As parents, we all want school to be a safe, happy, and successful place for our kids to be. For kiddos who may struggle with sensory, emotional, focus, behavioral, or any challenge that encompasses the neurological scope, getting to this goal may take a little more work. This is where school support plans come in.
There can be quite a bit of struggle happening for school-aged children, especially for our teenagers and middle schoolers but even starting as young as second and third grade.
As school demands pick up, struggles intensify. Hopefully, if they’re having a tough time, your kiddo has an IEP, 504, or some support or therapy they can use at school to help. Â
I have read so many IEPs, 504s, and neuro-psych evaluation reports and after the diagnosis and recommendations, the number one thing missing is exactly what you’d expect me to say, neurologically focused pediatric chiropractic adjustments. It’s so scientific and obvious but like a lot of things in our world these days, especially with healthcare, the obviousness of what helps kids get healthier, keeps getting glossed over.
Raging Bull
The reason why chiropractic adjustments need to be first in their plan is that the number one challenge, whether it’s causing hyperactivity, impulsivity, anxiety, or what we call “raging bull” kids, is a sympathetic fight or flight nervous system that is too wound up.
They have what we call ‘busy brain syndrome’, which gets in the way of focus and decision-making.
The sympathetic nervous system controls our emotions and when the sympathetic’s fight or flight gas pedal is really wound up, our emotions are wound up. This leads to meltdowns, tantrums, and frequent outbursts. Stressful situations, like transitions, tests, etc, can amplify all of this.
Drunken Bull
The second common grouping of challenges for kids is what we’ve nick-named drunken bull. There may not be elevated behavior, emotions, and accelerated gas pedal, but those kiddos lack focus, concentration, and follow-through. The root of those challenges still lies in their central nervous system, but instead of being wound up, it’s actually disorganized and disconnected.
Winding that all back to pediatric chiropractic, there’s a specific style of adjustments we can make to be able to calm down that fight or flight nervous system by stimulating what’s called the vagus nerve.
If you have too much of either of these, you need to bring the other back online.
The Science Behind Pediatric Chiropractic Adjustments
Neurologically for the raging bull kiddos, subluxations create interference.
They create a jam up in signaling and communication between the brain and all the different levers it needs to control. This ranges from emotions to cognition, movement, digestion, and the immune system. For that disorganization element, there’s a specific way that we adjust those kids and patients to reorganize, re-coordinate, and improve the connection and communication efficiency within those kids’ nervous systems.Â
Movement is calming for these kiddos.
This is why chiropractic adjustments that provide the right high dose of movement into the central nervous system, which is our access point through the neuro-spinal system, are so effective in calming.
All the things that are in the IEPs and 504s that are trying to calm your wound-up child or help create an easier path to organization, are made more effective when you add chiropractic to the mix. Every occupational, physical, and speech therapist who has their kids getting co-care with chiropractic absolutely loves it.
We have an entire network of school professionals who are always telling families about neurologically focused chiropractic and urging them to add it in.
Unfortunately, the reason it’s not in the 504 and IEP plans is that there’s no school pediatric chiropractor. If it were in the plan, the state would have to pay for it and that’s just not going to happen, YET.
Our training organization, The Pediatric Experience, is doing lots of research on this now.
There are a few early studies that have been done in small towns and other countries, like New Zealand and Australia, about adding chiropractic into the school systems. It’s unbelievable what happens to behavior and challenges. Grades, focus, and emotional stability greatly improved. They’re very small studies that need to get done on a large scale to really bring this to the world, but they’re happening because so many families have added chiropractic to their plans.
Pediatric Chiropractic IS the Missing Link
If you are going through your child’s plans and have that gut feeling that something is missing – that’s when you know the plan has to be dictated and created on your own and we will be there to help you. Make sure to search our directory for a PX Doc near you.
We want to do everything we can to help because we’ve been blessed to do it for tens of thousands of kids over the years. You need to get your child’s nervous system to a better place. So their schoolwork, social, sleep, gut, and immune system all improve. You’re going to be blown away by all the things that get better with chiropractic!
