Dr. Laura Brayton:

Welcome to another episode of Well-Adjusted Mama. I’m your host, Dr. Laura Brayton. And today, I have the pleasure of interviewing a mentor for me in the chiropractic profession, Dr. Marty Rosen, and we speak about common vs.

normal regarding pediatric growth and development. Dr. Rosen is a 1981 summa cum laude graduate of Life Chiropractic College. Since 1982, he has maintained a private practice in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Besides his practice, Dr. Rosen has traveled nationally and internationally teaching chiropractic technique, pediatrics, cranial adjusting chiropractic philosophy and practice management. His educational offerings include hands-on and online workshops and seminars, guest lectures, instructional videos, written books and articles, published research papers, and one-on-one interviews.

He is dedicated to giving chiropractors the tools and skills necessary to take care of children and to inspire them to expand this branch of chiropractic. With his wife, Dr. Nancy Watson, they run the Peak Potential Institute offering premier educational programs for the chiropractic profession. Their most recent book, It’s All in the Head, was published for the public. You can find it on Amazon, and was written to inform and bring awareness of the implications that cranial distortions can have in the initial stages of childhood growth and development. For more information, check out his website at drmartinrosen.com. Hi Dr. Rosen, welcome to the show. I’m very excited to have you on today.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Hi, Laura. Thank you very much for having me. I’m really excited about being here with you.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

You’re such a wealth of knowledge and information regarding pediatric development. You’ve been teaching this content to the chiropractic profession for 40 years. I’m excited for you to share it with all the moms listening so that they can have a better understanding, especially when their gut intuition tells them that maybe something’s a little bit off with their baby or child and what they can do about it.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

I think that’s great. It’s funny because today I had two moms come in. I was taking care of their babies and both of them were just so frustrated because they weren’t getting any help with their pediatrician. One of them was a mom who was having difficulty nursing her baby, and the pediatrician said, “Don’t worry about it. Just put her on formula.” And she was like, “No, I want to nurse my baby.” She goes, “They have nothing for me.” Actually, I’ve adjusted the baby about three times now, and she starting to nurse and the mom’s really happy. The other one was a child who had bowel movement problems, wasn’t pooping. And the pediatrician said, oh, give him prunes, or don’t worry about it. It’s only seven days. I’m like, only seven days. If I didn’t have a bowel movement for seven days, I would not be a happy person.

But I hear this all the time, and I think you’re right. Parents need a place to go, but they also need someone to listen to their intuition. It’s never been my experience that a mother is wrong when she’s talking about her child’s development. I remember one of the worst cases was a woman, the kid was 11 years old and she was living in California. She was visiting in Massachusetts through relatives, and someone told her to come see me because she had problems with her kid. I evaluated the kid. She came in for the report of findings, and I was telling her what I found and just started crying, just sobbing. She goes, “I knew there was something wrong with my kid at 18 months. I have been screaming at pediatricians, telling them there’s something wrong, and you’re the first one who’s actually told me that there’s not only something wrong, but something I can do about it.” It’s literally been almost 10 years that she’s been doing it.

So, yeah, it’s an extremely important topic. I think the medical system is overwhelmed right now, and we as chiropractors and especially pediatric chiropractors, we really see this and we study the neurology. And that’s what we’re looking for is neurological changes. So, if a mother has a doubt or an issue, and for me, if I see a neurological issue, whether it be considered minor or major, I want to change that. I think that one of the things we talked about is common vs. normal, and that’s the problem is people say, oh, it’s no big deal. My friend’s kid had that and my other kid has that, and this kid has that. And it’s common for a kid to throw up. It’s common for a kid to have reflux. It’s common for kids. That’s not okay when common and normal intercede and become the same thing. That’s a problem. And that’s where my big concern is.

Normal is just the baseline. I don’t even like normal. As chiropractors, we talk about optimal potential. So, normal is literally just the very baseline of what we want for our children at the very baseline, and we want more than that. Every parent wants more than that. So, I think it’s a real problem that common becomes acceptable. And parents need a way, like you said, to see whether it be a developmental milestone issue, whether it be the way the child looks, like the child looks a little strange. There was a study done and in the American Pediatric Association came out and said that 47% of children that are born today have some kind of head distortions, whether it be diagnosis of plagiocephaly or brachycephaly or whatever it is, flat head syndrome. 47% of them have it, only 10% of them should be treated. And I’m like-

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s so weird.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

… where do you get that number? That’s like getting to go to the chiropractic office and say, well, 47% of the people I see have spinal dysfunction, but I’m only going to treat 10% of them. But that’s the standard. When your kid looks-

Dr. Laura Brayton:

You’re talking about the worst 10, the worst of the worst, right? Super severe. Everybody looking at this head is going to know there’s an issue.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Exactly. And that’s when you treat it. There’s a 21 millimeter difference and the kid looks like he was born in a waffle maker, then we should treat that. I know. And it’s crazy.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

And the treatment is typically a DOC Band, that’s the treatment.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Or a helmet, which, again, an external fix as opposed to an internal fix. That’s what I love about what we do. It was amazing. This mom who I was talking to about the child having trouble pooping, she goes, “I don’t understand, doctor,” she goes, “I want to get to the root cause of this. I want to know why this is happening to my child. I want to know what I can do not only to help him,” and she was just like, “it’s so frustrating. They never get to the root cause.” And the root cause is neurology often, structure, function, neurology. That’s the root causes. I think it’s really important for parents to have a way to determine. That’s why we wrote the book. That’s why Nancy and I wrote the book during COVID. We couldn’t teach as we used to teach. We were teaching 20, 25 times a year, and during COVID locked down, there were places we couldn’t go. So, we said, what do we do?

Dr. Laura Brayton:

You had some extra time on your hands.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

We have extra time. We’re together. We can’t just hang out. And we were married 40 years. If we just hang out together, that would be devastating, so we worked together. That’s why we wrote the book, It’s All in the Head, because we wanted to give parents baselines, which is what we do in office. We look at the child’s baseline and we want to change it. I was thinking today as I was driving here, I was saying the CDC just released, if you know, new guidelines. And the guidelines are horrific because what they did is they pushed everything out, they pushed language out, they took creeping and crawling out of a normal milestone, and they pushed everything out. Even patients of mine who are speech therapists or pediatric nurses came in and said, “This is horrible. They’re going to miss all these developmental signs.

They’re going to not give people early intervention, early development.”

And the thing I was thinking about when I was coming there, I said, you know if kids are functioning worse, if they’re not reaching their milestones that are pre-programmed into the brain. They’ve been pre-programmed for generations, generations and generations. They’re pre-programmed loops at feedback, so when you lift your head, when you can turn, sit, crawl, on and on and on, that develops a nervous system. If we take those pre-programmed loops and stretch them out and make them longer, we are going to have developmental delays, developmental issues. And I was thinking, if you watch the Olympics and every year the athletes got worse when we take the world records and oh, they’re slower this year. Good, let’s bring the world record down. You’re going to say, no, we don’t accept that in that. But we can accept that in our children? Personally, I can’t accept that in children. That’s insane, lowering the neurological bar.

I don’t know how the CDC could… Well, I don’t know how they could sleep at night for a lot of things, but in particular, you can’t lower the bar. And that’s the same thing we just talked about in the beginning. They’re taking things that are becoming common and maybe part of the numbers are seen because of COVID kids have been locked down, kids have had mass, they haven’t been able to interrelate. It has definitely limited their ability to grow because they need stimulation. So, now they’re seeing it, and now that’s becoming acceptable norm as opposed to basically now being able to increase stimulation so the nervous system can then develop to its potential. So, yeah, I find a lot of that very frustrating.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It’s frustrating. And I think what’s ironic is you’re reading the guidelines. It keeps saying, if you see a regression or if something isn’t off, ask for early intervention, talk to your doctor, essentially saying you’re your child’s advocate, your child better than your doctor, and you need to ask for these things. So, they’re saying that, but yet like you said, they lowered the milestones.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Actually, the CDC recommendation is that your child should have a neurological evaluation at 18 months. And what we know and has been said in literature, not just in the chiropractic literature, but in the psychological literature that the first year of life is when 80 to 90% of the nervous system foundation is laid down. In the first year of life, the brain grows 101%. So, you’re talking about if you’re waiting until 18 months in the second year of life, it only grows another 15%. So, you’ve lost the foundational period. You’ve lost that period. If you are waiting until 18 months…. There was a study done on cerebrospinal fluid. For those of you who don’t know, cerebrospinal fluid is that lymphatic system in the central nervous system. It bathes the brain, it bathes the spinal cord, it brings nutrients to it reduces toxins from that system. It’s the lifeblood of the central nervous system.

They did a study and they found that if they found kids who had too much stagnant or too much cerebrospinal fluid in their cranium, in their head from six to 12 months, they could diagnose up to 70% accuracy that those kids will be on the autism spectrum by the time they’re two. That’s the six to 12 month period. So, if you’re waiting 18 months to evaluate your kid, you just miss that window. You just increase the chance of your child having a neurodevelopmental delay. I don’t even know what the percentage is, but that many fold, if they can diagnose 70% of the time. So, yeah, you’re right. So that is just insane lowering that bar and missing those milestones, especially that first year is criminal as far as I’m concerned.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It seems like what they’re doing, because as you’re saying, over the past few decades, we’re seeing these epigenetic changes. We’re seeing these delays become much more common. So much like an explosion of diagnoses. It’s like, okay, now we have to hit this bell curve. We have to get the vast majority of children to fit in this bell curve instead of… Right?

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Right.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It’s like going the other way.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Exactly, yeah. We’ve got to create average and who wants to create average? We don’t want to create… The other problem that is I’d seen it-

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Trying to lower the standard for average too.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

And I think part of that, it may be COVID is part of it, but I also think of it now, the birth process and the pregnancy process is being treated as a disease. Parents go through this intense amount of evaluation protocols, whether it be ultrasound and all these tests. I have this happen, and we’re in Boston and Boston is medical Mecca. We have children’s hospital. I have patients come in, moms who are pregnant for the first time, and maybe they’re a little older and maybe they’re 35, 36, and first they’re classified as a geriatric pregnancy, that’s just an insult.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It’s so insulting.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

I don’t even know what to say with that. The first time someone came in to me and said, “I have a geriatric pregnancy.” I’m like, “My wife would have a geriatric pregnancy, but you don’t have a geriatric. You’re pregnant and you’re 36 years old.” I think so many of the interventions that occur in the hospitals too… And so, the point that I was making is that when they start to get the geriatric pregnancy thing, they tell women that if they don’t give birth within the first week of their due date, they’re going to induce them.

And then when they start to the induction process, then that increases the use of forceps, vacuum and increases the percentage of C-sections. I think the C-section rate in Massachusetts is one of the highest in the country. It’s probably like 38%. Add the trauma of a birth and the trauma of what they put mothers through in pregnancy thinking that, oh, my due date’s Thursday, if I don’t give birth… I’ve never given birth, but I can’t imagine that stress around giving birth on the exact date that is supposed to be your due date doesn’t impact the pregnancy and doesn’t impact the whole

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It does. Or you’ll see like, oh, my amniotic fluid’s a little low, or the baby is not head down. There’s so many factors at the end of that woman’s pregnancy, or I tested positive for strep B, all these things that are really shifting the type of birth maybe that woman wanted to create for herself. She feels like her hands are tied.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Well, they are. Sometimes it doesn’t happen. Sometimes the optimum birth doesn’t happen. I know sometimes mothers blame themselves, which they obviously should never do, but the bottom line is there are ways that you can have a conscious pregnancy and conscious birth without people throwing all this stuff at you. Like you just said, if you have a “geriatric” pregnancy, then well, we should test your amniotic fluid. You should do genetic testing because you have a higher propensity for Down syndrome. It’s all the stuff that they freak parents out. It’s like people have been having babies for a fairly long time. I think it’s a process that can occur naturally. There are times when interventions are necessary, but to set up the paradigm that… Again, it starts out the whole process. We know that stress hormones during pregnancy affect the babies.

They’ve done studies for 100 years now. They just say, oh, the type of music, the type of environment the mother’s in affects the baby. That’s like, really? That’s genius. We’ve only been saying that’s since the inception of time that that affects the baby. So, you have this whole process and then you have a baby that comes out stressed. You’re right, it’s endemic in our society that I see kids that we call sympathetic driven. They’re so tight, they’re so tense, they’re not sleeping well, they can’t nurse well, and it’s because their nervous system is already charged. They come out in a fight or flight state.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s right. They’re literally like running from a tiger. They think what, so is mom. And then you look at these dyads and you’re like, it’s not shocking when they’re having difficulty with nursing or sleep or pooping, all these normal functions are going to be interrupted.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Well, you think about it when you’re in a fight or flight state, you have an autonomic nervous system. It has two parts, sympathetic and parasympathetic. So, when you’re in a fight or flight state, you got the sympathetic system firing. The sympathetic system is not a healing system. It’s a fight or flight. It’s an active system. The parasympathetic does all the rest and digest is what we call it. It controls all that. If that switch never gets turned on because you’re in that sympathetic state, you’re right then kids have all these problems, digestive issues, neurological issues. Their muscles are so tense and tight that they can’t lift their head or they can’t turn over, or they can only turn over one direction. They’re hypersensitive. This is completely hypersensitive. They have hypersensitive gag reflexes, their tone is hypersensitive. They don’t like tummy time, and the list just goes on and on and on.

Unless you can get that child back into a state of balance where their parasympathetic system comes back into play, then you’re going to have problems. I think it was two years ago, the number one drug given to kids was like Prilosec or Zantac.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Right, reflux.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Yeah, for reflux.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

They give them to babies.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Oh, yeah, no, that’s the number one drug given to infants. What I’ve noticed, I’ve been in practice 40 years as you mentioned, and there are all these little things. When I first got into practice, the number one reason parents brought kids to us is because they had chronic ear infections. That was the big thing. All kids had gotten it and chiropractors would help.

I remember this MD used to send these patients to me with ear infections all the time. One time I called her and I said, “I Jeannie,” I said, “why are you sending some of the kids to me and not the other kids who have ear infections? I’m just curious. I don’t want to lose the referrals.” She goes, “Well, I figure if they only have one ear that gets chronically infected that it’s structural, but if they have two ears that is chronically effected, then it’s not structural, and then I treat them and don’t send them to you.”

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s so funny.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

I’m like, huh. My first thought is… But I didn’t want to lose the half that she was sending to me. So, I kept quiet. But yeah, I hear stuff like that all the time. Parents used to ask me to call the physician who referred, and they would make no sense. They just would say stuff. I remember one kid came and-

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s awesome that they even referred to you, right?

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Right. But I remember one kid came in with some mild hip dysplasia and mom said, oh… I said I would adjust him and I gave her some exercise and things to do. She said, “Will you please call the orthopedic surgeon?” Fine, I called the guy.

And I called him up and he goes, “I don’t know what you’re going to do.” He goes, “I’ve operated on babies like that,” he goes, “you have to pull and yank at that hip because those ligaments are tight. You really have to push and force it. I don’t know how you’re going to do that from the outside.” After I threw up, I hung on the phone up and I said to mom, I

said, “Why don’t we just give this two months and they’ll re X-Ray, if there’s a problem, go from there.” And of course, the kid was fine.

There are always times for emergency procedures. There are always time to take the next step, but they need to be able, one, I know that most chiropractors will listen to parents better. We’ll take their information. And also, we have a global look at the process. So, we’re going to look at all the things that impact him. I ask parents, I say, “What’s the baby’s Apgar score?” And they’ll go, “Why?” I say, “Well, because sometimes the Apgar score gives me an idea of how stressful the birth was to the baby.” I understand that it might’ve been hard or difficult or easy for you, whatever that was around that birth, but how did the baby react to it? If it had a really low Apgar score, that’s telling me that baby came out distressed. Those are the kind of factors that we can factor in and that most medical doctors don’t. If the baby had a Apgar score of four and then five minutes later have Apgar score nine, they’re happy. And I’m like, well, that was just a stressed baby whose system wasn’t able to respond to that stress, but where did that stress land?

Dr. Laura Brayton:

And I would even say some of the most natural, least stress type of births, those babies can still be born with alignment issues.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Oh, absolutely.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

And that’s why as pediatric chiropractors we’re like, just bring in the baby for a wellness checkup as soon after birth as possible. We can prevent a lot of these issues.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Having, like you said, a more natural birth doesn’t supersede the fact that the baby may have some kind of stress. There’s a study they did in England, and I think it was 2015, 16, it was an osteopathic study, but they evaluated, I think it was 100 infants within 72 hours of their birth. And all of them were considered normal births. So, there were no forceps and no C-sections. Basically, they found 95% of those kids had some kind of structural imbalance, either in the cranium or the upper cervical spine, even though the birth was considered normal and natural, and that was within 72 hours, so yeah.

That’s the other thing that we talk about, and I think you made a really good point. We’re chiropractors, we’re not just looking for symptoms. We’re looking to see function, neurological function. So, bring the child into get checked. If there’s nothing wrong, great. If there’s something wrong, we can do it. We don’t want to wait until the child’s not nursing or having reflux. We don’t want to wait to that point. We want to basically get to the place where we can stop that stuff from happening.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Yeah, it’s a different paradigm. We’re looking at more of that preventive mindset. It’s very interesting. The parents that are already patients in my practice really get it. But if I’m seeing a family and the infant’s coming in because they can’t latch and they’re the first family member to get chiropractic care, they’re viewing it a little bit like physical therapy, like let’s resolve this issue once a week for four weeks, whatever it is. And they now, oh, okay, I’m breastfeeding and I’m out of here. That’s the parent’s choice. But I think what I really want to share, and I know you big message is as well, is that there’s so much more we can do with ongoing maintenance visits for helping with milestone development.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Absolutely. I think there’s two problems around that. One is, when I started practicing, we didn’t have the internet. We just had slates and we just carved, no, we didn’t. We didn’t have the internet. So, how I got kids to come in is I got parents in, I adjusted them, I educated them and they went, “Oh, I want to bring my kid in.” Now, it’s backwards because they go on the internet and they find all this stuff that chiropractors help with colic, this, the whole list, and they bring the kid in. They’ve never been to chiropractors. They have chiropractic ideology. It’s medical model. My kid is not sleeping, I want my kid to sleep. So, four weeks later, the kid’s sleeping. They’re like, have a nice day, doc. It is, it behooves us as chiropractors to educate people, not to sell what we’re doing, but to give them an opportunity.

I have a perfect example of a baby today. The came in, she was referred by a dentist. The dentist refers to me a lot. The baby had a revision, but the baby still wasn’t nursing. He said, “Go see Dr. Rosen.” I told the mom about the first phase of care. And then that there was a second phase of care to make sure the pattern is changed and do reconstructive and check your baby. So, today was the last visit on what she signed up for, which was the care to see if the baby’s symptoms got better. And it was three weeks into care. I think it was three weeks. Anyhow, I did my evaluation.

I sat down with mom. I said, “How’s she doing?” She goes, “Well, she’s nursing and she’s doing better.” I say, “This is the time now where you have to make a decision. Do you remember what we talked about that that’s great that we helped your baby with the symptoms, but your baby still has some underlying problems that we also want to help increase the function of her system? Do you want to continue on care because now is the jumping off point for you?” And she signed up to continue on care. I put her on once week.

I was very happy with that because at least I felt like I was able to communicate with her and I didn’t lose this baby because what I see in practice, and I’ve seen it numerous times, and it’s very painful, is I’ll see people come in with their babies and it happens, they come with the babies, the baby gets better, whatever the issue was. And then anywhere from nine to 10 years later, the parent will come back here with the kid is having all these other kind of problems. And what happened is they stopped care. I had one kid, when I saw him as a little kid he had all kinds of health issues. We saw him for about six or eight weeks. He got much better. His father brought him in at nine because he’s a toe walker. He has never not toe walked at nine years old, and he had some other neurological issues.

Another kid, I saw her when she was about 16 months. I saw her for about six months. She had a whole list of problems. She got better. She just came in at 13 with a scoliosis and seizures because they never… Actually, now, which is amazing, not only is the curvature going away, they just had another EEG and they found no seizure activity. I know. 10, 11 years and this kid was literally suffering because the mom, whatever it was, was it my fault, was it our communication, was it a different parent and never got the message? That, I think, is where we lack the commitment to do that.

You said something again, and I love to come back to this because one of the things that dentists did that was genius, they were losing a market share. So, what they did is they all got together and said that people should get their teeth checked and cleaned periodically. Let’s say it’s every six months. And when they come to get it cleaned every six months, they also get checked by the dentist. And if there’s nothing wrong, you go home and you go get your teeth cleaned next six months. If there’s something wrong, they suggest it. What chiropractors have to do is just what you said is get them to understand that your child should come in to get checked or you should come in to get checked. If there’s nothing wrong, go home and then come back. There’s nothing wrong with that paradigm. It’s actually the paradigm that we want.

People will say to me sometimes if I adjust them and I do a lot and there are maintenance care, they go, “Oh, I got my money’s worth today.” I’ll stop and say, “No, you didn’t,” I said, “Because maintenance care is not about me finding a lot of stuff to do. The whole idea is either I’m not doing it right, you’re doing something wrong, or your maintenance care is too long.” And I’ll say, “You know what? We had a lot to do today. You’ve been coming every month. Why don’t you set up a time for two weeks?” And in my practice, people do that. They go, “Yeah.” I don’t want to adjust your knee, your elbow, your hip, your head, your neck, your back. That’s not maintenance care.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s not maintenance.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

No, that’s not. It’s like going to the dentist and he goes, oh, well, I’m glad you came in because you need a scaling, a root canal. And they just give you a list of… And you go, oh, that’s great, doc, I got my money’s worth today. You going to take all my teeth out and put in an implant. No, you freak out.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

They also do charge more for that care. We give it all for the same price.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Right, exactly.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It’s important for people to understand, the moms listening, recognizing why you would bring your child in regularly to get checked by a pediatric chiropractor. Like Dr. Rosen said, that first year life is just so instrumental. Can we talk a little bit more about common vs. normal, what you do with that first year of life?

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Yeah. Okay. In the first year of life, the child’s nervous system is so, so, so sensitive that what’s happening is they’re actually forming what are called synapses. And synapses are the interrelation between the nerves that create the pathways. Think about it this way, if you’re building a city and you put people in that city and you want to be able to connect them with roadways, the synapses are the roadways part of the roadways that you’re trying to connect and the communication lines, if you were talking about telephone lines or you’re talking about Wi-Fi, whatever you’re talking about, cell towers, those are all the communication synapses. And the actual peak synaptic development, the time your body’s creating the most synapses, it reaches that at eight months of age. That’s why. So, you’re laying a foundation. It’s like if you don’t build enough neurological foundation, then when kids get older, they start to develop problems.

Most of the time when kids are diagnosed with issues, it’s somewhere around age three to four. Again, we go back to the fact that that happened or the groundwork was set in the first two years of life. When they’re three or four and they have to call on more of their nervous system to function what we call the front part of the brain where maybe they’re going to school or they have to think more or they have to become more responsible as kids. When that happens, their system starts to fail because they’re working so hard just to maintain that baseline level. So, when you call more input into them, like the difference between sensory integrative and sensory proprioceptive disorder is basically a kid who can’t process information. One of those kids will shut down because the information just overwhelms them. The other kid will act out and get violent. It’s actually the same neurological issue. It’s just how they act around that. And that, again, is set in their first year of life.

So, the brain grows 101%. But what’s really incredible, and that’s why I’m really upset about the CDC thing, is the cerebellum, which is right at the base of the brainstem here. It’s like your mainframe computer. It processes all the information it has those pre-programmed moves we talked about, it grows, now catch this 240% in the first year life. That’s your mainframe computer. That’s where all the information gets processed. That’s like if you buy a computer with a really small hard drive and start downloading a lot of pictures, what happens? It stops, or your phone, whatever it is. You can’t download anymore. That’s what happens to kids’ brains if there is interference with the way the cerebellum functions, it’s the processing center. So, they can’t process information. That’s when all those processing disorders occur. By age two, 80 to 90%, the adult volume of nerve cells are being laid down.

So, when we start to take milestones, reflexes, developmental things and push that bar away, what we’re doing is we’re really setting up for failure later on in life. If they have traumatization. There was a study done in the 1990s actually, and they found that if there was traumatization to the lower cervical spine, which often happens during the birth process from tractioning, if there was trauma in that because we are fault-tolerant individuals, which means we can compensate for those issues, that we will do that for a while, but when we hit age five or age six, that ability to compensate or that threshold breaks. When that threshold breaks, then we start to see symptoms. Kids may have behavioral issues, they may complain of headaches, they may have learning disabilities, they can have behavioral issues because what happens is they’ve been compensating for so long, and then when the threshold is no longer, it will be reached, the system breaks down, and that occurs as soon as the birth process. It can happen if there’s traction on the upper cervical spine.

What you have to understand about the pediatric spine is that it’s different than an adult spine. And what it is, it’s very pliable, and most of the injuries come from things being tractioned or too tight. And when that happens, nerves can’t fire correctly. And if nerves can’t fire correctly, then the body can’t respond correctly. That’s why we have to track reflexes. That’s why we track milestones. That’s why we wrote in the book, It’s All in the Head. We gave people normal parameters that they can watch to track their baby. The other thing that we also see is visual issues on the outside. As a chiropractor, we evaluate people’s spines. That’s what people are looking for. A lot of times, parents will come in or they’ll say, oh, my husband always walks you with one shoulder high or one hip is higher.

A runner will say, boy, when I run, doc, I feel like my left leg is hitting the ground harder. Well, those compensations and those distortions go all the way up into the cranium. Watch the news, well, don’t watch the news now because it’s horrible.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Don’t watch the news.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

But watch the talking heads on the news and see how they speak. And you’ll see they have head tilts, their jaw deviates from one side. Watch babies. It’ll be the same thing. A little baby just came in the other day and mom said, “He really likes to nurse on my right breast, but he hates nursing on my left breast.” And as soon as you look at the kid and I saw his jaw, I could see his jaw deviated to one side. Every time he opened his mouth, his jaw would pull to one side. Of course, one side of his bite or his suck was stronger than the other, so he liked to nurse on the side that was stronger. You’ll see things with the eyes, watch kids’ eyes and see if their eyes track. It’s very important when they’re learning to walk that their eyes track straight against the horizon. It’s called the visual proprioceptive righting reflex. If their eyes don’t track normal, they’ll have balance issues.

Sometimes parents will say, oh, Johnny’s just not coordinated. Well, it’s not that Johnny’s not just coordinated, is that his neurological system is under stress and he can’t balance it right. You can see it, by the way, his eyes track. Or you’ll have other things where kids, at a certain point in your life, your eyes, which around age three, your eyes supposed to converge, which means they’ll be able to look to the midline. If you can’t do that, you can’t read. So, if your kid’s going to school and having trouble reading very often it could be just because neurologically speaking, he can’t converge his eyes, which means if he puts something within 18 inches of his face, he can’t see it clearly because his eyes don’t converge. Or they’ll get headaches when they read because one eye tends to drift. These are all neurological signs that we can tell or parents can tell when these are happening, that their children are having neurological challenges.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

If they start to see these things, what would you recommend for them?

Dr. Martin Rosen:

To see a pediatric chiropractor? If parents bring their child to a physician and then the physician either doesn’t agree or now follows the new CDC milestone, which is your kid doesn’t have to speak two words by age 12, don’t worry about it if he’s not talking by 14 months or 18 months. They’re going to follow that guideline. Most chiropractors are not. Matter of fact, any chiropractor I have spoken to is appalled by those new guidelines. If you feel like there’s something wrong with your child, it’s your job as a parent to seek appropriate help. Pediatric chiropractors are trained to determine neurological function, and not just baseline neurological function, but to actually strive to create optimal function. We don’t want to settle just for making that threshold. We like to see kids get beyond that threshold. Not every kid’s going to be a genius and every kid’s going to be perfect, but within that nervous system, we can optimize their function so that their individual potential can be reached. That’s our goal.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s the goal. I think for moms listening, if you’re looking for a pediatric chiropractor community, you can go to the ICPA website, International Chiropractic Pediatric Association, and they have a list of accredited doctors.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

They do. And also, if you want to go to our website, it’s drmartinrosen.com. And go to our graduates, we have a whole list of all the people who’ve graduated from our courses. You’re going to be on that list soon.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s right.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

That’s right. We have a list of that too. You go on there, you can find pediatric chiropractors that are trained. And the ICPA, like you said, is a great website. There’s a bunch of programs out there now that are training pediatric chiropractors because we’re in such need and such demand.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Such need. I want to talk a little bit about the cranial distortions that you see in your practice because I think that’s also something that the average chiropractor is not adjusting the skull.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

The simple version is 80% of the central nervous system is in your brain. That’s where 80% of the control mechanisms are. And as I said earlier, let me show you this, so this is a little baby’s skull. And what makes it so different and so unique is that all these soft spots and all these bones are not quite joined together. They’re separated by the dural system. The dura is that system that attaches comes outside of the cranium, attaches around the cranial bones, comes down through the neck, through the foramen magnum here, attaches all the way down the spine all the way to the tailbone, and attaches to every single nerve root as it exits the spine. So it’s a system that controls how much tension is in the nervous system and controls how two things happen. One, how nerves transmit impulses, and two, how cerebrospinal fluid moves up and down the spine, which we talked about a little while ago.

So, if there are distortions in this cranium and then it grows to the point where the sutures seal or fuse, then those distortions become more permanent. What happens is the distortions are a reflex of how much tension the attachment points are inside of the dura. If you see a child with a very, what they call plagiocephaly with one side of the head flat and one bulging out, or they call brachycephaly with the head really flat and wide, or you see one ear really higher than the other. Picture that that soft tissue underneath it is being torqued. That creates tension. If you think of a tent, if I have a tent pole and one side of the tent pole is pulled or the other, that’s what’s happening inside the cranium. And when that happens, it affects the nerves by putting abnormal pressure on the brain.

It affects the dura by changing tension on the nervous system. And also, it affects the way cerebrospinal fluid flows. We all have some distortions, we’re not all perfect, but when the distortions get too big and they affect the tension membranes in that, you’ll see… If you have a little boy or girl and they’re constantly banging their head, there’s a good chance that the reason they’re banging their head is because there’s something inside that’s bothering them that’s too tight and they’re trying to loosen it. Or you have a baby or child that keeps smacking themselves in the head, or a baby or child that can only nurse on one side that we talked about a minute ago, or a baby who doesn’t turn their head as well to one side or the other. All those things are telling you that the system is too tight, it’s too wound up.

We start looking at the cranium and work our way all the way down the spine, all the way to the tailbone because we think it’s the entire system and that entire tube is connected. In our world, we feel it’s extremely important to make sure that these cranial bones are in the right position. So when they become adult, like this guy over here and they become what actual sutures and they actually start to fuse, then we want to make sure that that process has become as symmetrical as possible to create as least amount of tension within the central nervous system as possible.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Obviously, if there’s a kid that has a, especially a moderate to severe plagiocephaly or distortion in their cranium, we can assume that there’s going to be developmental challenges with the brain that first year of life, depending on where the flatness is located.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

I have never seen a kid with what’s a pretty severe plagiocephaly that doesn’t have, when the parent comes in, doesn’t have another list of symptoms, whether it be the child can’t turn over, child hates tummy time, my kid only sleeps an hour and a half and wakes up. Their system is real tense, they’re hypersensitive, they have allergies, eczema, anything, their system… I’ve never honestly can say that I’ve never seen a kid with severe plagiocephaly that there are not lists of other things that are going on because of how the nervous system is under stress.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It’s really that simple. So all we have to do is take the stress off a nervous system and then it can function normally.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Sometimes this helps parents when they think about it. When you put a helmet on a child, if they have plagiocephaly, so there’s a flat spot and there’s a bulging spot, and what they do or what a helmet does is it takes where the bulging spot is and creates a pressure against that side of the head, and on the flat spot it leaves a space. So, this is what it looks like. There’s a space here, and what it’s doing is it’s forcing the head, the cranium to grow into that space. It’s actually inhibiting the growth here. What’s causing that growth to happen is that, as I said, the brain is growing 101% in the first year. What actually they’re forcing to happen is they’re forcing the brain to now grow in this direction because that’s how the cranium expands. That’s the external process of the helmet, and it does have some negative side effects.

What chiropractors do is we’re finding the areas of the dura that’s too tight. For example, if a little baby has a problem with their neck here, and it’s pulling really tight on the attachment to this cranium bone here called the occiput, if it’s pulling too tight, it’s not going to allow that bone to expand. And so, if that bone can’t grow normally, what’s going to happen again, the brain is going to force the cranium to grow in the other direction because it’s going to increase in size. But if I release the tension here, if I release that internal tension, then I can allow that occiput to move normally. And once the body sees that, it’s going to then allow the brain to shift back towards that position and balance itself out. As a chiropractic paradigm, it’s an internal mechanism as opposed to the medical paradigm, which is an external mechanism. What we’re actually doing is correcting an imbalance. So, not only we’re changing the plagiocephaly, but we’re changing the tone of the nervous system, so that’s increasing function as well.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It’s so much more than just aesthetics. I think that drives me nuts. When I hear a pediatrician, okay, this baby’s got a flat head, and not just that look, but in there’s facial issues that come with it. Put them on them in a helmet so that their face is straight and it can wear glasses with even ears.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Right. Exactly. That’s the chiropractic paradigm. We have a global outlook. We don’t compartmentalize the body. It’s like, oh, this is an eye, this is an ear, this is a mouth. It’s like, no, this is an entire picture, and that’s what we’re trying to… We’re make the picture balance as opposed to… In medicine, very often, not all medical doctors, but very often they compartmentalize. You see that happen, especially during COVID. You see that happen all the time. People will call their medical doctor up and say, oh, it doesn’t sound right, you should go to the emergency room. It’s like they don’t even want to deal with that stuff if it’s not within their awareness level or whatever, their treatment protocol level. Chiropractors don’t compartmentalize. We globalize. If your tailbone is crooked and your head is crooked and things are not functioning and moving normal, we want to create balance in that system, so things balance normally.

Again, dealing with optimum function, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create an optimum situation or an optimum foundation for the child’s nervous system to grow so that they can literally be, I know it sounds like a cliché, but be all they can be when things change. We talked about the Olympics in the beginning. Athletes train and function under optimum tension. Athletes use chiropractic care all the time to increase their optimum function. It can happen as people get older, but just imagine if you lay down this amazing foundation before this whole nervous system develops. So, what you’ve given your kid is a really strong, strong baseline from which to grow from. That to me, is the secret of what we do.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

It’s so powerful. There’s no drugs, no surgery. This is just really supporting the innate intelligence of the body to heal and function normally. I remember when I first started practicing, I don’t hear it so much anymore, but it’s like a new patient. Oh, doc, if I start getting adjusted, I’m going to have to get adjusted for the rest of my life. You’re going hooked on the crack.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Right. Exactly.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

I’ve been under care my whole life and I can’t imagine not getting an adjustment. My body functions better. I feel better physically, mentally, emotionally when I get adjusted. So, why would I not want that?

Dr. Martin Rosen:

I ask patients, I said, “Is there anything that you own that you don’t have to take care of? Do you have a house?” Stuff falls. We have a house. We just put a new roof on two years ago. It’s like, oh, there’s only a couple of holes, I think I’ll just leave it until actually the water pours into the house. Or they think that they get addicted, like we’re addicted to chiropractic care. No. What’s happening is when your body’s functioning and it’s not. And when you feel like it’s not functioning, then you feel off and you know that it’s off and you want to get it corrected. Now, I haven’t been adjusted my whole life. I didn’t discover chiropractic until I was about 19, but I’ve been adjusted ever since then. But my kids have been adjusted since they were born.

The whole idea again is that we’re checking the spine, we’re improving function, and if you want to maintain your spine for the rest of your life, so people say to me, “Hey doc, how long do I have to come in?” I said, “Until you don’t get rid of your spine.” As long as you have a spine, it needs to be checked. Different people need to be checked at different times depending on what their activity level is and their health level and all that. But yeah, it’s really about optimizing function. Again, it makes me as crazy as it makes you.

It’s like if you put gas in your car, do you never have to put gas in your car again? It’s like all these things that we want to maintain, but we don’t want to maintain our body. We’re addicted if we have to go to the chiropractor. I said, “No, you’re getting your spine checked.” I live in New England. And so, one of the things we always have to overcome is don’t fix if it ain’t broken. That’s like the New England paradigm. It’s like, well, some things if you wait till they break, you can’t fix. So, you don’t… Yeah.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

I think that’s what’s beautiful about maintenance is it’s not about symptoms. You can ideally see your chiropractor when you’re not having pain and you’re going to prevent that pain from happening. You’re going to feel better, function better, less prone to injury. Oh, I was just going to say, a big mantra on my podcast is, mama self-care. So, really mothers taking care of themselves first with chiropractic being part of that so that they can take care of everyone else around them.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Perfect example of that. I just had a woman, she came in last week and I adjusted her. She said, “I’m due really soon. I feel like it’s coming.” I said, “I might not be here on Friday.” When I’m supposed to come in. I said, that’s fine, no problem. This morning she came in, she gave birth on Friday. She gave birth on Friday. She came in, she said, I didn’t say this, she said it, so no one blamed me. She said it was an easy birth. It was five and a half hours. She said it, not me. But it was five and a half hours.

But she said, “But I’m tired and my pelvis. So, I wanted to come in and get adjusted. My mother and father are at my house, so I just left the baby to come here and get adjusted, and next week I’m going to bring the baby in for you to check. My other son was…” But it was right, she needed to take care of herself. She knew it. She felt the birth was fairly easy on the baby, so she didn’t feel the baby was really distressed. So, she’s bringing the baby in next week, but she needed to take care of herself so she could take care of her baby. It was a perfect example. And she was right on. She gave birth on Friday and she was in on Tuesday.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Yeah, I love that. I remember getting adjusted six days after I gave birth. I saw Dr. Christine Benner, and I brought my son in as well.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Oh, Christine. Yeah.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Yeah. I reached out to her. I was like, “My son has got a left temporal issue going on. I’m not in a head space to adjust him right now. And by the way, while I’m there, can I get an adjustment?” So, we both received care and it was powerful. I wasn’t having necessarily any pain. I ran a marathon. It was intense work. After I got off the table, I was like, holy crap. I feel so amazing right now. And I wasn’t even in pain before.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Right. Well, that’s the difference when you change the bar. It’s like the common and normal bar that we just talked about. It’s like when change the bar, yeah, well, I don’t feel that bad. And people say that all the time to me, and I’m sure they say it to you, when they get adjusted, they get up and they go, wow, I could stand. I can take a deep breath. I feel great. And kids will do that. You’ll see a little kid come in that he’s kind of lethargic and he is really tired, I’ll adjust him. He’s like, mommy can I, because we can give stickers out, they mommy, can I go get stickers? Mom looks and goes, who’s this kid? He wasn’t like that. It goes both ways. We have little babies who would… I just adjusted this little baby. He just came in. He had really severe plagiocephaly. His parents do not want to do a helmet. We’ve been taking care of him for about four weeks.

He started with a 15 millimeter difference. Now he’s down to 10, but… Right, it’s amazing. But he came in today and he got adjusted. He just lay on his mom. Babies are on their moms very often. He lay on his mom. He went through the whole adjustment, didn’t cry. And she goes, “Oh my God, it’s so different than the first time.” Because he was very scared, he was very tense. The first time he cried a lot during the adjustment, not because he’s hurt, but because he was scared and angry, and now he just lay there, got his entire adjustment, and you could see. So, his head literally changed five millimeters that changed his entire nervous system.

I want to talk about just one thing before I do that because I know this is for moms. People always ask me, well, is chiropractic care safe for kids? And what I want to tell you is that it’s actually safer to adjust a baby than it is to adjust an adult. And the reason for that is because not only were very specific, we use a very low force to make an adjustment. And so the amount of force that we’re putting into the child’s body is extremely low. And if the child cries, it’s usually because they’re angry because holding them in a position, as soon as we stop the adjustment, they’ll stop crying. Whereas an adult is getting adjusted and you’re going to a chiropractor who does what we call high velocity or the popping stuff, the actual force they’re putting in your body is actually stronger. So, the efficacy and the safety of infants is almost non-existent as far as there being any issue or any problem with adjusting a baby.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Yeah, it’s extremely safe, very, very safe. That’s important. There’s no popping or cracking with babies. It’s a very safe, light touch. One thing I see in my practice, and I’m sure you do as well, when kids are old enough to start talking, they ask their parents to bring them in for care. They’ll be like, Johnny, ask to get an adjustment, so I called and made an appointment.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

My whole thing is make your patient or child the advocate for coming in, because kids have a lot of stuff going on as they get older. They have soccer and hockey. So if they don’t want to come to the chiropractor, they’re going to make the parent’s life miserable. And basically, you’ll fall down the list of importance. I have a great story about that. I have this woman come in. She has four kids. She came in first, her husband came in. Then three of the other kids came in, and the fourth kid didn’t come in. And my wife and I, my wife works front desk. My wife’s also a chiropractor, Dr. Nancy Watson. But right, she was working at the front desk, the office. And we kept talking to her. I was like, when are you going to bring Maven? When are you going to bring Maven? No, no, I don’t know.

Finally, she brings her in and the case history, we asked, why did you bring her to this? And she wrote, because the other kids had symptoms, this one never had any particular symptoms. She goes, “I brought her in because I thought it would be cheaper to bring her in now than spending the money on her psychological care while her entire family was under chiropractic care and she wasn’t her whole life.” I said, “I don’t care. Great reason.” But it literally took her six months to wrap it around her head because this child was one of her children who didn’t have any symptoms. Eventually she did bring her in. But yeah, that was what she wrote. It was just like, because her kid was complaining, how come Johnny’s going? How come Sue’s going? How come I’m not going?

Dr. Laura Brayton:

I’ll see that sometimes if mom and dad are on the table and the kid hasn’t been adjusted after a couple visits, they just climb right on afterwards, and looks at me like, hey, I’m next.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

And how many of your patients tell you that the kids are playing chiropractor at home?

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Oh, all the time. We send them home with little toy activators.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Oh yeah, we have those too. We give them the toy activators.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Yeah. Every stuffed animal gets adjusted. Mom and dad gets adjusted at home. They love it.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Yeah, they do. Most kids love it. You’re right, sometimes the parent will come in and the parent goes, “Oh, she’s just been driving me crazy. So when asking to come in for the last week.” They have an innate sense. I adjust animals. I don’t know if you adjust animals. I just, dogs and cats mostly, those are the main animals. And the dogs, the people say when I pull into the parking lot, the dogs starts barking and wagging his tail because they can’t wait to come upstairs. There’s an innate understanding of when your nervous system is working right, and when it feels right. And there’s an innate understanding of people who are helping you do that. Kids get that. Kids feel that.

I always say the hardest age that to get kids to come in regularly is preteen to teenage because their life is just busy and they don’t want to take a half hour out of being with their friends. But it’s not because they don’t want the care. It’s just that I’d rather hang out at my friend’s house than take the half hour or 40 minutes, go to the chiropractor. But otherwise, there’s an intuitive connection.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

There is. I think a lot of pediatric chiropractors have Saturday hours to help accommodate busy family schedules. Monday through Friday is a blur.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

It’s hard for parents, yep. I agree. I think I don’t work Saturdays anymore, but then again, I’m just kind of semi-retired. But you’re right.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

What about your daughter?

Dr. Martin Rosen:

My daughter just opened her own practice.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Oh.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Yeah. It was interesting. And it’s great now. She just wanted to do things different. She didn’t want to be doing things how we did it. I think it was hard because it was her mother and I and her, and then we have a couple other CAs. She opened her own practice. She left right before Christmas in December, and now she’s been opening, she took a time off in January and now she’s in the next town over.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s awesome.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

She’s seeing a lot of patients that she used to see at my… It was a very positive thing for all of us. She seems to be very happy she’s doing her practice where it is. At the point, I’m deciding if I’m going to hire another associate or what I’m going to do at this point in time, because I’m not willing to work any more hours. I’ve been doing it a long time and we’re already full, so we’re actually deciding what to do. But she’s, like I said, in the next town, so technically if we need to, she’s open.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Right. I think that you have four decades of experience. An associate could just learn so much and really help take on that volume, work the Saturdays.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Oh, yeah. I mean, we refer five or six people out every day because I just can’t fit them in our schedule because there’s only a limited amount of time. That’s again what you just said, we always refer, especially the pediatrics to pediatric chiropractors. We know people in our area. We know people from our list. A day doesn’t go by when we get phone calls, do you know someone in California? I get people from Europe. Someone asked me if I knew someone in Honolulu. It’s great to have a listing of people and this great to have people study, so we can refer to them because it is a specialty. You don’t learn it in chiropractic school.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

No. It’s definitely more complex than you can learn during the basic education. This is somebody who’s really done years of additional study and is passionate about working with that population.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Right. That’s the other piece is you really have to want to work with that population. It’s definitely a different prototype in your office. I remember one time, my kids were homeschooled for part of their lives, and so we used to have a big homeschooling community that would come in. I remember at 10:00 in the morning 10:30 in the morning, there could be 12 kids there.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Oh, wow, because they were homeschooled

Dr. Martin Rosen:

And they’re all homeschooled and they all come in together and I remember this one guy, he owned a dojo and he did Taekwondo. He was a nationally ranked Taekwondo master. And he came at one time at the 10:30 slot, and all of a sudden I hear this slam and I go back out after I finished, adjusting a kid, I say, “What happened?” And he said, “Oh, it was James.” I said, “What happened?” He goes, “He walked over the front desk, he goes, ‘In my dojo, kids behave.’” And then he just slammed it down and left because there were 12 kids in the office. We had three families. There was one.

Two of them had four kids. One had three. One of my kids was in there. So, there were 12 kids in the office and it wasn’t like a dojo, let’s just say.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

That’s hilarious. Oh, yeah. I love it. Do you have any last thoughts that you want to share with the audience?

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Last thoughts. Yeah. Moms trust yourself. You know better than anybody else what’s going on with the kid. There’s never been a mom that has said, I thought blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, was wrong, and everybody was arguing with me. You were right. Trust yourself. As Laura said, check on websites for pediatric chiropractors. If you want to go on Amazon or go to itsallintheheadbook.com, you can pick up our book, which will give you some baselines and we’re here to help you. If you get that book and you have questions, you can always email us. We’ll be glad to answer them. I can’t stress how important it is to have children’s spines checked in their first two years of life to lay a strong foundation for a healthy nervous system.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Wonderful. Awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to come out and share your passion, wisdom and everything else, knowledge.

Dr. Martin Rosen:

Great. I appreciate it. It was great. I’m really glad you had me.

Dr. Laura Brayton:

Thank you. All right, mamas, I hope you are inspired to pick up Dr. Rosen’s book, It’s All in the Head, so you can really be an empowered and educated mama to understand what normal infant and childhood development looks like and really how you can optimize your child’s function and potential. I think it’s very exciting that we know that epigenetics is real, and when we can optimize our child’s internal and external environment, they are in the best position to thrive.