Hi. I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Chiropractic [now in Petaluma, California]. I want to encourage you to have your children checked by a qualified chiropractor. This includes infants and newborns as well. The reason is that infants and newborns often have birth trauma that distorts their spine, either their neck or lower down in the spine, and causes problems. Problems that can become more severe later on. In the case of “easy births”, easy for the mom, it’s not easy for the child, it’s always a difficult traumatic event for an infant because they’re just relaxed for so long inside the womb. They come out, they don’t have the musculature to be able to support and stabilize themselves during that process. On top of that, they’re getting pulled out literally by, oftentimes, the head or sometimes the arm and shoulder combined with the head. In the case of forced delivery, suction delivery, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a C-section or normal birth, it is traumatic for the child.

Now, adjustments for children and infants is like this to the neck. It’s very light and gentle. So children should not cry during an adjustment, they should stop crying. That’s often what they do. Especially if children come in with colic or with some problems developmentally, why they’re not breastfeeding, they’re not sleeping, they’re not thriving. Now, colic is just basically a collection of different symptoms that gets labeled colic because children can’t speak to tell us what’s wrong with them and what their experiencing. But if you think about it, the nerve system is the first thing to form in an embryo. We start to see a nerve, like a spinal cord or a precursor to the spinal cord forming at about three weeks in the embryo stage, and it’s called the neural streak. That’s the first thing that forms because it’s the most important system because it runs everything and it kind of regulates development and differentiation of all the tissues.

It’s really important, it’s crucial, in fact, to have proper nerve flow coming through that nervous system, especially in the case of a child or a newborn. Having nerve flow working properly in an adult is crucial, but if you look at a child, they’re kind of like a rocket that’s in that initial primary stage where it’s leaving the platform, and it is going to the rim of space and it accelerates from zero to 20,000 miles an hour. That initial stage burns the brightest and the hottest because it’s the most important. It’s the same with children. They are differentiating and developing on a huge scale from zero… Well from birth to about four months, the brain’s size actually doubles. So we want to support this growth and this development by removing any interference to the spine with general adjustments to allow the child to grow and thrive the way they can… They’re supposed to, and to be their best. I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Chiropractic encouraging you to have your children checked by a qualified chiropractor.