Children's Posture - The case for family chiropractic care
I started practice when advertising meant not missing the cut off date for the yearly Yellow Pages entry. If you did you were sent off into purgatory for the year and bumped to the bottom of next year’s list. It was also a time pre-devices. It was pre-smartphones, pre-tablets, pre-taking your laptop to school and pre-fortnite. It was a time when kids had kids spinal problems and adults well…unfortunately had adult problems mainly in the form of postural stress and strain and spinal wear and tear.
Fast forward 20 years and now we are seeing adult problems becoming kids problems.
Children should be learning to support their growing frames against the forces of gravity, holding their heads high and shoulders back and proud, running around getting fit and strong, riding bikes, climbing trees and playing sport. Instead they are now heads down, round shouldered increasingly deconditioned and over-stimulated with their newly acquired and never to be lost again appendages, their phones, tablets and computers. Where we used to have to pick our heads up to look someone in the eye to have a conversation, we now have children standing shoulder to shoulder eyeballs buried down into their phones. You’d swear they are almost trying to climb body and all straight into their phone so they could be fully integrated and never be apart again!
Modern day kids need modern day support
Why do you think the dental profession had to go full throttle on the idea of “Dental Hygiene”? It was because our diets went south with toxic processed, sugary and chemical laden foods and with that so did our teeth. Our ancestors diets consisted of natural foods, fruits, vegetables and meat. They didn’t have the sugars and chemicals that were harmful to your teeth. Also with a balanced diet you get more vitamins, minerals and nutrients, all the things needed to make your teeth (well all of you) stronger and more resistant to dental (well all the problems) we see today. The foods they ate were also very fibrous which naturally kept their teeth clean and stopped dental plague building up.
The Western diet hasn’t just left us grossly deficient in vitamins and minerals. It has left us grossly deficient in movement.
Your days need to be rich in a variety of movements to protect your posture and help keep all your joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments healthy supple and strong. When was the last time that your day, week or month naturally had each of your joints explore their full range of motion. This lifestyle change first had the biggest impact on working adults but now it has gotten to our kids too! We have a huge postural pandemic on our hands, largely consequential to the ubiquitous uptake in technology.
So I want to claim it, we need to go full throttle on SPINAL HYGIENE. Our children’s lives have changed and so too we must change what we do to compensate for this. Our children aren’t growing up the way we did so we need to consider that they need types of help and support that we did not. The best place to start is with a chiropractic check-up and regular maintenance to keep growing body’s in good alignment for the years to come.
We teach our kids to swim so they don’t drown, we also now need to teach our kids how to survive on dry land so their body’s don’t degenerate prematurely.
Families need Chiropractors to care for their children’s spines, to mentor them in the art of good posture and what it takes to injury proof their frames for life . It’s time for us all to re-romanticise what it means to be strong, healthy and upright and we are ready to help.
Dr Andrew Richards (Chiropractor)