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Feeling Well Place

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Feeling Well Place

Feeling Well Place - Paediatric Neurodevelopment Centre helping kids with challenges and injuries

05/23/2026

Picky eating involves oral motor reflexes, interoception, and a threat-safe environment, and forcing dysregulates all three simultaneously. The Rooting and Babkin reflexes, when unintegrated, create hypersensitivity around the mouth that makes certain textures feel genuinely threatening, not just unpleasant. Interoception, the brain's sense of the body's internal state, is often dysregulated in children with significant feeding difficulties, meaning they're not being dramatic about fullness, texture, or discomfort. They're receiving different information. The vagus nerve regulates both digestion and the social engagement system. When mealtimes are stressful, the vagal system shifts into defensive mode, digestion is suppressed and sensory sensitivity increases. Pressure at the table literally makes the food harder to tolerate. Food acceptance expands in environments of genuine safety. No pressure. No rewards. No commentary. Just presence, exposure, and time. What's your child's most reliably accepted food, the one they'd eat every day if you let them?

05/21/2026

Parental burnout isn't just exhaustion; it's chronic sympathetic nervous system dominance, and children feel it neurologically. The HPA axis under chronic stress produces cortisol that impairs prefrontal function, narrows the window of tolerance, and limits the co-regulatory capacity that children depend on for their own regulation development. Autonomic nervous system contagion is real: your internal state transmits to your child through micro-expressions, vocal tone, and postural cues constantly, whether you're aware of it or not. Parental mental health is not separate from child development. It is woven through it, including through primitive reflex integration, which depends on attuned co-regulatory relationships in early childhood. Seeking support for your own nervous system isn't selfish. It is the most upstream developmental investment you can make. Sleep. Movement. Genuine connection with other regulated adults. These are parenting tools. If you're in a season of burnout right now, what's the hardest part? You don't have to carry it alone.

05/19/2026

Parental nervous system regulation is contagious, literally. Your internal state transmits to your child through micro-expressions, vocal tone, and postural cues constantly, whether you're aware of it or not. Limbic resonance is the neurological phenomenon through which mammals attune to each other's emotional states. The child's developing nervous system uses the parent's regulated state as its external regulatory reference point. Which means your calm is not just a nicety - it is the most powerful developmental input you provide. Many parents are running their days in low-level sympathetic activation: not in crisis, but not in genuine regulation either. Children feel this. They cannot access safety from a nervous system that isn't safe. Parental dysregulation also affects primitive reflex integration in children; the "co-regulatory experiences" that support integration require a regulated nervous system on the offering end. Your regulation is your child's development. Physiological sigh. Cold water. Twenty seconds of genuine connection. These are not luxuries. They are upstream parenting investments. What's your go-to regulation practice on the hard days? Let us know

04/17/2026

How passive tablet use affects myelination, attention circuits, and the sensorimotor foundations children need before academics.
White matter, the myelinated highway system of the brain, develops most rapidly in the first five years and requires physical activity, cross-lateral movement, and sensorimotor experience to build. Passive screen use provides none of these inputs. Sustained attention networks develop through effortful focus - building, reading, creating - not through the passive capture of attention that screen content is engineered to produce. These are different neural circuits with different developmental consequences. None of this means screens are toxic. It means they have trade-offs that most parents haven't been given the information to navigate. When you know what passive viewing displaces (movement, sensory exploration, face-to-face interaction, primitive reflex integration) you can make different choices. Foundation first. Screens in the remaining space, intentionally. That's digital age parenting with the neuroscience on your side.
What's your family's approach to screens? No judgment, we are genuinely curious.

04/16/2026

Low-effort activities that give kids the vestibular, proprioceptive, and social input their nervous systems are actually hungry for. Most modern children are overstimulated visually and auditorily, and chronically understimulated in the sensory systems that matter most for development: proprioception, vestibular input, and tactile sensation. Tech-free play isn't punishment or deprivation. It's a targeted correction of the sensory imbalance that screens create. Primitive reflex integration depends on whole-body movement - rolling, crawling, climbing, spinning. None of this happens on a screen. All of it happens on the living room floor, in the garden, and at the playground. The 'boredom window' that children enter when screens are removed, that 10-20 minute period of agitation and protest, is the brain finding its own internal resources. Children who are allowed to sit in it regularly develop stronger imagination, creativity, and self-direction. Let them be bored. Then watch what happens.
What's your child's favorite tech-free activity? Drop it below, let's build a list together.

04/15/2026

The real issue with screens isn't the content, it's what passive viewing doesn't activate. Reflex integration. Proprioception. Vestibular input. Social mirroring. The sensorimotor loops that young brains need to build the foundation everything else rests on. A child watching a screen receives HIGH stimulation at LOW developmental value. The brain is engaged, but the body is still, and for young children still integrating primitive reflexes, bodily stillness during screen time represents real opportunity cost. This isn't an argument against screens. It's an argument for understanding what they displace and building a day that replaces it. Heavy proprioceptive work, vestibular input, and face-to-face social time before and after screen use offset much of what passive viewing doesn't provide. Mirror neurons activate most powerfully in live interaction, the full sensory, emotional, relational context that a screen cannot replicate. Build the sensorimotor foundation. The screens will find their appropriate place in it.
How do you navigate screen time in your house? What works, what doesn't?

03/07/2023

📢 There is ancient wisdom in everything, once you dig a bit deeper.

❓ Why in every culture men share the same demand for a firm handshake? Because the person capable of strong firm hand grip is supposed to possess certain character qualities, such as motivation, perseverance, courage, grit.

👶 With newborn babies we want to check a Robinson Hand Grasp Reflex - when stimulated the skin of a palm, we want to feel the fist closing and the grip firming.

❗ It is untaught unconditional primary reflex, given to us by nature for a survival and protection.

❗ Fast forward few years from a newborn state - if Grasp Reflex ends up being pathological, dysfunctional or simply unintegrated and doesn't develop from a baby level - we usually see:
🔸 lack or speech development,
🔸 lack of motivation,
🔸 very uncertain gross motor skills, such as throwing,
🔸 and bad development of fine motor skills, such as writing.

We also see:
🔹bad grasping ideas, in other words, slow processing.
🔹 strength and muscle tone on a somatic level are underdeveloped as well,
🔹getting dressed is problematic for children with unintegrated Grasp Reflex
🔹 they may also be scared to climb somewhere, or to swing from something, since their grip is not a tool that they trust,
🔹 and with newborns pathological Grasp can be a part of bad sucking, swallowing, and chewing!

Did you know this? Share your thoughts with in the comments

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