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Elizabeth and I wanna thank ChiroSecure for always having our backs and for giving us this platform to educate and enlighten the world about pediatric chiropractic. So Elizabeth is gonna take a nap for right now, and we’re gonna carry on, and she’ll be back at the end
Hi, I am Dr. Monika Buerger, and we have an amazing show for you today. We are going to give you the three important things that you must know when doing a passive or active evaluation on little fiddle-farts. Hold onto your seats and let’s get rocking and rolling. One number one. We’ll start with number one, because one becomes before three.
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So first thing, can they do what you’re asking them to do? Or, so if you’re asking them to do an active motor movement pattern, let’s say crossing the midline, hands up and opposite arm to opposite leg, or marching. Can they do it? Okay. If you are passively watching a little fiddle-fart and you’re trying to see are they meeting their m- neuromotor milestones are they able to crawl with controlled core in a cross crawl pattern?
So can they do the activity that you’re looking for them to be able to do? Okay, so that’s number one. But number two, how well can they do it? How easy, how accurately can they carry out that neuromotor pattern? These are incredible clues to you to tell you what’s going on with their brain maturation. So movement is the developing brain.
Proper movement is proper neural development. So let’s go back to the five, six, seven, eight-year-old little fiddle-fart, where you’re asking them can they march in place, opposite arm, opposite leg? Can they cross crawl, reach across the midline, opposite arm, opposite leg? Can they do sequential finger touching?
Okay. So you’re looking for how easy, how accurately they can do it, and you’re looking for little pearls. For instance, on sequential finger touching, are they having to think about it? Are they going
I call it the head bob. They bob the head with every matching movement. Are they having to do looking at it? Because this is a lot of proprioceptive input. That’s what you’re looking at here, tactile and proprioception. When proprioception isn’t up to par, one will cheat by using their eyes. Okay? So their eyes can tell their brain where their fingers are in space to try to make them work Do they have what we call overflow movements?
They are now called neurological soft signs ’cause we have to rename everything to make them sound, might more serious. So it’s not a hard sign. A neurological hard sign can denote a tumor or some lesion in the brain or the spinal cord. A soft sign is maybe they’re doing things like this
sticking their tongue out. It’s what we call overflow movement. Or while one hand is working, the opposite hand is working as well So what you might see when they’re doing sequential f- what you need to look for, I should say when like doing sequential finger touching, can they do it with the hand that you’re asking them to do, left hand?
But you also need to look at the right hand. Is the right hand moving as well? Is the tongue moving? Either the tongue sticking out or tongue or mouth movement. These are called overflow movements. They cannot isolate one movement at a time. Okay? So we conquered can they do it, how easy, how accurately they can do it, but now here is the third thing that you must look for, and what I call neurological collapse.
What is their fatigue factor? Okay. So back to the how well can they do it let’s go back to the baby crawling. Can they crawl… This is a, you’re passively evaluating this, this little fiddle fart. Rolling or crawling or are they on tummy time pushing them up? But let’s say pushing themselves up, but let’s say cross crawl.
You’re passively observing here. Do they have a nice cross crawl, opposite arm, opposite leg crawling across the floor? They’ve got good c- core control. Okay. They don’t, they’re not crawling with this open mouth presentation, not wobbly or floppy, low tone, but do they have good control? So then we move into our third thing, their fatigue factor.
At what point does their s- nervous system neurologically collapse where they can’t hold it together enough to do the proper neuromotor pattern? I’ve been getting pinged a lot on this on social media and Messenger and what have you. Like I got this little fiddle fart, eight months old, nine months old, whatever, wasn’t in a cross crawl pattern when I first started with them.
Now they’re able to do it. Yeah, rock on. But they do it for three or four “step- steps,” three or four reps, and then they go back to butt scooting or army crawling or dragging one leg. Why is that happening? It’s what I call neurological collapse. They fatigue out. Their nervous system can only hold it together for so long until they wanna go back and they wanna cheat.
Okay? They wanna come up with a workaround because their nervous system isn’t up to par yet. So what you usually in those situations… So the older fiddle fart, let’s say you have them doing the cross crawl opposite arm to opposite leg, okay? They don’t seem to have any compensatory movements.
They’re not sticking their tongue out or, any kind of overflow movement, blinking a lot, anything like that. They’re doing a pretty good job, but then they start to wanna speed up super fast and they get really sloppy. That’s telling me that their brain is starting to cave in. There’s– That’s their fatigue factor.
So what you need to do in that situation is you need to, what I s- I have a, a mod, I say fast-forward or rewind. At that point in time, you gotta rewind. Where might they have missed a motor movement pattern as a building block that they’ve created a pothole in their neurological integrity, their brain’s ability to connect with their body, and their body’s ability to connect with their brain, and now they’re trying to do compensatory movements because they don’t have that foundation.
So back to the baby crawling, okay? You finally got ’em all fours and they’re crawling, but they three or four reps and they collapse So what you really need to go is back in time. You need to rewind. Did they go through proper rolling protocols, a corkscrew rolling fashion between three and six months?
Three months starting from the pelvis up through the core, around six months from the shoulders down through the core. Did they develop the ability to sit unassisted and have good core control and pivot and move off the center of their axis? Do they have that now at nine months of age while they’re trying to learn a proper crawling pattern?
So it’s all about trying to go back in time, figure out what potholes might have got laid down, what workarounds did they do as to why now they fatigue out or they can’t do things with good form. Okay. So hopefully that helps. So well, again, to recap, can they do what you’re asking them to do or what you’re looking for in a passive evaluation?
How easy, how accurately, how well-controlled can they do that motor motion pattern? And three, what’s their fatigue factor? When do they neurologically collapse? You’ll see this in kiddos at sc- in, especially in, in school. School’s a hard time because they’re gonna try to fake it till they make it, and they are, they’re trying to fly below the radar because it’s embarrassing not to be able to keep up with your peers and so forth.
So let’s take writing. Take writing as an example. They can… Not that kids write that much these days in schools ’cause there’s so much on technical devices, which is another whole problem. But let’s say they’re writing and they get three, four, five lines and then all of a sudden either they have an emotional meltdown, “This is dumb.
This is stupid. I can’t,” or they just space out or their writing becomes horrendous and you can’t even read it
What you might look for is hold– looking how they hold the pencil is one thing. So a lots of times in school when they’re advocating they pull kiddos out for handwriting or for reading or whatever. But handwriting they’ll have to do a whole grasp instead of holding the pencil correctly, they have to hold it with their whole hand.
That’s one dead giveaway. They may never have d- developed their intrinsic muscles in the palms of their hands. So they can do the task for a little while, but then these fatigue out, and they either can’t hold the pencil correctly anymore, the handwriting gets worse, or what have you. Okay? That might stem all the way back from when they never were in tummy time and started pushing up on their hands and straightening their elbows and lifting their chest off, and then going to a creeping, crawling position, ’cause that develops those intrinsic muscles.
So that’s a case where now it shows up when they’re in fifth, when they’re five years old, six years old, whatever, in school, and they missed a major milestone in the past. So what I want you to take away from this is start using your keen eye. Start looking back and saying, “Why can’t they carry this task out for a long, longer period of time?
And why are they neurologically collapsing? Did they meet those past motor milestones?” Don’t just ask the question But evaluate them for if they have that functional capacity at that point in time. Are they eight years old and can they sit on a physio ball and s- move off the center of their axis and hold their core control without losing it?
If not, you might have to start back to where you’d wanna see them at six, eight months of age. Okay. So if you wanna learn more about, especially the first year, the foundations of neural development, that critical window of neural development, scroll down, dive in now to our Six Pillars, a foundational course.
It gives you everything you’re gonna need to sit back, take a keen eye, evaluate these kiddos, and get ’em back on course for neural development. And once again, she’s back. Me and Liz want to thank you and thank ChiroSecure for giving us this platform. We are wishing you a spooky, amazing Halloween, and we will see you next month right around Thanksgiving.
Until then, keep being amazing
Trick show, Look to the Children, was brought to you by ChiroSecure.
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