Healthy Kids Blog: Toxic Emotional Stress Can Make Children Sick |
| Toxic Emotional Stress Can Make Children Sick Posted: 10 Jan 2012 01:38 PM PST
It’s become a life-long passion for me to understand health and healing. I’ve been on a healing journey for the past 25 years and on a passionate quest to understand how early stressful experiences effect our brains and physiological systems. I am passionate about helping people achieve health and well-being on a holistic (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) level. This passion was born out of my stressful childhood. Not that it was all that different from others within that same time period fifty-some years ago, when the constant threat of physical punishment and lack of breastfeeding/parental nurturing was the norm. But I was a child of deep sensitivity, my dad was an angry man prone to violent outbursts and emotional abuse, and my mom was too afraid to follow her instincts to provide any meaningful nurturing or protection. So I created a protective shell around myself, physically and emotionally. I spent the first 25 years of my life in self-destruct and diminished capacity, and the last 25 years on a healing journey that has been profoundly challenging as well as rewarding and wonderfully gratifying. I’m now a happy person with an amazing life and a tremendously positive outlook. And this journey has inspired within me the desire to help other parents recognize how delicate and precarious the time of pre-conception, pregnancy, birth and early childhood is and the vital importance of fully nurturing our babies to offset the stress of the world. It’s a different time, now that many parents are aware of the negative effects of physical punishment and emotional put-downs and understand the need for breastfeeding, connection and nurturing. But as parents in this present time, we are under a great deal of stress ourselves, and even the best parents with the highest intentions are understandably prone to releasing their frustrations on their kids. Especially those of us who do not have a healthy nurturing blueprint to draw from. Even after everything I’ve learned and embraced emotionally, I still have explosive moments with my own daughter that I fully regret. There is no such thing as a perfect parent and once we understand this, we can commit to doing the best we can without putting more stress on ourselves. Kids are remarkable in that they provide us with a true gauge of how emotionally present and balanced we are, and they can be our greatest teachers in our own growth process. We need to recognize the emotional sensitivity of our children and treat this with the utmost care and respect. Babies and young children will adapt to emotional stress with coping mechanisms that can hinder their brain development, and undermine the development of their immune, nervous, and other fragile physiological systems. Emotional trauma can become lodged in the cells of the body and can affect a child's health in pretty big ways. It’s encouraging that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), after many years of scientific research, has just acknowledged this in their latest policy statement. They now know that toxic stress can harm children for life: I write a lot about environmental toxins, nutrition, homeopathic and herbal medicine, and other holistic modalities. These are all important, but if you have a child that has a persistent health issue and is not responding to treatment, I believe it’s necessary to go deeper and explore what may be going on emotionally for your child. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a big, traumatic event for health issues to show up in a sensitive child. The good news is that there are many wonderful ways we can help our children heal from emotional stress and release the cellular damage. Children respond to energy medicine therapies very well. I’ll be writing about all these ways in future posts and in Healthy Child Newsletter. Most importantly, there is a lot of help and support for you as a parent to reduce your own stress and take better care of your emotional needs so it is easier to nurture your children. I feel like I have a lot to offer on that subject and I’ll be writing more about that, too. In the meantime, here is an article to help you take care of yourself: http://www.healthychild.com/parent-self-care/the-art-of-self-care-for-mothers/ More articles on parenting via connection and nurturing: http://www.healthychild.com/attachment-and-connection/ And I’m happy to let you know about this wonderful free event happening now, presented by leading experts in all areas of holistic health that will give you profound insights and practical tools to reduce stress and increase your vitality and wellness: It’s great the AAP is finally informing pediatricians of the role of toxic stress on health. There are organizations that have already been working for many years to support parents in meeting the meet the needs of children. The Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children (aTLC) has invested thousands of hours developing a proclamation and blueprint of evidence-linked principles and actions that combines scientific research with deep-rooted wisdom on optimal human development. I urge every new parent to read this proclamation and blueprint and take whatever action you feel is right for you: A great book is Connection Parenting: Parenting Through Connection Instead of Coercion, Through Love Instead of Fear, by Pam Leo. I wrote the foreword to this book and I highly recommend it. Find support from other moms in your local area. It’s essential to find your tribe and receive the support you need. A non-profit organization dedicated to creating communities of holistic moms through local chapters, focusing on attachment parenting, holistic health and green living.
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