Episode 158: Brave Parent: Raising Healthy Happy Kids Against All Odds in Today's World

Hi and welcome to episode 158 of the Untethered podcast. Today we have Dr. Susan Maples joining us. Dr. Maples is a practicing dentist for 36 years with an emphasis on wellness and all the connections between the mouth and the body. She's currently the president of the American Academy for Oral Systemic Health. She's also the founder of Total Health Academy, an online learning solution for dental teams, and the originator of the Children's Hands On Learning Lab. She's written two books. The first is Blabbermouth 77 Secrets Only youy Mouth Can Tell you to Live a Healthier, Happier, Sexier Life. And her newest book, which debuted March 22 of 2022, is called Brave Parent Raising Healthy, Happy Kids Against All Odds in Today's World. Quick Disclaimer all information, content and material of this podcast are the opinions of the speakers and is for the informational purpose only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis and or medical treatment of a qualified healthcare provider. Welcome to the Untethered Podcast. I am your host, Hallie Balkan. I'm a certified orofacial myologist, feeding specialist and mentor. This PODC is all about getting your questions answered and collaborating with colleagues to bring you the most up to date information in the orofacial myofunctional therapy, tethered oral tissue and airway space. I challenge you to keep an open mind and join my mission to get this information out to the masses. Let's get started. Susan, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to chat today.

Do I've been looking forward to this. Thanks Sally.

So I'm also really excited because I know that you have launched your book Brave Raising Healthy Happy Kids Against All Odds in Today's World. And when I got a chance to take a look at what was in the book, I was just, I was like, yes, this is the manual that every parent in America, in the world really, but especially America, needs to read. So I'm curious to know what was your inspiration behind writing this book?

Well, aside from watching the decline of my health, of the patient's health in my practice over 36 years, which has been disheartening, I. I was a sick kid. I was born of two parents who smoked two packs a day each. I was born in an oxygen tent, spent three months there, seven more hospitalizations for pneumonia under the age of 12, 52, allergies, overweight, sedentary, pre diabetic. I had glucose tolerance tests every year. They thought it might be genetic. It was purely. It was Purely lifestyle. So with the help of an amazing astute internist, a doctor for adults at the age of 12 who literally met with me weekly and walked me back to health through diet and exercise. It's a gift that I've been trying to pay back my whole career, pay forward, I should say my whole career with children's health. And this is really a compilation of the research in several areas that I think are all the issues that we wrestle with today. When I wrote in the title raising healthy Happy kids Against all odds in today's world, the early readers were like, I don't think you can say against all odds because that might be a turn off to people. I go, it is against all odds when 20% of 2 year olds have tooth decay and 84% of school age kids tooth decay, teeth are not supposed to decay. It would be against the odds to raise a healthy child today. And yet it's possible if parents know what to do and are able to garner the resolve to do it and hopefully maybe even set up communities of people around their own children that would be willing to support some different lifestyle change.

Yeah, no, I love that and it's interesting because I feel like I had that community in Bethesda, Maryland and then I moved down to Boca Raton, Florida. And you know, it's, it's different. We found a great pediatrician down here who is a nice mix of, you know, Eastern and western medicine. Right. And so you have both, the best of both worlds because you have the opportunities to have somebody who really looks at the full picture versus just one way. And you know, that's really hard to find. But it's also been really hard to find airway centric dentistry in this area, especially for pediatrics. And you know, it's, you know, when you talk about raising a child, there's so, there's only so much I can do as the parent. You know, I definitely. We eat organic. My kids don't eat food dyes, we don't. We make sure there's no preservatives in our foods. And we obviously, to the extent that we can control, you know, really try to eat a balanced diet with full of nutrients. But we all know how that goes this day and age in the United States of America and what, what nutrition looks like compared to what it was, you know, even 30 years ago. So it's interesting and I've definitely seen on my own journey between myself, I'm headed in for nasal surgery. I've done adult expansion. I was an adult case that had Ortho when I was younger, was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 19. Even though they sat at age 5, they told my mother to get tested and she did take me to three different specialists. So it's interesting because I'm like, I've been through this and now reviewing my whole history, it started in infancy. I was tongue tied, I was fed, you know, I couldn't tolerate regular formulas. My mom couldn't breastfeed me, I wouldn't breastfeed. I look at you now, look at me now, right? That's what they all say, right?

I know, it's true, right? I'm on a quest also to have my health span match my lifespan. I'd like to live like this and have one bad day or bad week or bad month or whatever it is, but not to live my life that way. So you too? And it's possible. But you know, it's interesting. Even in the pre podcast discussion we were having, or you're like, oh, I wish my kids didn't eat dairy. I wish they didn't eat gluten. I think we have done, I think there's a misnomer about that. We've done a disservice to our community. People are diet confused and we have very, very unhealthy relationships to food in our country. Even if you use our pick our language, you know, a treat is something like chocolate cake. That's not a treat, that's a cheat. Do you know what I'm saying? We're kind of elevating the foods that are unhealthy. But the point of the matter is that if you look at the confusion today about what is the best thing to eat, what's the best thing to feed your kid, there is a lot of controversy about that plant based diet. We all kind of agree that. But what about meats and what about cured meats and what about munch meats and all that stuff? But when you think about gluten, our country did a disservice to wheat by taking one grain, knocking the outside off, grinding it into a white powder and putting it into everything. It's the basis of our cookies and crackers and cereals and cakes and you know, all of that, right? That's the problem. Not the wheat. But we've demonized it. So if you're not making it your staple, your kids likely won't have an issue with it. Same thing with dairy. It's one of those things that if you continue to narrow or guilt the food choices, what's happened now, is that our gut diversity in our microbiome, and there's a whole chapter on this in here called digest. And it's really impressive what's happened through the Human Genome Project. But our gut is a home. First of all, our bodies are home to 11 microbes per every human cell. 10 viruses and one bacteria. A human gut carries about three and a half pounds of bacteria in it, and the more diverse, the better. Like in any nature. I'm here in Florida, and that Red tide is an overgrowth of one bug because we've suppressed others. Right. So by narrowing right now, compared to 50 years ago, our gut diversity is half. That's why we're seeing all this rise in allergy and immunology deficiency. Right. So what is the single biggest contribution to the decrease in microbial diversity in our gut? It's the depletion of foods. In other words, we are now consuming 75% of our food from five species of animals and 12 species of plants. If you look at the top 50 foods that we eat in the United States, there's not a single stitch of produce except potatoes from french fries and potato chips. By continuing to narrow the choices or saying, I would like to eliminate this whole food group. I wish my family would. Or this whole food group, it's troubling because we want to increase the diversity without demonizing foods, but we want it to be real food, not manufactured food. That's the difference.

Yeah. No, and it's. I really love the way that you put it and that what you're saying makes a ton of sense. And I think I always follow my gut where.

Thank you. Good pun this morning.

I always follow my gut where, you know, for me, especially with Lily with my first one, she was so narrowed down in the types of proteins that she would eat at one point that I said, I'm not willing to take out the milk protein and some of these other proteins she's eating. But what I will do is I will continue to make sure that I give her the best quality. So we will make sure that, you know, I know that she digests a 2 milk better than, you know, other milks. And we do like whole milks versus the low fat that has higher levels of sugar. We do only grass fed, you know, butter. And. And so we're very careful about the types of dairy and the quality of dairy that we're eating. And if I, you know, in Maryland, I knew where there were farmers, I knew where there were, you know, local farmers where I could go and get, you know, Material, you know, different foods from here. That's still something I'm working on. And it's not something that I feel like my lifestyle has allowed me to really hyper focus on. So we just do our Whole Foods deliveries every week.

But I'm laughing about, about, you know, the whole drink thing is a real conundrum. I have a whole separate chapter in there on drink because people don't know what to drink. People literally are walking around drinking bottled water out of single use plastic, thinking it's better than tap water because they have no idea where they got it. And the fact that they're holding a container that's going to go in the landfill or the ocean. But they also are demonizing milk and thinking about milk, cow's milk, which I don't care what kind of milk you drink. If you're walking around with a red bull in your hand wondering what kind of milk to give your child, I mean, we're right, I'm going to tell you. 73% of kids between 6 and 12 drink caffeine every day. We have little addicts in training, but we're all flustered about their milk. So I'm not diminishing any of that. I'm just saying the section on drink, which sounds like, oh, it's just on drink, is really helping you discern what do we drink for pleasure. If you're going to add bubbles to your water, do you need to add acid to it too? What about single use containers and are those healthy or not? There are a whole bunch of things even around drink. I added this drink thing because I feel like 50% of our sugar comes from what we drink. We're consuming 22, 40 teaspoons of sugar a day, and 60% of children have fatty liver disease. Non alcoholic fatty liver disease, because we can't process fructose anywhere but in the liver. When we look at what we've done with high fructose corn, sirup two fructoses per every glucose, we've doubled up the amount of fructose. And free fructose only gets deposited or gets metabolized in the liver. Fatty liver diseases. Maybe you're not even on your radar. Maybe you're worried about insulin resistance. Half of us have that. Or the march toward diabetes, which we will be one in three of your children by 2050. That's a concern. So I think that all of this deserves a closer hard look and then some freaking resolve when you're in the grocery store to leave it there for parents too, right?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, it was one of those things. I remember even just as an adult being taught shop the circumference of the grocery store, because that's where they always keep the fresh foods and the fresh and avoid a lot of that processed stuff. And, you know, for me, I try to balance it, right? My kids are going to be exposed to this stuff at school and at birthday parties. And so my whole thought process is 80, 20. I can control what we do at home. And I can also let them go out and live life and not stress about it, because I know that a majority of the time, what they're getting is really high quality. They're going to have a strong gut. They're going to be able to digest most of this stuff. So it's very. It is. I think it's an interesting world we're living in right now, especially for parents of young children, because of, like, you know, it's like, what do you listen to and who do you listen to? And so I love that you've broken it down with eat and drink and digest. And I know you even go beyond that, and we'll get there. But it's. It's one of those topics that I think is so critical because I think parents are kind of like, I don't know who to listen to these days and what to feed my kids.

We, you know, when our kids go out in the world and see how people do it differently, they know right from wrong. So they can cheat, but they still inside, feel like it was a cheat, not a place they want to live. Right? I remember I never bought box cereal, except one time I bought Cheerios because I heard that it would help my son learn to urinate in the toilet. Right? You pee on them, which is where they belong, in the toilet. Okay. So when we got to Disney World at 5 years old, we went to breakfast with Mickey, and he walked in, and he sees these huge vats of cereal, and he sees Froot Loops, which he'd never seen before, and he goes really loud. We are in Disney World, Mom. They even have colored Cheerios. And I think the people around me were like, oh, boy, what attic has she. What seller has she kept her kid locked in? But, you know, when you raise your.

Kids, you'll appreciate this. So Lily comes home and tells me, like, a month or two ago, she was like, yeah, you know, my friends were talking about, like, chicken nuggets from McDonald's. And, you know, this other child, he said, it's not real food. And I was like, oh, okay. So Lily They, Lily said they asked me if I had had it. And I told them, I've never had McDonald's, I don't really know what it is. And so she goes, but now I know it's not real food. And I was like, okay, well, that's fine for me.

That's funny, right?

They don't eat fast food. You know, we do pick up food from fast casual restaurants that have healthy ingredients. And actually down here in Boca, there are some nice, like, locally sourced types of places where they make really healthy bowls. And it. There are different, you know, organic options and everything. So they're definitely used to eating from restaurants, but they don't know those. We don't do drive ups. It's not a thing.

I know you want to get on airway, I do too, and movement and all of that. But I'm dying to tell you the story. In the sixth grade, my son went to school. The principal wrote an email home because he said, three days into sixth grade, I had lunch with your son. I've never done this, but I need to give you some feedback. I was shocked. He pulled out a bag of spinach. And I said, what is that, Hunter? And he goes, Dr. Tweedy, you don't know what spinach is? And he goes, I thought that's what you're going to eat that raw? And he goes, it's delicious. Do you want some? And then he said, I said to him, well, Hunter, next thing you're going to tell me is you eat brussels sprouts too. And he reached in that bag and pulled out a bag of roasted brussels sprouts. And I about lost my lunch. He's like, they're my favorite. We had them grilled last night.

They're left over.

Anyway, I started feeling like Hunter was going to be bullied because people surely were going to see the difference. So I thought, I'm going to do something surprising for him. I went to the store and I was going to put potato chips in, but I didn't know how to put. Put a bag of potato chips in a brown paper bag. So I bought Pringles and I put a little stack of them in every day. And he never said a word. And on Friday I said, jim, so honey, how did you like the treat I put in your bag? And he said, I thought you would never ask. He said I had to ask people what they were. They told me they were a potato chip. And I held it up to the light and it looked just like particle board. And I'm pretty sure that Was not cut from a potato. And then he jumps up and he goes, mom, this body is a rocket ship. It only gets rocket fuel. I don't know what you were thinking. And that's the day that I changed the word treat to cheat. I thought we've got to say this is a cheat, not a treat. And he's like, keep it coming. Always makes a good trade. I can always find someone with an apple or orange they aren't willing to eat and I'll trade. And so I thought it was pretty funny. Like, give it to your friends, don't eat it yourself.

Very funny. That's hilarious. That is hilarious. I think my, my kids teachers are always like very impressed with their lunches. They have a little planet box lunches, lunchboxes for both of them. And so there's like the five little compartments and they always have like broccoli or green beans or some type of a green vegetable. And Lily would also eat just raw spinach by herself. Just raw lettuce. She loves it. But that's because when she was becoming a little bit pickier, if you will, around the time that she had her tongue tie release, we were dealing with airway stuff and she was, you know, not yet in her hair expansion appliance. I said, you know, we, we got to just explore foods. And I think that so many people and being a feeding therapist, I see this. A lot of parents focus on expanding foods that are easy to pick up at a drive thru or that are easy to pick up and carry around in your purse. And I'm the parent who is carrying a big bag with a cooler freezer pack in there because I'm carrying around green beans for snack or we blanched.

And put in a ziploc bag. They don't need to be refrigerated.

Everybody when you carry it around like all day and. Right, right, right. I mean, I would actually take her food to restaurants. We would go to restaurants and she doesn't eat stuff on a kid's menu. And so I would make her a meal and we would bring it and I put her meal out at the table at a restaurant and we would.

Ate at restaurants because Hunter's like, why are we waiting so long for food? Food that doesn't taste as good as what we have at home. So it's pretty funny.

Yeah. So it's, it's so interesting to see. And then my second one came along and we dealt with her airway stuff and her tethered oral tissues and everything from day five of life and Just completely different journey and much more open to eating everything. And, you know, so it's been a lot easier. But also she has a really great model and her older sister, so it was also much easier. You know, and obviously they eat what we eat, so it's. That's the point.

And we have to change who we are to raise healthier kids. And so the interesting part about the book, the person that did the research citations, you know, formatting at the end of every chapter. She said she's a physician, she's in residency, and she does this for a living. Her undergraduate was in research and she got done. She said, I've never, ever reread a book. After I was finished with the project just for me, she said, I feel like I parented myself. Every adult needs this book because she said, I, you know, it's about becoming who we're supposed to be, not just raising healthy kids. So that's an interesting point. All eyes on us. When we're raising kids, they're literally modeling our behavior. They will not do what we, you know, if we're asking them to try a variety of foods and we're asking them to avoid this or that, we need to be doing it.

Yeah, absolutely. So can we shift to airway? I want to talk about that because I know that this is like, this is an everything book. It's amazing. I love how much you covered in this book. I was flipping through and I was like, oh, yes. So I know from an airway standpoint and having been on this journey with myself and both my kids and my husband, who I don't really talk about much, but my kids, especially Lily, went into early orthodontia at age 4 to 5. And I was looking at her CBCT yesterday, reviewing it, and I was just like floored to see what we did. And, you know, I knew that there was a change. I could tell she was a healthier child overall. She wasn't getting sick as often, but to see that her sinuses went from almost fully black to totally clear and to see that I could see, you know, her airway now nice and clear on the cbc. Love it. Like, it just. It blew my mind. And we're now down here in south Florida and I'm like, mia keeps getting sick. I need to take her to for some type of pre orthodontic, but there's no one around here I can drive to, like North Miami. And that's probably what I'm going to have to do. But I was really trying to wait three hours in a car every time we have to go try for an adjustment. So I think that's what we're where we're headed at this point, though.

Well, I think this is a collaborative effort. You know, we, as pediatric airway people, me included, feel very powerful in our ability to change a face and change the trajectory of a child's life. But we can't do it without the myofunctional therapy and the speech language therapists and the allergist. It's truly a team effort, I think. Last night I was at an event down here in Tampa where Sarosaghi came in and gave a beginner lecture to a whole bunch of collected assorted adjunctive therapists on just tethered tissues. And, you know, the idea of bringing a community together to learn is super important. I started a wellness and prevention study club, a group of physicians in my area that's now 30. We meet at my house once a month for dinner, and I only can fit a dozen at my table. So it's a first come, first serve. We have a core group of people, but 48% of my practice now is people referred to me by the medical community. The way that that works is that we can really work collaboratively. They're on a text thread. We can access each other's brain power and all of that. We need more grassroots efforts in communities to serve kids. But we also need to not consider ourselves so powerful that just by doing the mechanical work of expansion, that we're fixing an airway problem when they may have sleep issues related to sleep hygiene. Could be that the environment they're sleeping in isn't healthy. It could also be that they have food or environmental allergies. This is a big concern for me because when you have an allergy that causes congestion in the turbinates or in the nose, you have to breathe through the backup valve. When you read through the backup valve habitually, you get more nasal disuse. But you see, we can't just say, oh, we got to do myofunctional therapy and tape them out. Because the fact of the matter is, if that food sensitivity or allergy is still there causing nasal congestion, we're out of lunch. How do we look at those allergies differently? How do we diversify their food and improve the gut microbiome and allow. Allow us to find these inflammatory foods that are bothering this particular child? It's a personalized medicine approach to each individual child. But it's bigger than the window that we're in, which in the pediatric Airway space seems to be. I'm on this endeavor group with all the best of the best. It's a 14 group or 17 of us around the globe. Everyone from Barry Raphael and Mariana Evans and Steve Carsonson and Kevin Boyd and all the names that you love, Sharon Moore, all these wonderful people engaged in pediatric airway around the globe. And we seem to come back and back and back to what appliances are you using and how are you? And it's important for us because we do the mechanics, but we all have to keep an eye on the big picture, which is breathing and sleep. And in the book I separated the two because sleep is impacted by airway, but sleep has its own issues. There are other sleep disorders and there are sleep hygiene issues. And let's talk about uars, because upper airway resistance syndrome, which we've often thought, we've always thought, you know, Christian Gimano said it was a young, fit female problem. Someone like you.

I just had this with it yesterday.

You did. Because the ahi only the apneic events have to be 10 seconds or more. They don't register for the upper airway resistance. So maybe you stop breathing for six seconds and then you have a respiratory effort and you take a breath, but you're missing sleep. You see, sleep is integrally important for the glymphatic system to clean up the brain. So you get the brain free fog and the chronic fatigue and the chronic inflammatory markers and the fibromyalgia and all the rest. So without sleep, and that is an airway issue, it's an obstructive airway issue that doesn't register and it's treatable. But without sleep in general, when I look at. You're a busy mom, so am I. I'm. My child's 28, he's gone. Which is why I can do these wonderful upstream efforts. But when I was in the trenches, I got home at night and I wanted to spend time with my child and I wanted to cook a healthy meal. And by the time I got home and cooked a healthy meal and we had dinner and cleaned up, there's like this much time. So my kid would stay up later and I would cheat his bedtime and he didn't do well with that. So I had to go, like, I got to rethink this. Do I buy convenient food and not cook it? Or how do I make. And of course, you know, I wasn't going to do that. So how do I make life more convenient for me so that I have more time with my child and don't feel guilty about not spending time with my own kid, you know what I mean? So there's all of those sleep issues that we have to continue to talk about in dentistry with our patients, not just, oh, we're measuring this. And I'm seeing tonsil enlargement and mouth breathing. And it is our arena. So we own that space and I'm grateful for that. But we have to think about it as a big picture issue.

Yeah. Well, and that's one of the things I've tried to do on this podcast and with inviting a lot of airway centric guests on the podcast, too, is talking about the full body connection, talking about the big picture, finding the root cause, because we can do MYO all day long, but we're going to hit a wall if there's a nasal obstruction, if there's an enlarged tissues, if there's an allergy. We have these discussions in my MYO membership all the time. Therapists will come in and say, what do you think I should do? This parent doesn't really want to stop therapy for their child. But I'm seeing that we've hit a wall and I've told them that we were going to get to this point. I think we're there. Yes. Has a child improved a little bit with their oral structures? Absolutely. Is there tough tongue now up more? Are they chewing a bit better? Yes. Is the swallow improved? Yes. But their oral rest posture hasn't changed. And I'm like, well, gee, what do you think it might be? You know, on nine times out of 10, it's like, well, I, we need to still either rule out allergies and, or nasal obstruction. And so I love how you also mentioned, you know, we can't just do MYO and tape them out because there's this whole movement, which really concerns me of, you know, if you're an adult and you want to tape your mouth, that's fine. But telling parents to tape the mouths of children when they have not been to an ENT or an allergist, you are now cutting off their air supply even more by putting tape across their mouth. And one of my colleagues and I, Autumn Reed Henning, who teaches the TOTS training, she and I did a podcast on this because we're like, look, I'm not against, you know, taping like you can. You want to tape around the lips in therapy and, you know, the airway is clear, fine. But when you're just going to outright tell parents, and this is all over social media, so any parent can just get a glimpse of. Oh, well, this professional said that we should tape our lips while we're sleeping at night. Have no idea their child has obstructive sleep apnea or even a mild form of sleep apnea, and that's dangerous. It's not helpful to the child to tape their lips if they can't breathe through their nose. So it's one of those interesting topics where it seems to just. It's been this trend lately on social media, and it drives me up a wall.

Well, I see both sides of it. I think we haven't put much emphasis on nasal clearing techniques. Not just nasal rinses, but, you know, we could be using xylitol. There's some really nice hope for erythritol. Some of the, you know, in terms of reducing inflammation, the nasal structures and getting kids settled. You know, interestingly, I don't think I wrote this in the book, but in the. In the. I tell my parents all the time that develop habits of closing the lips and breathing through the nose. You can tap your child's chin to have them remember, and you can then develop a little signal where you tap your own chin and they know to close. You know, we. We can sort of remind them to do this. But the. The interesting part about this nasal disuse, you know what that is, right? Where when you breathe through your mouth, you. Well, Nestor, you know, in his book Breath, when he put silicone plugs in his nose, and then all of a sudden the nose became very congested. If you don't use it, you lose it.

Right, Right. Yeah, yeah.

So the idea of mouth taping is literally to help open the airway, but it doesn't. You have to be. That's why I say let's start taping at. Sorry, at story time, during wakeful time, and see if it helps the congestion.

Yeah.

Start taping it and do some nasal clearing first, you know, and see, you know, without putting a child to sleep with it at night, you know, and then maybe try nap time and see how they feel, if they're feeling more rested and refreshed. Because I think it is a useful tool. And not everybody is going to. You know, you go to the ents, and the ents have had pushback on all the stuff we're doing.

Right.

So they very much diminish the opinions of the dentist who's looking at an airway problem. And then all of a sudden they go in for their ENT workup. And the ENT says your child's totally normal. I see normal tonsils, you know what I mean? And by the way, just because they have normal tonsils does not mean the adenoids are not enlarged. If there's any audible breathing or snoring, there's an obstruction.

Yeah. And I think that I also come from an area where it was really hard to find. Ents would actually look at a child beyond. They wouldn't, they weren't doing scans or scopes. They were just looking at the tonsils and saying the child's fine. And so for me, that made me nervous because I'm going, no, I really think this child needs a referral to an allergist. I really think this child needs to have a scan done to be sure that it's safe to expect them to have a closed mouth posture. You know, we can't work on this until we know they can breathe through their nose. And like you said, we can trial in therapy. The parent can trial when the child's awake or if they're, you know, I would say if you're monitoring them or it's a short period of time, that's a different story. But it's just this trend on social media where nobody's talking about making sure the airway is patent or making sure that it's safe to do this before making the recommendation. And I'm over here going like, oh, gosh, this is not, this is not good. This is not good. But yes, it's so important to. I love how you also talked about training the mouth to stay closed and how you can give these cues where, you know, on babies. Right. Because we work with infants through adults in my practice. But on the infants and toddlers, we might initially start with taking the fingers and just kind of gently push, you know, bringing the lips together. And then we tell parents, okay, after that, back off and just touch the lips and then touch your lips. Right. So same idea. It's what you're saying where, you know, you kind of fade out the. We call them like cues or non verbal reminders or, you know, it's, it's just a way for them to visually, you know, see. Oh.

The way we do it with teaching them to say please and thank you. It's just, we're training them.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So. And I love, I love. You're gonna love.

My friend Kelly Richardson's just finishing a book. It's a children's book called the Very Stuff he knows it's about her son Finn. And it's in, in Finn, who decides he'd start. Starts mouth Breathing and feel scrappy. And then teaches himself to have a mantra of close your mouth, breathe through your nose. And it's a beautiful little book, so I hope you'll like it. This very stuffy nose. It's about to come out in a couple months. Beautiful.

Awesome. My dentist colleague and I are writing a series of books on tether dural tissues and myoin frenectomies. And that whole mantra too, of, you know, breathing through your nose, tongue up, lips close, teeth apart, breathe through your nose. So we are, you know, that's in the late stages. We're getting close to also putting out the first little series of three, but I'm like, we need more stuff like this for kids out there so that it's normalized so that it's expected that this is what we could be doing.

So not to change the subject, my favorite chapter of the book is probably feel and think, which is social emotional cognitive learning. My mom was a therapist, a couple therapists, and she, you know, I grew up with a lot of that language. And it was so fun to do the research in areas of, you know, everything from anxiety, depression, addiction, which we see so much of. We were projecting that anxiety would increase to 40% by 2030, and it happened in a year during COVID but it was, you know, it's been very sad to watch. But also, you know, what to do about screen time. I know that in my day, the worst punishment we ever had was go to your room. And now it's like, get out of your room for 30 minutes. You know, the idea that kids are sedentary, stuck behind screens and addicted to gaming and all this stuff is a real, real issue. And we need to figure out about bullying, about social media, about monitoring their apps. All of that is in here. And I think that this is an area in children's health that is sorely overlooked, which is the social emotional learning part. We tend to not see this until kids fall into major traps, and then digging them out of a trap is really difficult. There's an urban legend told of two guys that are sitting on the side of a river having a fishing and having a picnic, and they see a drowning child floating by, screaming, and they reach in to save this child, and then there's another one, and then there's two more, and then there's three more. And finally one of the guys gets out and dries off and he goes, where are you going? And he goes, I'm going upstream to figure out what's going on. And I think that the Upstream efforts in our health care system are completely abysmal. And so if we're looking at parenting our own children, trying to prevent some of the anxiety, depression and addiction, isolation, bullying, all the stuff that we see, how do we build character and integrity, and how do we have kids be able to stick up for themselves and feel good about themselves and chart their own course? We all want that. How do we do it? So that was super fun for me to write, and I hope that helps a lot of people. And probably my second favorite chapter is the movement chapter is really, by the way, there is a chapter in oral health. We were forgetting that. But chew and smile and Caries being our number one disease across the world for children and 100% preventable. Occlusal disease. Periodontalis, oropharyngeal cancer from oral sex. Body part sex. How to talk to your kids about sex. The sex part. My mom was a sex therapist, too.

Oh, wow.

She passed a few years ago. Yeah. Interesting. Growing up in a family where penises and vaginas were like fingers and toes. When you're like, tongues and palates and.

You know, we sit down at the table and my kids go, who pooped today? How many times poop today? And my parents, because we're all, like, down here and Boca together right now, they're like, do we have to discuss this every night at dinner? And I'm like, I'm a pediatric feeding therapist. Welcome to my world. Yeah.

Yeah. I taught my son to. To prize the foot long floater, right? And he'd call me to the toilet. And I said. I said in the book, hopefully that, you know, that ends before college. But in truth, I got a couple selfies from college just as a joke, you know, it's like, I don't want to see the toilet anymore, honey. Really fun, mom. Come on. Look what I did.

You know, funny, we went to a doctor recently who, like, pulled out a Bristol stool chart, said, do you know? Do you. Have you ever seen this? I just started laughing. And he was like, can your child identify which one they have on the chart? And I'm like, probably. That's. That's conversation at dinner every night. So just give her the picture. She'll tell you what's up.

Anyway, I put the sex section in the oral health section, which, you know, my mom passed a few years ago. But I like, I want to write another book called Brave Parenting the Emancipating Child. So I left a chapter on sexual health out, But I did address that since oral pharyngeal cancer from oral sex is increasing at 30% a year and is super freaky scary how fast that's growing. And 50% of those infections happen between 15 and 24 years old. So we need to really talk to kids about the fact that oral sex isn't safe sex. And where do we stand on vaccination for kids for a very real cancer? The nine most oncogenic types of oropharyngeal cancer are also included in that vaccine. And I know that vaccines are touchy subjects right now, so deals with all of that in the oral health section. That's an area in dentistry that we sort of put blinders on because nobody really wants to talk about oral sex. Right?

Yeah, but you guys, oral health and oral care. And we actually have a guest coming to speak to the membership in August of this year. He's going to talk about oral cancer because I think it's also. It's just not something that gets discussed in the myo world or the airway space. But we need to know what to look for and when to.

Realistically, 30% of it shows up in the mouth and 70% is invisible to our eye as a clinician. And so where does it show up? It shows up in neck nodes first. And because 82% is men, middle aged men, they usually would get it when they're find it, when they're shaving and now they're not shaving. We have to spend 70% of our oral pharyngeal cancer exam here in the neck because neck disease, we need to learn how to do that. Anyway, that's off subject of kids, but the fact is that kids are often engaged in the majority of kids in body part sex in middle school. And so we don't want to think about that oral sex in middle school. But we, we do need to do that because we, they don't think of it as sex, they think of it as safe sex. And we need to sort of dispel the myth that this is safe.

Yeah, I feel like I had that education, actually. I always say they didn't teach us much, but I feel like we actually did have like a sex ed class. They actually separated the girls and the boys into two different classrooms and we had that. And they talked about everything, including oral sex and all the STDs that you can get and how you can still get them through a condom and all this. I remember talking about all this stuff.

So interesting.

Maybe they need to bring it back. Maybe it's gone away and it needs to return.

I don't know whether it happens through education, because it's a cultural thing. Oral sex is not going away. When I was a kid, it was a lot longer before. I'm 62, so it was a lot longer before you were a kid. People had early intercourse, but there wasn't a lot talked about in terms of oral sex. Now it's really considered casual, like kissing, body kissing. Right. And sometimes it's the price that girls pay to hang on to a cool boyfriend or boys pay to be cool. You know, it's. It's one of those things that kids talk about.

Yeah.

You know, they're carrying around handheld computers that have access to porn. How do we monitor that? And, you know, so again, I address some of these issues in the book. I know it's a big book. I mean, I know it deals with A to Z, but I mean, I try to take the most contemporary issues and really unravel those for parents. And the last section is probably my second favorite, which is really movement is how do we foster daily exercise? I don't know if you're aware, but the National Institutes of Health and Fitness have now come out with guidelines for toddler movement, which is really critical. Crazy, because normally we're like, settle down. Now it's like, you guys need to move. Because they're literally glued to a tablet. We've used these as a babysitter, and they're very captivating. We want our kids to get ahead in technology and be able to navigate the technology world, but we are seeing a gross insufficiency in movement among kids of all ages. And so how do we, as adults model that instead of going, I really should work out, and, you know, I often have my audiences all stand up, and I start to say, like, let's. When we're pointing one finger at health, we're pointing three back at us. So let's level ourselves. Let's be humble here. And then I'll say, sit down. If you don't floss your teeth every day, nobody sits down. And they'd be embarrassed. Right?

Right.

Sit down. If you don't wear your seat belts, they're all still standing. Sit down. If you don't drink six to eight glasses of water a day while you lose some, sit down. If you're not exercising five days a week, moving for at least 30 minutes a day, that takes most of the people out. And then people come up to me, and then I. And then I'll say something like, you know, sit down. If you don't wake up to a Drug every morning, like caffeine. Well, then the rest of us are sitting down. I mean, I have a lot more questions in there, but I know how to get them to all sit down eventually, right? And so, but the, the exercise part, people will come up to me and say, like, boy, that's pretty strict. Five times a day for five times a week for 30 minutes or less. I like, are you kidding right now? Our bodies are designed to be moving. This is why animals in nature are not diabetic, because they don't have diabetes, because they move around for their food and they eat food from the source. And we have to be willing to move. You know, three 10 minute walks a day would do it for you, but you got to move. And so the idea is, how do we engage in activity that values daily exercise for our children? That will set them up for a lifetime of, you wake up, you brush your teeth. In your case, you're eating good food, you're doing all these things. And we're trying to model behavior in our kids. We often forget about a really healthy dose of physical activity a day. And we do it too. Responsibility to our bodies as adults. Not just in the gym. We do address in the. I do address in the book Cardio versus weights. And when can kids start lifting weights and what, you know, what are the best kinds of exercises for kids and all of that, but things like a dance party at your house, in your living room at night, like your favorite music.

Oftentimes my kids go and have Alexa turn on music and they do little dances. They say, watch us. And I'm like, this is so great. Because they're kind of. You're not back. And we have a rule because I don't want them on a screen close to bedtime. So I will let them have like, downtime while dinner's being made. I'm working, something's happening. And then I'm like, enough, okay, Put that iPad away. You had your time. I actually bought them recently an air track off Amazon where you could just blow it up and deflate it very quickly. And it's like a gymnastics track. And I got one that was like, it's like 20ft long. It's like across the entire kitchen and family room. And they do gymnastic stuff or they just jump around on it, or they try and do cartwheels and it's something novel that gets them. And, you know, you could do yoga.

Mats and do sing.

I mean, yeah, I got new yoga mats like Target Dollar Aisle, right? Like, they have all kinds of Stuff that you can buy. Oftentimes.

You realize you're aberrant, right, Ellie? You realize you're an aberrant.

I know. I know.

You and I are in the same girlfriend vibe here.

People I didn't go, like, really? Oh, okay. I like.

They don't understand me. No. And you are. You're active yourself. You know, it's really difficult when you're looking at families of people who are struggling with obesity. They don't want to be fat and they know they're unhealthy and they don't want it for their children, but they're stuck in their own ways. Parents get stuck in a rut. The idea of this book is also to try to help kids build habits, to put themselves in the driver's seat for a preferred future, and that we can spur parents to talk about. A lot of this book is about how do we deal with self awareness, self love, forgiveness of ourselves, ability to admit to our kids that we're not where we want to be either. We're in this together. I'm not perfect. I think kids do better with structure and routine, but they also. And prescriptive parenting. But we also have to be gentle, kind, humble parents to be willing to say, you know, I haven't done this well for me, and I want better for you, and I want to work at it with you. And to be able to say, like, you know, this is something I wish that I had as a child is parents that were really promoting exercise and I want to get better. So let's do it. Why don't you design a workout for me today and I'll do it with you and I'll do yours tomorrow and we work at it together. There's a whole bunch of tools in there. So that was one of my favorite things to write because I had a surrogate, brave parent and my doctor at age 12 who fixed my life through exercise and diet and really helped me figure out that I could do this without medication. I could get rid of my allergies, I could get on with my life. I could lose weight and feel better and through a healthy approach to that. And I know that we're capable of doing that with our kids and we'll feel better, too. But it's got to include daily activity. Just has to.

Yeah. No, I think people are always surprised to hear that. Like, I'm not on any medication. My kids aren't on medications my husband's on. I mean, because we use food and we use. We try to use natural remedies. Homeopathy and food.

And I hope it'll be the same when you're my age and older. I intend to carry on just like that my whole life, too. And it's possible.

Yeah, absolutely.

But it's, you know, it's against the odds because it's not. It's not what the world would have us do. You and I, Haley, are really in this to win this. But you know who's winning, right? The food manufacturers, the drink manufacturers, the pharmaceuticals, the recreational drug pushers. They're all in it to win it, too. And they're beating us. And they have lobbyists and they have bigger forces and more money. We're grassroots here. But I do believe Margaret Mead, who said, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

Indeed.

It's the only thing that ever has. And I do believe that if we start movements that build awareness and we have parents who are willing to do the work and spread the news and become part of a movement, we could put a dent in this. And, you know, I was more hopeful before COVID that we might see some change in my lifetime. Probably not in my lifetime. We'll get worse before we get better. But I hope that my work stands for something, and yours too. I'm getting a little teary eyed, but I mean, I hope. I hope that our work stands for something long after we're gone and that our life will have been worth living knowing that we were trying to make a difference.

Absolutely. Getting chills, but thank you. I mean, this has been an amazing conversation. I know. We could talk all day. We'll have you come back on soon, too. You know, the book is definitely out. We could talk about some more of these topics maybe a little bit and dive a little deeper into them.

But I know launch Tuesday, by the way. Tuesday, anywhere you buy books, it's called Brave Parents.

By the time this goes out, the book will have launched. So they can go to be a braveparent.com or they can go to like Amazon, Barnes and Noble or anywhere you can purchase books and get your copy. Okay.

Be a brave parent.com and join the movement. Be on the newsletter and it'll be.

Fun to have everybody link that so that everybody has that in the show notes and yeah, thank you, Susan. This has been wonderful.

Loved it. I knew it would happen. We'd suck the air right out of the room. We'll do it again.

Absolutely.

Thanks for all you're doing for all of us.

Yeah, and you too. Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you want to hear more of these Myo Tots, Airway and Feeding related episodes, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or pledge a small amount on patreon.com the Untethered podcast. If you found value, others you know in this space will too. So be sure to share this episode on your social media platforms and join us over on Facebook on my Facebook page @HALLIEBLCAN BIZ, on Instagram at Alibulkin. And you can head over to theuntetheredpodcast.com to grab a copy of the Show Notes, where you can also subscribe to be kept up to date on the latest podcast episodes.