Things Every Patient and Parent Should Know

Growth and development are not a race.

These days we’re in such a rush to grow up. In our mechanized, post-

industrialized world of speed and efficiency, we’ve forgotten that life is a

process of ripening. To get good fruit, you need to nourish strong roots. Pay

attention to the ground that supports your child’s life: Go for a walk with your

child, eat with your child, play together, tell him a story about your experience

as a child.

Creating family traditions encourages strong roots and a healthy life.

This takes time and practice. Personal traditions are sacred because they

promote exchanges that strengthen bonds of love and intimacy and build the

kind of confidence that will carry your child through this world.. 

We grow in cycles.

There is a rhythm and pulse to each child’s life – sometimes fast and intense,

sometimes slow and quiet. Just as each spring brings a renewed sense of

appreciation for life, each stage of a child’s life is a time of new discovery and

wonder. After all, learning is not just a process of accruing information. It';s the

process of transforming our ideas, and sometimes this requires forgetting in

order to see with fresh eyes. Some children will take a step backward before

making a giant leap forward.

Growing in cycles means that we don’t get just one chance to learn

something. The same lesson will offer itself up to us again and again as we

pass through the seasons of our life. There is deep forgiveness in this way of

understanding childhood, which I find takes the pressure off parents to “get it

right” the first time.

 Encouragement is not the same as indulgence.

We are not in the business of raising little kings and queens. Kings don’t do

well in our society. Recent studies have shown that indulgence actually

weakens your child’s powers to survive, deflating motivation and diminishing

feelings of success.

Encouragement means putting courage in your child, not doing things for him.

Create a supportive context that will open up a path without pushing your child

down it. Unconditional love is the scaffolding that encourages your child to

take chances, to experiment, and to fail without judgment. Sometimes being

an encouraging presence in your child’s life means standing a little off in the

background, there to offer a compassionate hand when circumstances call for

it, but trusting in his innate ingenuity.

There is spaciousness in encouragement. Indulgence, on the other hand,

limits freedom by inflating a child’s sense of entitlement and reducing the

patience needed to work through obstacles when he doesn’t instantly get his

way. Indulgence leads to small-minded thinking.

 Pushing your buttons is a spiritual practice, and children are our spiritual

teachers.

You don’t need an expensive spiritual retreat to become enlightened. Your

little sage-teacher is right in front of you, offering you true wisdom free of

charge!

Children watch our every move when they’re little, studying our

inconsistencies as they try to figure out this crazy world. And they will call you

on it. When a child pushes your buttons, remember: they are your buttons, not

hers. Take the time to listen to what your child is trying to teach you. One of

the secrets of parenthood is our willingness to transform ourselves out of love

for our child. When you’re willing to look at your buttons, you open up a

deeper self-awareness that is transformative for both you and your child.

A symptom is the body’s way of letting us know something has to change.

Good medicine asks what is the symptom trying to accomplish rather than

simply suppressing it. Our body has its own intelligence and yet so much of

pharmaceutical advertising tries to convince us that there is something wrong

with feeling symptoms. All of my chiropractic training was focused on looking for the cause of the symptoms and not only masking the symptoms as if they were the problem. (This is like telling the body to shut up.

It’s rude!) We don’t trust the body’s intelligence. We think too much and tend to be afraid of feelings in our body.

But children have taught me that a symptom like fever is actually not the

problem. Whatever is causing the fever may be a problem, but the

temperature is simply the body’s way of trying to deal with what’s happening.

Take, for example, the child with a fever. What other symptoms does the child

have? If he is playful, you may not need to suppress the fever. It means the

body is trying to make metabolic heat to mobilize the immune system. To help

it do this, you can give warm (not cold) fluids so it doesn’t dry out and

nourishing foods like soups to fuel the fire.

Be prepared.

The one phrase from the Eagle Scout motto that stuck with me since I was a

boy was be prepared. This is a state of readiness that can be fueled by

confidence or fear.

These days I practice what I call  preventive chiropractic care.

 so that having symptoms is not seen as a failure. Being healthy does not

mean never having symptoms. Life is a journey of ups and downs and the growing

child lives in a constant state of flux. A resilient immune system is one that

learns how to get sick and get better. Living too clean a life robs us of the

information necessary to be fully prepared to recover.

Rather than living in fear of illness, there are natural ways we can support our

children to recovery from illness quickly and efficiently: good nutrition,

hydration, probiotics, chiropractic spinal adjustments with rest and exercise. But the most important? Rather than

focusing on how often your child gets sick, celebrate how often she gets

better.

Healing takes time.

The most important part of alternative healthcare these days is understanding time. There are no unrealistic goal to improving your health, only unrealistic time frames. As a

society we’re addicted to quick fixes because we have no time to be sick

anymore. As a doctor, I was trained as a kind of glorified fireman, looking to

put out emergencies quickly and efficiently.

In emergencies, strong medicine is often necessary to save lives but most

health problems are not emergencies. In those instances it takes

more than strong medicine to get better; it takes time. I realize that taking

another day off from work because a child has been sent home from school

with a runny nose can add real stress to our already stressful lives. But

children have taught me that healing is a kind of developmental process that

has its own stages too.

When we don’t take time to recover, we rob our children of the necessary

stages they need to learn from if they are to develop long-lasting health. When

we take time to recover, illness becomes a journey of discovery, not just a

destination; we begin to see our health and illness as two sides of the same

coin.

The secret of life is letting go.

Life is a process of constantly giving way. Things pushed past their prime

transform into something else. Just as spring gives way to summer, so is each

stage of development a process of letting go. Crawling gives way to walking.

Babbling gives way to speaking. Childhood gives way to adolescence. By

breathing in, you breathe out. By eating, you poop.

Each season, each stage, each little rhythm of our life is a matter of letting go.

This allows us to get rid of what we don’t need to make room in our lives for

new information. Learning to let go is not always easy and each child has his

own adaptive style and timing. Nature favors diversity. Remember to honor

your child’s unique nature.

Perhaps the most important way children teach me how to let go is in the way

they play. Playing means letting go of our inhibitions; it frees us up and allows

us not to take ourselves too seriously.

 Trust yourself: You’re the expert on your child.

One of the most important things I teach new parents is how to trust

themselves. Nowhere is this more daunting than when a new baby comes into

our life. We’re expected to know everything and yet we feel like we know

nothing. But children have taught me that this knowing-nothing can be a real

opportunity to open our powers of intuition.

Mindful parenting begins by listening with an open heart to your child’s life

without fear or panic. Studies have shown that a mother’s intuition is more

powerful than any lab test in picking up problems. Unfortunately today we are

flooded with so much scary information that it interferes with our ability to

listen to our own intuition. (Just think of the arrogance of a doctor who acts

like he knows your child better than you do!)

Take a tip from your baby. Look into your baby’s eyes. Imagine what it feels

like to be conscious of the world before you have language, before all those

labels that scare us and divide things into good and bad, right and wrong.

Babies have no enemies. This is seeing from the source. It is what Zen

Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” Watch closely how your baby breathes with

his belly. This is Qigong breathing. Stop thinking for a moment and try

breathing this way. You may just find the answers you need waiting for you

there.

Take the long view.

Having watched thousands of children grow into adulthood, what sometimes

seems like a big deal at four-months old or 14-years old may be no more than

a small bump in the road. Children have taught me how to take the long view

of life. When we step back and see the big picture of our lives, we discover

wisdom and compassion.