go backwards into “I should have done things differently.” Regret wrecks our emotions, and wrecked emotions wreck our nervous system resilience. Go forward with gratitude and excitement, because you now have clarity, a better understanding, and more complete answers. This is what I now know that I didn’t know before, so this is what I can now do about it. That’s the magic perspective that changes everything and lets you go forward and experience miracles for your child.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do some kids struggle after birth trauma while others don’t?

The biggest factor is the strength of the child’s nervous system before birth, its resilience, adaptability, and reserve capacity. Dr. Tony Ebel compares it to a house in a storm: a strong foundation can absorb the hit of a birth intervention and recover, while a weaker one, often shaped by stress during pregnancy, is more likely to develop lasting struggles. The severity of the intervention itself also matters.

Are all C-sections equally traumatic for a baby?

No. According to Dr. Tony Ebel, there is a wide spectrum of physical force, twisting, and torsion involved even within C-sections alone. An emergency C-section, forceps, or vacuum delivery is generally far more traumatic than a scheduled one. This is why two babies with the same “C-section” box checked on their paperwork can have completely different outcomes.

Can stress during pregnancy affect my baby’s nervous system?

Yes. Maternal distress, anxiety, and toxin exposure during pregnancy can weaken a baby’s nervous system foundation before birth. Cortisol, the stress hormone, crosses from mom’s nervous system to the baby, and environmental toxins cross the placenta. This is called fetal distress, and it can leave a child less able to absorb the stress of a later birth intervention.

What is HRV and why does it matter for my child?

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is an INSiGHT Scan measure of a child’s global reserve capacity, resilience, and adaptability, qualities that can’t be seen on labs, hair analysis, or stool samples. A child can have a difficult case history yet show “green” HRV, signaling a strong underlying foundation. Children who start care with green HRV tend to respond two to three times faster.

Is it my fault that my child struggled after their birth intervention?

No. Dr. Tony Ebel emphasizes that it is not your fault and you did not miss anything. Sometimes interventions trace back to the overmedicalization of birth, sometimes they were unavoidable, and sometimes the cause remains unexplained. Dwelling in blame harms your own nervous system resilience; the more helpful path is to gain clarity and focus on what you can control going forward.

How do I find a provider who can measure my child’s nervous system resilience?

You can locate a Neurologically-Focused Chiropractor trained in INSiGHT Scans through the PX Docs Directory. Enter your zip code or region. These practitioners run the thermal, EMG, and HRV scans that measure your child’s reserve capacity and adaptability directly.

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