Why Do Kids Need to Come to Your Office, Anyway?
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    why kids need holistic, movement-based care

    I am surprised by how often adults ask me this question when they see me emerge from my room with a child and realize that I have been working with the child, not her/his parent.

    In this question, I find evidence a deep and pervasive cultural paradigm. The paradigm says that childhood is (or should be) an Eden of perfect health and happiness, from which we are sadly expelled at some point in adulthood. Most American adults grew up in a world that defined health as the absence of symptoms, and that acted as if there was no reason to seek health care in the absence of significant symptoms. If kids do not have symptoms that we recognize or take seriously (i.e., symptoms that look, like ours!), we assume that they are healthy and wonder why they would need health care. (Conversely, when children are indisputably sick or injured, their suffering seems “unfair” to us.)


    Intellectually at least, most of us realize that symptoms usually represent the flowering of a plant whose seed germinated years or even decades earlier. But we may find it hard to experience that reality in our own bodies. Therefore, we may find it hard to take seriously kids’ need for holistic health care.
     
    As we consider why kids need holistic health care, we might ask how we as adults have arrived at such a point of estrangement from ourselves. What happened to the endless curiosity about and delight in our bodies we all displayed as infants? When and how did we lose our childhood sense of ease, the quality of being effortlessly “at home” in our bodies? How have we become so alienated from our bodies that we must develop quite severe or lasting symptoms before we are moved to notice and care for them? Why do we know so little of ourselves that we must turn to “experts” to tell us how to attend to ourselves? Is our acquired ignorance of the native language of the body—our common mother tongue—a legacy we want to leave our children?

    As we develop, we learn the languages of mind (and potentially soul and spirit as well) in addition to the language of body. However, our development need not—should not! —entail the loss of that original language.   If we defined health not as a mere absence of symptoms but as a process of deepening our knowledge of ourselves and expanding our ability to share our gifts with others, being healthy would require us to become increasingly skillful at listening to our myriad voices, understanding their different languages, and letting them be heard by others. If we define health this way, then the loss or suppression of any of our languages is dis-ease. If we define health this way, we naturally recognize that it is imperative that we help children value and remain fluent in the language of the body.

    At its best, holistic health care offers us a variety of means to speak and understand the language of the body, and to illuminate its relationship with our other tongues. Any healing modality—spinal adjustment, Feldenkrais work, allergy elimination, nutrition, herbs—can help kids retain and develop their native, embodied intelligence. And any modality can separate kids from their own authority and wisdom.

    While certain tools may be more effective than others at reducing certain symptoms, such efficacy is not the only or even the most important goal of genuinely holistic care. The highest goal of holistic pediatric care is to find ways of working that help spark and refine an individual child’s innate intelligence.