Every Behavior is Communication! Get to the Heart of Behavior Problems (ages 3 - 21) with Special Guest Kristan Weisdack

Hey, you guys, no problem parenting is just three steps. Seek first to understand why is my child behaving the way they're behaving? And why am I as the parent responding or reacting to the behavior? Step two, prepare for the worst.

We can't always be prepared. Everyone that's a parent knows that our kids and life throw us curveballs that sometimes, you know, just catch us off guard. But there are behaviors that our kids are, you know, showing us or displaying every day. And those are the ones that we really can be prepared for so that we respond versus react.

And then step three is to change the conversation. Kids these days, we're actually giving them way too much praise. Praise for things that they don't even feel confident or comfortable receiving. And so in step three, we teach you all about how to change the conversation with your kids.

And today I have a special guest on who's actually going to help us seek first to understand, get to the root of the behavior problems that we're facing with our kiddos. You know, it can be tough to deal with behaviors. Maybe your child's biting, hitting, kicking, spinning, running into walls, or climbing on everything. Well, step one of no problem parenting is to seek first to understand, and we're going to do just that today.

My guest is Kristen Wiesdack. She's going to help you to get to the heart of the problem that you've otherwise maybe considered a misbehavior. Kristen is the founder and CEO of Behavior Works of Southern Pennsylvania. Her company offers outpatient services as well as in-person and virtual training for parents and professionals that are often frustrated and overwhelmed when navigating behavior issues with their child or learner, particularly those with autism.

Kristen's personal and professional experience has helped her understand the causes of behavior that are often rooted in nutrition, allergies, undetected vision issues, and problems that occur early on in life. Her holistic approach to behavior is incorporated into every facet of what she and her team do to help others understand and navigate behavior successfully. Are you a parent of a child with autism, ADHD, or other behavioral issues who is frustrated with your current service provider? Are you feeling overwhelmed with the number of services that your child is receiving. Or maybe you feel discouraged because your child has kind of reached a plateau, but you know they have so much more potential. Behavior Works is a great resource for helping you to get to the root of the behavior problems. And I'm so excited to have Kristen with us today. Jackie Fineman is a 30-year family counselor turned parenting coach with more than 40,000 hours of working with children and families. She is thrilled to share behavioral strategies, supportive resources, and parenting stories from her own real-life personal and professional experiences. Parenting is a roller coaster, not a merry-go-round. We can deal with and overcome the behavior challenges within our home and set ourselves and our kids up for a successful ride. Has your roller coaster derailed? No problem. Listen in to get you and your family back on track. So welcome to the show, Kristen. Yeah, thank you for having me,

Jackie. I really appreciate it. I'm just really intrigued by, I know there's a, you specialize in kids with autism, but you serve every kiddo that's having any sort of behavior or emotional issue, right? Generally, we go through a screening process to make sure it's a good fit for our practice. It's autism, ADHD. We get general behavioral concerns and our main focus is the 3 to 21 population. So we get a lot of kids that are autistic just because there are a plethora of them now, because according to the CDC, the data they just released in January, one in every 44 children has autism. And those numbers could actually be higher because when they changed the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual in 2000 and, was it 13? I think it was 2013.

they took out PDD-NOS and Asperger's as diagnoses. And so that number could be larger. So, but just with the intake, the uptake of more and more kids, we're seeing specifically autism. When did you start to realize that nutrition played such an effect on behavior?

It happened more so when my son was born in 2017. I've spent the last 17 years in the field. He's now five. And so his birth really impacted that. When he was born at 33 weeks, he spent the first 52 days of his life in the NICU.

and he had a submucosal cleft palate, which just means that the skin of the roof of his mouth was there, but the bony part wasn't formed together. And he had reflux issues. He had eating issues. And then later on in life, he developed some behavioral issues, headbanging, rigidity, trouble with transitions. So many of the symptoms of, of being on the spectrum.

Um, but what happened really was, it was really a magical thing. I was right out of graduate school. I was hired to work in early intervention because I had spent so many years working in the school settings and with adolescents and adults with autism and behavioral disorders. And so right out of my master's program, being hired into early intervention, I was working on multidisciplinary teams of providers.

One of them was an amazing occupational therapist who was also my son's occupational therapist. She herself also has a child, an adult child now with special needs with autism. And it was really her influence that impacted that along with my son's birth to really start exploring the physiological underpinnings of behavior. Because if you look at the medical history and everything else that goes on, just with nutrition in general, the way that I speak about it is it's like a human recipe.

And I realized that part of my son's human recipe was, was going awry. And so we found out that his reflux was tied to a cow's milk allergy. And so changing my children's diet severely, well, not severely, because that has a negative connotation, but significantly impacted his behavior. He became a different kid.

we they have to be both of my children gluten-free dairy-free and soy limited and so getting the blood work and seeing those things really had a significant impact but it was really his birth plus my time working in early intervention really had a significant impact really opened my eyes up to explore not just nutrition but also to become a certified infant massage instructor, the certified integrated mental health provider, but also a licensed brain gym movement facilitator, because I really wanted to look at how movement plays an impact as well.

What are some of the signs that parents can recognize from infant, you know, to maybe age five, that there could be, you know, we think of it as behavior, if they're not, if they're wet noodling on the floor and throwing a tantrum, if they're screaming at the top of their lungs, and you can't get them to settle. Or if they're tiptoeing and you're like, okay, it's cute until, you know, they're three and four and they're still tiptoeing. Yeah. I mean, some of the major signs, like you said, are toe walking. But it's also what we would call self-stimulatory behavior.

So rocking, flapping, spinning in circles, what they call perseveration. So just really insisting on sameness. So watching the same thing, scripting the same things. This is scripting is just talking about what you've seen before. It's not actual conversational skills. It's just talking about what you've seen. So if you see your child, maybe scripting, or maybe they're nonverbal, you know, and they're not really talking or babbling past the age of like, I would say 14 to 16 months, there's also lining up toys. Now the saying is once you've met one person with autism, you've just met one person with autism. And so it looks different across the board, but if you're noticing that along with, let's say that they have reflux or they have chronic ear infections, or they have what we call allergy shiners, which are just dark circles under the eyes. So looking at to see even if they have white spots under their nail beds,

you know, white spots under the nail beds indicate a zinc deficiency and zinc is related to smell and taste. So it can lead to picky eating. Lack of eye contact is a big one because if you think about it when a kiddo is toe walking and it could be happening for multiple reasons, but if they're toe walking, they're in fight or flight. And so they're really trying to detect a threat and be ready to run at any time, but it's like a predator versus prey. And so if you think about it in the wild, that, you know, if you're a predator, your eyes are looking out front and you're really focused. If you're prey, your eyes are out to the sides, right? You're really focused in your periphery because that's where danger can happen. And so according to the covd.org, it's college of optometrics and vision development. They indicate that children with autism and ADHD are 40% more likely to have vision issues. And in regard to that, um, ocular motor dysfunction. And so it's really essentially that the eyes are not working together. And so this, this touches on that vision part of when you go to a general optometrist, they just look at the each eye. And if that eye is working to see, you know, you have the big e-chart or they prescribe contacts or glasses, or they'll,

you know, they can detect glaucoma and things like that, but they don't look at, are the eyes working together. And so ocular motor dysfunction is a big, big problem because if you're in fight or flight, your eyes are out here all the time, right? They're not going to be able to relax and converge and diverge from near work to distance work, which is very much needed to be able to sit and attend in a classroom. And so all of these components really have to be considered.

that is fascinating to me I hadn't heard of the ocular peripheral what is it called ocular so it's ocular motor dysfunction I hadn't heard of that however Erlen syndrome I've heard of which is more of a light sensitivity right yeah yeah and so I mean you can get light sensitivity squinting covering the eyes some of the kids that side eye like they'll look out of the side of their eye or they'll hold their hand up some of the kids that side eye what's happening is that they get this little wiggle in their eyes called a nystagmus response. So it would be like if you're looking in a camera and the camera is always kind of shaking. And eventually when you turn your head to the side far enough, you get to what's called a null point, N-U-L-L. And so that stretches those eye muscles to a point where that wiggling stops. And so now that can come into focus, whatever they're watching. So a lot of these things are just indicative that one of the eight sensory systems in your body for these kids are not working. And so it's just a matter of when we do our trainings, we do those virtually and in person and hybrid. But when we do our trainings,

we look at testing that eye wiggle. And so we teach people just in how to do an assessment with our child in a matter of five to 10 seconds. And so it's just getting them to follow an object right in front of their eyes, just if it was in the frame of their glasses, to follow the pen back and forth or an object of interest to see if the eyes are wiggling or not. You can really easily pick that up, you know, in the vertical and the horizontal plane, because you can get what's called vertical nystagmus or a horizontal nystagmus. So we check for those smooth pursuits.

and then we put that preferred object or when we when we train adults in our trainings we have them just put a pen to their nose and see if they're both of their eyes look at it and then we have them hide it to the side of the bridge of their nose here to see if they can get both of their eyes to look at it and on the other side and it's interesting because even some of the adults have this revelation that they have these issues as well and so that's why they're getting car sick you know we have behaviors where kids don't want to get into a car it could be very well that they're getting car sick because if their eyes aren't working together because they have inflammation from allergies intolerances and sensitivities or their birth experience you know if when they were born they were born with suction or forceps and it damaged their occipital lobe in the back of their brain and so now you have this information this nerve signaling that's not happening. And there's this connectivity between these sensory systems that are required for homeostasis. And is that correctable? Oh, yes. Yes. And so it's fascinating because the neuroplasticity of the brain is just an amazing thing. But when you go through something, you work with a developmental optometrist, or we do some of the motor planning activities. We incorporate what's called handle here at our practice. The OT that I co-treat with, she

is practices MNRI, it's muskatova neurosensory motor reflex integration. We work with the brain gym. And so just really getting those muscles of the eyes to work together. Yeah. So vision therapy, just motor planning and things like that. But you also have to look at from a dietary perspective, because if that child's body is on high alert because they're in a state of chronic inflammation from eating foods that they're allergic and tolerant or sensitive to they're still you know you have to you have to see both sides of it you have to say how can we remedy the nutritional issues the inflammation issues and then put that child back together from a motoric standpoint because those early learners, when you start to, you know, roll and crawl and do all those things,

it forms neural connections in your brain that are the basis for thought and thinking and abstract thinking. And so if those foundational motor connections are not made, establishing those neural connections, it affects your learning and thinking and regulation. So one instance that we often come across is these babies that have reflux that essentially have a milk allergy. They don't want to crawl because they associate rolling or moving with pain. And crawling is one of the most organizing motor actions that you can do because it organizes the left and right hemispheres of your body and your upper and lower extremities. And so it lays a lot of that really great neural foundations, but also when you crawl, you put pressure across your hand.

And so this muscle that leads right below your thumb and this long muscle that you have right underneath your pinky, when you crawl, it activates those nerves and those muscles. And so what ends up happening is you develop a really great, if you feel that smooth cup in your hand those muscles to bring your fingers together for writing and so now because you had reflux which was an undetected dairy allergy now you might be a messy handwriter or you might have trouble applying the right amount of pressure to write and so it might be really dark or really light and so all of these physiological underpinnings leads behavioral issues because now if I'm presented with a writing activity and I wasn't a crawler because I had reflux,

it's going to be challenging for me and I might fall to the floor. Right. And, or be, as you get older, be embarrassed. So you become the misbehaved kid or the funny kid and get in trouble because you're joking all the time during class and you're being, you know, reprimanded for that. Yeah. This is, this is all really fascinating. You know, I, I've been in the mental health field or I was in the mental health field for 20 some years.

And so the focus was very much on emotions and behaviors and regulating those. This last eight years having Hello World, I've learned so much and you're teaching me more today about all of the physical things, the nutritional things that are going on in our bodies. Most of it leads to our digestive system, right? It's fascinating to me, maybe I should say frustrating, that we're not screening for this stuff early on at our pediatric appointments and at preschool screenings.

And we're trying to change that dynamic because that's why we also train. So we worked in about 20 counties across the state of Pennsylvania so far with EI professionals, early intervention professionals, to help them understand these things and to introduce our screening. we've also worked in private schools um and we're working with head start early head start organizations so we're trying to change that dynamic because even essentially one of the things that happens let's say that um you know a child does have chronic ear infections so it's bacterial right and you commonly get prescribed antibiotics um but what ends up happening is if that chronic ear infection is because of a cow's milk allergy, you just need to change your diet.

But the common approach is that whenever you have chronic ear infections, you get prescribed the antibiotics, but the antibiotics will then kill all of your gut bacteria. And so you need that gut bacteria as part of your human recipe. It's a necessity for homeostasis of human life. and so the gut bacteria send these chemical messengers called neurotransmitters and so dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine all of those things but one of them is serotonin and so serotonin then goes on to make melatonin for sleep so now if you're a kiddo that has had chronic ear infections due to milk allergy you were prescribed antibiotics now you have no gut bacteria to support your sleep. And so having more conversations around that, like, what do I refer to as a waterfall effect? Right. Right. I can see that you're painting that picture. It's just like one thing leads to another, to another, to another. And yet then we're taking our kids to a counselor right. Because of behavior. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so much rooted in, in the gut microbiome,

but also nutrition because like vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat soluble. And D combined with magnesium controls calcium and calcium controls our hormones and our enzymes. But if you were a kiddo that doesn't have enough gut bacteria, or if you were prescribed reflux medicine that impacts your hydrochloric acid, that's needed for digestion of food, you're not going to have those right ingredients. And so it impacts so many things that happen in your body. You know, it affects our, our liver, our kidneys, our heart regulation, you know, our heartbeat, so many of those things, hundreds and hundreds of things that happen in our body rely on a healthy gut microbiome. So what are the things that we can be doing? I want to talk about some action steps for parents. I'm definitely sending them to your website so they can learn more about you, but what kinds of things can we be doing? What questions should parents be asking professionals? Do the concerns start before there's a behavior issue or is behavior usually what tells a parent something's going on with my kid? I've seen a mix of both because,

you know, you can have kids with chronic reflux and that maybe reflux medicine isn't working. The first thing I would say is to make sure that you're in front of a provider that will listen to you. I can't stress that enough. And to trust your gut and advocate for the services for your child that you feel are right.

So once you're in front of the right provider, ask them about, you know, we've been on a lot of antibiotics. And that's why we provide resources to our parents that are PubMed article, that are evidence-based, that have been peer-reviewed. really advocating for their child to be put on pre and probiotics to say this gut bacteria stuff is really, really important. Why haven't we had these conversations before? And what pre and probiotics do you recommend? A daily vitamin is really great. A well-rounded daily vitamin, essentially because of the lack of crop rotations as well. So some of the farming practices in the U.S. impact that as well, because there's no uptake of nutrients that would have been planted before that food. And so because of that, our food is nutritionally deficient compared to what it was in the fifties and sixties. So a daily vitamin, talking to the pediatrician about a daily vitamin and daily pre and probiotic, but really looking at the implications that, you know, ear infections have and these vision issues have on growth and development because you yourself know that if you have an ear infection you're in pain but it also impacts your speech development because if I can't hear what's going on around me then I can't repeat that another thing that commonly happens is if these kids have you know the allergy shiners so if you see a kiddo that has dark circles under

of their eyes. They can have what's called a Denny Morgan fold, a D-E-N-N-I-E Morgan fold, which is also indicative of allergies. If these kids are in a chronic state of inflammation, then we talked about how it's important for both hemispheres of the brain to talk and work together. And so you have areas on the right side of your brain that are called the posterior superior your temporal sulcus that help you identify, is this a social situation or not? Then you have Broca's area that is on the left side of your brain. And then you have your motor and your sensory cortex that are on both sides of your brain. And I say that to say, whenever you're going to have a conversation with someone, you're going to engage in social emotional skills,

knowing that parts of both sides of the brain have to come together to make that happen. if that didn't essentially form because of inflammation, because maybe you didn't crawl or you have problems with motor coordination, you don't have that connectivity between the hemispheres of your brain. And that connectivity is necessary for speech, eating, swallowing, because all of that happens at vertical midline. So you have to draw on both sides of your brain.

So just as like a quick win for parents, what they can do is encourage straw drinking for their children when it's developmentally appropriate, but encourage straw drinking. And particularly you can start with like milkshake, milkshake straws, and then you can go down to a regular straw, even like a coffee stirrer straw. But here in our office, through that handle approach, we use a crazy straw because not only does drinking out of a crazy straw or like sucking or blowing activities using your mouth really coordinate the hemispheres of the brain.

But if you can also get that child to close their eyes when they're drinking through that crazy straw and have that nice suck, swallow, breathe pattern and be nice and relaxed. When their eyes are closed, your eyes converge. And so you have this nice convergence and divergence of your eyes. So you're essentially working on that ocular motor dysfunction as well.

What about hair pulling? I have had clients where their kiddos are literally pulling chunks of hair. Yeah. So you can have trichotillomania, you can have dermatillomania, which is, you know, the dermatological picking and all those things, but those are anxiety related.

And much of anxiety is related to gut bacteria imbalances. And so if you look at, you know, that child's gut dysbiosis, if you're looking, working really essentially with a developmental pediatrician to understand the gut microbiome and how to help your child and making sure that you're doing things to perpetuate a healthy gut. So that would be in the way of if a child does necessarily need an antibiotic, which is sometimes appropriate, right? Making sure that they get that gut bacteria restored, you know, making sure that if they are eating foods, trying to make sure that they have more of an organic diet, because those foods that are sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, they kill the bugs on the plants.

they disrupt what's called the shikimate cycle of the bug and they eventually die. But the thing is that some of those crops are early sprayed and late sprayed. And just means the time that they're sprayed before they're harvested. And so those late sprayed foods are more heavenly laden with the herbicides and pesticides.

And so a higher concentration upon digestion leads to more death of our bacteria in our gut, which is essential for so, so many things. And so just trying to incorporate the best that you can more of that organic food diet for your child. What are some common nutritional deficiencies with kids who have ADHD? So one of the biggest things that we have seen improve, and we always refer to a nutritionist for this, but omega threes, omega sixes and healthy fats for those kids is really, really important.

because, but also, you know, we talked about the ocular motor dysfunction, you know, making sure that the eyes are working together because anatomically all of those systems are connected, but looking at how the eyes tell the ears what to focus on. And so if you're having a two visually different lived experiences, because your eyes aren't converging on the same fixed point, your ears aren't focused either, but the omega-3s, the omega-6s, healthy fats in their diet are really going to contribute to myelination, that myelination process, but also getting those kids moving, you know, addressing those retained primitive reflexes that we treat here. When you get your body moving, you're contributing to the development of that myelin sheath.

So they need both of those components to come together, the nutrition and the movement. So my work with kiddos with reactive attachment disorder, many years ago, when I first started out in 93 ish. I learned so much about that first year of life bonding cycle and how important that is. Well, I teach this to parents. Babies have a need. What do they do to let us know they have a need?

They cry. If we don't get to them right away, they cry harder. So what do we do? We go pick them up. We gratify them. And that's exactly what you've been talking about with movement, eye contact, touch, you know, and then I'd add smiles and lactose, which is the sugar and milk.

Well, if your baby is allergic, has an allergy to cow's milk, if you're not breastfeeding and they have an allergy to that, or if you are breastfeeding, but you're not producing enough, right? Yes. But also in, in addition to that too, if mom was on antibiotics or is currently taking antibiotics that also affects the bacteria that's in her breast milk, that's passed on to baby. So looking at the maternal exposure to antibiotics as well and her diet.

Yeah, it's essentially important, but that's why we take a holistic picture. And that's why I spend the first hour to an hour and a half with moms or dads or grandparents or whoever comes in. And we ask so many of those questions. You know, we ask, what was the crawling length of that kiddo?

Did they butt scoot? You know, did they have one leg kicked out to the side? Did that look a little bit different? Did they have reflux, eczema?

You know, do they have allergy shiners on visual inspection? Do their eyes move together? we go into poop habits because pooping is so so important happy gut happy brain happy kiddo sleep habits you know if these kiddos are have allergies and they're snoring in their sleep you don't get enough oxygen in your brain thus you don't enter into your smooth circadian rhythms into REM sleep you don't have that restorative sleep and you wake up you know or you know a restless kiddo that is really not well-prepared. So going back to the root of the problem is what it's all about. And when we can't gratify our kids, when they just won't settle that cycle, I was just talking about the need, the crying, letting us know they have a need, the gratification that builds trust. Every time we pick the child up and we can suit them, we can comfort them. We can change their diaper, get them dry, make them feel good, right? They associate us with that eye contact and the touch, right? As being the source of the relief. And so that's how trust is formed and developed. So it's no wonder when your baby isn't settled, isn't soothed, you know, doesn't feel like when you're holding them, picking them up, comforting, doesn't get that comfort from you that they would then eventually, you know, misbehave, defy, push you away. Not only want you when they want you, not when you want them kind of thing. Right. So this is just absolutely

fantastic. One of my favorite things to do is to find the appropriate resources for parents, because so often when they come to me, it's about a specific behavior. Their child's getting, you know, hitting kids at daycare, they're biting, they're having issues at home, wet noodling on the floor, or as they're even in teenage years, you know, the more extreme behaviors as they get older, right? But find I'm not a one-stop shop. No problem parenting helps us seek first to understand why is my child behaving the way they are? And then for the parents, why are the parents responding or reacting the way they are? Preparing for the worst so that when we're prepared, we can respond versus react. And step three is to change the conversation. I definitely love resources, finding resources for parents so they can seek first to understand so they can get to the root of what's going on. Because so often it's not what we think it is. It's not about the behavior. The behavior is just the communication to let us know something's going on. Right. Right. And it's not necessarily, you know, as a, as a formally trained, my master's degree is in applied behavior analysis. It's not necessarily to communicate the standard of,

oh, I just want attention. You know, escape avoidance behavior is so much more than that. Why are you escaping or avoiding that behavior? You know, my son was headbanging because of his gluten allergy. And I realized that when you look at the gate theory of pain that says that pressure sensors in our skin transmit signals faster to our brain than our pain sensors, it's an override.

but understanding also that like pressure and pushing and headbanging you know relieves that that pressure but it also provides relief to the thalamus and the thalamus in our brain is like grand central station for routing that sensory information and so they're they're experiencing temporarily relief but commonly we're taught to extinguish that behavior and maybe put a helmet on them or a pillow under them or, you know, distract them or curricular revisions, right.

To make that not so demanding when it just could be to take gluten or dairy or whatever, whatever other allergens out of their diet so that we're not putting a bandaid on it. We're fixing the root cause. Absolutely. I love that.

And so how do we determine that? Are we just eliminating the foods? Are we actually doing lab work or something to identify the allergy? So it's a different approach. Yeah. I mean, it's a different approach for all parents, right? Because some parents don't want to put their, their child through lab work or they don't want to get the skin prick. So some parents will walk through working with a nutritionist, obviously to do an exclusion diet. Because funny enough, what ends up happening is mom will say, oh, my belly doesn't feel right when I eat dairy or, oh yeah, I have to drink almond milk already.

So there's already some implications of those things going on in the family. so it's it's different for each family that we encounter some will be all about getting the blood work they want those definitive answers but some are you know they want that different approach and we're here to offer that we just want to offer choices to parents we're not going to tell you what to do but we're here to offer you the choices and just give you the information about evidence-based peer-reviewed research that has been done in the area of nutrition gut dysbiosis, but also looking in general at the physiological and the motoric underpinnings of behavior. I'm so thankful to have been introduced to you by Melissa Dealy, our fellow nutrition,

integrative health medicine doc, right? Yeah, she's great. Yeah, Melissa is, I've had her on the podcast already and referred many, many folks to her, but she introduced us and said, Jackie, you need to meet with Kristen for your family's kids. I'm stuttering all of a sudden. I'm so excited about all of this. I like literally my there's my ADHD, right? I'm like thinking of family after family. I probably on the, on the spectrum. Why do you think that just because it's, do you think it's genetic or it is genetic? I think, yeah, there's genetic components to it.

It's nature versus nurture. It's a little bit of both. One of my friends, Patty Lima wrote a book outsmarting autism. And she talks about something called total load theory. And so total load theory is basically our bodies can only take so much before they start breaking down. But I had asthma allergies when I was a kid. You know, I had some gut issues, some GI issues. My social filter wasn't the greatest. When I was a kid growing up, I have high interoceptive awareness of my body, really narrow restricted interests in autism. And so some of those same telltale signs are there. I was diagnosed with like generalized anxiety disorder, but it's just kind of like the way I think my brain sees the world and putting these ideas together.

So there's a lot of clues that, that are there. So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You don't need the diagnosis, you, you figured out, you learned to cope, but we can make it so much easier on our kids and not have to work hard at things that they shouldn't have to work hard at.

Yeah. And a lot of that's rooted in nutrition, gut dysbiosis, your motor planning, right. Being able to cross vertical midline successfully, like in brain gym, we talk about doing lazy eights and being able to pattern your body and doing contralateral movements, even doing like snow angels being able to really create these neural connections that maybe were never there like if your son had reflux and didn't crawl or if there were some like he bumped his head or something and so these things called we haven't even gotten into this really those retained primitive reflexes that are really really important because if you have retained primitive reflexes. It can be hypersensitivity, hyperreactivity, poor impulse control.

You can get postural issues, bedwetting. There's a whole host of things that can be happening, but it's based on these involuntary motor patterns that your body is still exhibiting called retained primitive reflexes. They're needed for survival, but they're supposed to be integrated into these higher order movements, but your body just kind of gets stuck and repeats them over and over again based on sensory input to your body. And so we really overcome those by getting you to move in more and more complex ways to overcome that. But also from the dietary perspective, looking at is there still inflammation from allergies, intolerances, sensitivities? Are his eyes working together? And so we look on adding pushing and pulling exercises because that helps with convergence and divergence of your eyes. And just doing little fun things that can really help put the body back together. But you have to look at both the nutrition and the motor movements of the body. So we need a nutritionist on board,

we need a developmental pediatrician, and we may need a developmental optometrist. Well, so that's where we come in with families and we help make those connections to understand. And we do that assessment, right? And so that first hour, an hour and a half is spent with me going over those things. And then ideally you come in person and my co-worker, Mandy, she's an occupational therapist. She's been doing pediatrics for about 20 years, but she also does the MNRI with children and adults as well. But having her assess what are specifically your retained primitive reflexes, how do we overcome those and basically put the body back together as it should be. And then you get organized movement, organized thought, because the saying is rigid spine,

rigid mind. Wow. This is so great. I'm so sad that we have to wrap up and get going. We both have appointments to get to. So we do. Let's make sure that your website is behavior works of southwesternpa.com. I'll have that link in the show notes. What you are offering is just absolutely so needed and can help so many families. So thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. Not a problem. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you for tuning into the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Join Jackie next time for more tips, tools, and resources that will help you become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. Who do you know that we could support on their parenting journey? Like this podcast, subscribe, share or leave a review of the show your support of the no problem parenting podcast pays it forward and helps us help more families