The Experience Miracles Podcast

The Best Way to Build Brilliant & Resilient Brains in Kids

Feb 17, 2026

How Movement Builds Your Child’s Brain: The Science of Neurodevelopment and Why It Starts at Birth

Episode 183, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: February 13, 2026 | Duration: ~60 min Guest: Dr. Stefanie, DC, Pediatric Chiropractor, Founder of Building Brilliant Brains, Owner of Adjusting the World Chiropractic

Key Takeaways

  • The brain learns through the body, movement is not optional enrichment, it is the mechanism of brain development. Every time a baby moves, crawls, or climbs, their nervous system is building the connections required for learning, coordination, and regulation.
  • Containers sabotage brain development: baby swings, Bumbo seats, activity centers, and bouncers restrict the movement input a baby’s brain craves. Dr. Stefanie compares placing a baby in a container to “giving a baby poison”, the brain is being deprived of the only stimulus that actually builds it.
  • Primitive reflexes, including the crawling reflex, must be actively stimulated to integrate properly. If a child skips crawling or is placed upright before they are developmentally ready, the brain misses critical cross-hemisphere wiring that affects focus, reading, balance, and coordination for years downstream.
  • Chiropractic care and movement integration work synergistically: children who are subluxated cannot fully receive the neurological input from movement and therapy. Clearing the subluxation first, then retraining and reintegrating, produces what Dr. Tony calls a “one plus one equals 111 effect” compared to either approach alone.
  • Neuroplasticity means it’s never too late to rebuild: the brain retains the ability to form new pathways at any age. Children who missed critical movement windows can still make significant gains through intentional movement, adjustment, and nervous system reintegration, it simply takes more consistent effort.

How Does Movement Actually Build a Child’s Brain?

Movement is not a supplement to brain development, it is the engine of it. According to Dr. Stefanie, the body is the teacher and developer of the brain, particularly in infancy and early childhood. The brain is learning faster on the day a child is born than at any other point in life, and it is learning almost exclusively through physical input: sensation, motion, vestibular stimulation, and proprioception.

Primitive reflexes, including the crawling reflex, the palmar grasp reflex, and the vestibular responses, are the brain’s developmental scaffolding. These reflexes are meant to be activated, used, and then integrated as the brain matures. When they are not adequately stimulated, because a baby spends most of their waking hours in a container instead of on the floor, those reflexes remain active past their window, creating ongoing distraction and dysregulation in the brain. The result is a nervous system stuck in a primitive, fight-or-flight state rather than progressing toward the regulated, focused, learning-ready state that parents and teachers are hoping for.

The practical implication for parents is significant: setting up a home environment for movement is not about pushing a child to reach milestones faster. It is about giving the brain the raw material it needs to do its job. As Dr. Stefanie puts it, “if you’re setting up your child’s environment for movement, you’re setting them up for brain development, and they just think they’re playing.”

How Dr. Stefanie Discovered Movement as the Missing Piece in Pediatric Neurodevelopment [00:08:00 – 00:14:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: I want to set the frame here. What we know in the world we work in is even as people pick up this conversation and say, okay, to have my child have a healthy brain, I know that’s the key, they first often look at nutrition, toxins, and detoxification. I feel like movement and motor milestones are just sitting right here like this 800-pound gorilla hiding in plain sight.

There are only a few experts, even in the autism community, talking about movement quality, integration, tone, and coordination. When parents find your platform, they probably DM you and say, “Whoa, I knew this was there. I knew it was important, but I didn’t know it was that important.” How did this particular topic become your focus?

Dr. Stefanie: I fell in love with it at a chiropractic conference. Someone mentioned the book How to Teach Your Baby to Be Physically Superb, and I took it to Puerto Rico on a trip and couldn’t put it down. It was physical therapy speaking our language, chiropractic, and it described how the brain actually develops through the body. The body is the teacher and developer of the brain. And it validated all these things that I feel are so innate within us.

You want to move your baby. You want to bounce your baby. All the things that soothe a baby are feeding their brain naturally. And from a chiropractic perspective, I had never been a container fan, but once I understood brain development at this level, I realized that movement and motion and input is literally the only way the brain develops. To see a container became almost like seeing someone give a baby poison. It’s that extreme.

Our entire society is set up with baby swings, bouncers, and car seats, things that make babies lay on their back with almost no input. Most of them are shielded so the baby can’t see, can’t feel the breeze, can’t get the sensations into their body that allow them to learn the world. That’s why they were born. That’s how they develop their brain and become human.

“Movement and motion and input, that’s the only way the brain actually develops. To see a container is almost like seeing you give a baby poison. It’s that extreme.”, Dr. Stefanie

Innate Intelligence, the Dad’s Role, and the Developmental Window [00:14:00 – 00:22:00]

Dr. Tony: You said something so chiropractic: the things that soothe a baby are feeding their brain naturally. That is innate intelligence in action. What does “innate” actually mean from a nervous system standpoint?

Dr. Stefanie: Innate intelligence is that natural drive that comes from the heart rather than from thinking it through. I always think about birth, birth is probably one of the most innate things I’ve ever personally experienced. You just drop in and your body knows what to do. When a baby’s crying, the first thing you want to do is stand up, rock them, move them side to side. That’s innate.

And dads actually have a strong innate drive to stimulate babies vestibularly, tossing them a little, doing goblet squats while holding them, bouncing on an exercise ball. Dads approach babies as athletes-in-training, which is actually neurologically correct. My husband Nick played college basketball, so he came at our babies like, “I’m gonna build an athlete from day one.” And because I’d read the Doman research and understood brain development, I could tell him: yes, this is your job. He fell in love with the newborn stage because he had a purpose.

Dr. Tony: The dad’s role here is massively underrated. The developmental window is real, the brain is wide open and massively capable right now, and that’s not the case forever. Super critical sensitive periods exist. When you understand that, you don’t just make the dad joke about it anymore. You go: okay, let’s get intentional and take this to cognition. You want an academic scholarship for your kid? Start on day one.

“The brain is learning the most the day we’re born and is shutting down every single day we’re here. The earlier the movement, the earlier that brain development takes place, and the smarter your child is going to be.”, Dr. Stefanie

The Perfect Storm vs. The Perfect Path: What Happens When Neuromotor Development Gets Off Track [00:24:00 – 00:34:00]

Dr. Tony: Here’s how I want to frame this for our audience. Dr. Stefanie’s content is always helping new parents take the ideal, perfect path, understanding how important early stages are, how to sequence motor development correctly. The opposite of the perfect path is The Perfect Storm.

If a child had prenatal stress, cord wrap, breach positioning affecting neuromotor planning, then birth interventions, then injury to the brainstem and cerebellum where all motor planning, tone, coordination, vision, and vestibular function live, that child’s nervous system and neuromotor development gets thrown off track. They show signs of motor delays, sensory challenges, and may be heading toward the spectrum.

Coming back to Building Brilliant Brains basics doesn’t just prepare kids for learning and athletics, it prevents The Perfect Storm. And if the storm has already hit, it is the path back.

Dr. Stefanie: The Doman Institute was actually founded around brain injuries, they were working with kids with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, serious diagnoses. And they started seeing these brain-injured children reading at four years old and doing gymnastics. They realized: what if we train a healthy brain with the same intentionality? That’s the whole principle.

Primitive reflexes are central to this. We’re born with reflexes designed to help the brain mature. If those reflexes are still active when they should have been integrated, because they weren’t stimulated properly, the brain is constantly distracted. It can’t focus and develop the way it needs to. So what do you do? You go back and stimulate, stimulate, stimulate. Give the brain what it missed.

The brain is neuroplastic, especially in kids. You can go back and change so much. You can fix a lot of the damage that happened, just going back to primitive reflex work, vestibular movements, getting kids crawling. I see patients come in who skipped crawling and have reading issues, focus issues, and balance problems. You get them crawling, and they become an athlete. It’s wild.

Why Chiropractic Adjustments Amplify Everything Else [00:32:00 – 00:42:00]

Dr. Tony: I want to go somewhere specific here. For our audience, they know subluxation, nervous system dysregulation, brainstem injury, vagus nerve dysfunction. They understand that if a child’s neuromotor sequence was thrown off, there’s often an obstruction. There’s interference from subluxation.

Do you notice a clear difference between kids who are doing your movement work and getting adjusted versus kids who are doing everything right but not getting adjusted?

Dr. Stefanie: Absolutely. And it’s one of the first things I ask a parent: are you getting them adjusted?

From a chiropractic perspective, we always think about the brain’s communication out to the body, to the heart, to the bladder, whatever organ we’re focused on. But we often forget the pathway back. If the child is subluxated, the signals can’t get in. You can be doing the right movement work. You can be doing OT and PT. But if the input can’t reach the brain because of subluxation, how is any of that going to maximize its benefit?

What I see clinically is that OTs and PTs will get some good changes, but they typically plateau. When chiropractic is added, the exponential return on what they’re doing becomes massive. I have a PT in my area who says she doesn’t want to work with a child who isn’t getting adjusted, because the results are so much better when the nervous system is open and that communication between brain and body is flowing.

Dr. Tony: We are so blessed that pediatric PTs, OTs, and speech therapists are the most receptive professionals we work with. They can’t get enough of what we do, and we can’t get enough of what they do. The sequence is: clear the subluxation, then retrain and reintegrate. It’s truly a one plus one equals 111 effect.

“Pediatric PTs, OTs, and speech therapists can’t get enough of what we do and we can’t get enough of what they do. Clear the subluxation, then retrain, reintegrate, and let’s go. It’s truly a one plus one equals 111 effect.”, Dr. Tony Ebel

Setting Up Your Home for Brain Development: What to Add and What to Return [00:44:00 – 00:56:00]

Dr. Tony: Let’s go to the home. If a family says to you, “Dr. Stefanie, I’m all in, load up your stuff in a box and ship it to my house,” what does that box contain? And what do we send back to Target?

Dr. Stefanie: My absolute number one non-negotiable is a thick gym mat. The more time you and your baby are on the floor, the better. A good gym mat makes you want to be down there. That’s where it all starts.

Next is giving babies the opportunity to hang. We have the palmar grasp reflex for a reason, it’s primitive, it’s designed to be used. Hanging develops lung capacity, chest strength, and posture. In a small apartment, a doorway gym with a little monkey bar works perfectly. Before a baby can self-serve, you lift them up to it. They hang, they build upper body strength, and it integrates the palmar grasp reflex. There are so many benefits to hanging, and almost nobody does it.

The third thing I love is a Pikler triangle. You don’t need the full set with the slide, even just the triangle is incredible. At five or six months old, a baby can grab and pull themselves up on it. It develops the ability to climb, it promotes cross-crawl, it builds strength. And most Pikler triangles are labeled for 18 months, I think you should introduce it at least six months before that. Babies are innately ready way earlier than we give them credit for.

What to return: Anything that props a baby upright before they’re developmentally ready. Bumbo seats, activity centers, any device that sits a child up when they haven’t yet earned that position by developing the motor control to get there themselves. Train the horizontal plane before you ever go vertical. Developmentally, the brain needs to understand that horizontal plane deeply before it goes upright. When you bypass that, you understand why kids skip crawling, and skipping crawling has real consequences.

The only time a baby should be sitting is in a car seat, because we have to get places. That’s it.

“If you’re setting up your child’s environment for movement, you’re setting them up for brain development, and they just think they’re playing.”, Dr. Stefanie

Neuroplasticity and the Path Back: It’s Never Too Late to Rebuild [00:38:00 – 00:50:00]

Dr. Tony: Let’s address the parents who are listening and feeling that their child missed some of these windows, whether because of containers, because of screens, because of The Perfect Storm. You and I have both said this many times, and it’s worth saying again: you can go back. Talk about the neuroplasticity piece.

Dr. Stefanie: The brain is amazing in its neuroplastic ability. Especially with kids, you can still go back and change so much. You can fix a lot of any damage that could have happened.

Here’s an analogy I love: if you walk from your house to the shed every day, you beat down a path through the grass. Going from house to shed becomes easy. But if one day you need to take a different way, you’ve got an overgrown, weedy area to push through. Can it be done? Yes. Does it take more effort than if you had pathed it correctly from the beginning? Yes. But if you take that new path over and over and over again, you create it. You build a great path to the shed.

That’s neuroplasticity. The new pathway takes more work, but it forms. Crawling, climbing, cross-crawl exercises, vestibular movement, swimming, anything that crosses the midline and gets the two hemispheres talking to each other works. And when chiropractic care clears the subluxation first, all of that work is able to actually reach the brain and stick.

So yes, start today. The best time to start is yesterday, but today is the day.

How Parents Know Their Child’s Brain Is Thriving [00:54:00 – 01:00:00]

Dr. Tony: Leave us with something practical. When the brain is developing, integrating, and getting back on track, what do parents see, feel, and notice in their child day to day?

Dr. Stefanie: Honestly? A lot of it comes from mom’s gut. I can feel it when I’m working with families, there’s a moment where mom just knows. She goes from “something’s wrong and I can’t explain it” to “my kid’s killing it and I know it.” That shift is real. It’s unmistakable.

When a child’s neuromotor development is on track, parents start to feel a kind of confident pride rather than low-level anxiety. You see them moving more fluidly, hitting milestones in sequence, engaging more easily, being more regulated. You can feel when the nervous system is calming and organizing.

For parents who’ve been told “they’ll catch up, don’t worry”, if your gut says something is up, trust that. You’re made for this. You know your child. Find a practitioner who will actually hear you, because that feeling you have is there for a reason.

Dr. Tony: That is exactly right. We send moms checklists and PDFs when really what we should be doing is helping them trust what they already know. Innate intelligence is in the parent as much as it’s in the child. If your gut says we need to do some work here, that instinct is valid and it deserves to be taken seriously.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is movement so important for baby brain development?

Movement is how the brain actually builds itself, especially in infancy. The body is the teacher and developer of the brain, every crawl, climb, hang, and tumble sends signals that create neural connections. The brain is learning faster at birth than at any other point in life, and the primary input it needs is physical movement and sensory experience. Without adequate movement, critical developmental windows close with fewer connections formed than the brain was designed to have.

What baby gear is actually hurting my child’s brain development?

Any device that holds a baby upright before they’ve developed the muscle control to get there naturally can disrupt the proper sequence of brain development. This includes Bumbo seats, activity centers, bouncers, and baby swings used for extended periods. According to Dr. Stefanie, babies need to master the horizontal plane, belly time, floor time, crawling, before the brain is ready to go vertical. Car seats are the one exception because safety requires it.

My child skipped crawling. Should I be concerned?

Yes, skipping crawling is not developmentally neutral. Crawling is a cross-hemisphere movement that wires the brain’s left and right sides to communicate with each other. Children who skip crawling often show downstream effects: reading challenges, difficulty focusing, balance issues, and coordination problems. The good news is that neuroplasticity means you can go back. Intentional crawling exercises, primitive reflex integration work, and chiropractic care to clear any subluxation can help the brain build those missing connections at any age, it just takes consistent effort.

Does chiropractic care actually help with movement and development milestones?

Yes, and this is one of the most consistent clinical observations in Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care. If a child is subluxated, the nervous system cannot fully receive the input coming in from movement and therapy. OTs and PTs often see good initial gains that plateau, until chiropractic care is added, at which point the gains accelerate significantly. The reason is simple: clearing the subluxation opens the communication pathway between brain and body, so all the movement work the child is doing can actually register in the brain and produce lasting change.

What are the best things to put in my home to support baby brain development?

Dr. Stefanie’s top three: a thick gym mat on the floor (so both you and baby are comfortable spending time down there), a doorway gym with a hanging bar for upper body and grasp reflex development, and a Pikler triangle for climbing and cross-crawl stimulation. These support babies from birth through toddlerhood and beyond. The most important principle is simple: floor time over container time, horizontal before vertical, and movement over stillness whenever possible.

How do I find a PX Docs chiropractor trained in pediatric neurological care?

PX Docs has a searchable directory of certified Neurologically-Focused Chiropractors with trained offices now in 18–19 countries. You can find a practitioner near you at pxdocs.com/directory.

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