Primitive Reflexes and School Challenges!

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Hey, it’s Dr. B and Elizabeth here and we are going to have some fun today. First of all, ChiroSecure, you are amazing. And thank you for giving us this opportunity to spread the word about chiropractic to the docs and parents and teachers and everybody out there. So today we’re going to do a crash dive in into primitive reflexes, learning attention behavior, and what to know about the upcoming school year.

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All right. So Elizabeth. Elizabeth needs to take a nap, so she’s going to take a little snoozer here while we hang out and then she’ll be back to bid you adieu. So Elizabeth, there you go. She’s got her own little crib next to my bed next to my desk. Okay, what do you need to know?

First of all, this is just a brief overview, right? This takes a lot more digging in and diving in if you really want to incorporate the integrating reflexes into your practice. However, we should be screening for them just to see where if a child has neurological readiness to start their endeavors into the academic environment.

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So a couple of things to think about is one, there’s debate out there whether. primitive reflexes stay active in the older child and or reactivate in the adult? And what does that look like? What is it in the older child and the adult anyway? So one thing you may want to take into consideration is if you want to use some of this information in your communities, in an academic setting, in the schools, is is not really going there saying we want to test primitive reflexes per se, or the concern about primitive reflexes being active.

I want you to understand what primitive reflexes mean. If they’re active, what is that telling you about neurological readiness, about neuromotor patterns, which we talked about last month and their connection into brain and learning intention behavior. I want you to understand how the, how it all ties together.

Sometimes different communities in the medical community, in the teaching community, et cetera, will have more of an open mind if we talk about neurological readiness from a neuromotor standpoint, rather than using terms like primitive reflexes. So essentially what you’re talking about is that the autonomic nervous system hasn’t matured to the point.

where a little fiddle fart is ready for an academic environment. The things that are most associated with these active primitive reflexes, remember that means they’re stuck, what I call stuck in the stem. They’re neurologically stuck in the brainstem mode. And what gets them out of that is progressive neurodevelopment to higher, more cognitive centers of the brain.

Cognitive. Cognition equals learning, attention, behavior. So when they’re stuck in the brainstem, their cognitive executive functioning abilities are less than stellar. And that’s what we need to be successful in the classroom and academic environment. So maybe frame it in that mode. And you might be more, get more be more receptive.

They might be more, more receptive to you and your, what you have to offer. But these, when these reflexes are active, they’re a lots of times tied with things like particularly with language acquisition, reading, and writing. And of course, paying attention. So we’re just going to spot shot. We’re going to highlight a few reflexes to be mindful of.

If you have a little fiddle fart that A, presents with difficulties and challenges in the classroom, or B, you want to screen for neurological readiness of that child and their success in the classroom, in the academic environment. And if they’re not there, then chiropractic care, helping to connect those neural pathways.

Especially for the brain, the body and the brain and those neuromotor patterns. is a huge intervention that can help them be more successful in the classroom. Okay. So let’s just go over a few of them. First of all, Mara reflex. Mara, right? That startle reflex in that infant that should no longer be active.

After about four months of age, but we give them all the first year. After the first year of life, you really don’t want to see this active response to Morrow. Morrow what does that look like in a classroom setting? A. Morrow is associated with the development of all sensory systems. So sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, introception, vestibular, proprioception, visceral, microbiome, et cetera.

And they can often have a residual attention to the periphery. So they look like squirrel, right? If they see there’s a fan blowing and a piece of paper that’s pinned to the board is quivering, their attention goes there. If a kid, another kid scratches their nose, their attention goes there.

Their attention is to the periphery. And so they have a really hard time focusing in on what they’re supposed to focus in. So they’re oftentimes very inattentive and ADHD appearing. Most of the reflexes, most of the research that’s out there on primitive reflexes is connected with things like autism, ADD, ADHD, but a lot more attention is coming down the pipeline with neuropsychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and such.

The main, think about it, the main reason is the higher, more sophisticated cognitive areas of the brain have not. fully developed and come online. And so therefore, they don’t have the skills. The skill set for cognitive behavioral manif ba presentation, and those lack of skills are associated with these disorders, okay?

So that’s basically what it means. All right, so we got maro, we got that inattention, we got, squirreled like behavior and we’ve got all the sensory systems that can be not up to par. Dyslexia is a big thing associated with three of the big reflexes have been, had ties to dyslexia. And that’s the ATNR, the STNR, Symmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex, and the Tonic Labyrinthine Reflex, TLR.

Those three are big guns that have connections with dyslexia and overall reading and reading comprehension. Now, let’s take those and let’s look at why that might be. Those three reflexes are very much associated with cervical spine movement. So for us as chiropractors, that’s a big deal, right?

So a lot of information coming into the cerebellum from the cervical spine is huge. So those three reflexes are associated with cervical spine movement. They’re associated with input into the cerebellum. Dyslexia is very much associated with cerebellar deficits. So that’s the connection there.

Those three reflexes are very much associated with integrating during progressive tummy time movements as an infant. And we’ve talked about that in some previous classes. So you can go back and listen to those. So those three reflexes when you see reading difficulties, reading comprehension, and dyslexia.

In fact in 96 percent of dyslexic individuals, they found an active ATNR. That’s pretty significant. The STNR, Symmetrical tonic neck reflex is associated with learning disorders and they found about 76 percent of the population with learning disorders had an active STNR. Other signs of ATNR, asymmetrical tonic neck reflex, is difficulties with knowing right and left.

with activities that require crossing the midline. So in the academic arena, that’s going to be reading and writing in the United States in our language. Cause we go from left to so they might have a difficulty with understanding directions and so forth. With the STNR, you might see the WCIT.

That’s commonly associated with STNR. And why do they WCIT? WCIT. Even in the classroom, they will. Sometimes they’ll W sit on their seats there in the desk. That is often because they have poor postural stability. And so they have that W sit. And again, poor postural stability is a sign of dismaturation of those higher executive functioning areas of the brain that control muscles and postural, especially the small spinal stabilization postural control.

So tonic labyrinthine, oftentimes a telltale sign, especially in the classroom, is they sit like this, they have to prop their head up because they have weakness of the cervical. muscles. And so they get, they fatigue out. So they end up sitting like this. So those are just some trinkets, some keen eye trinkets that you want to be able to look for and say, okay, are these signs telling me that little fiddle fart is not neurologically ready to be sitting in a classroom all day?

The spinal gallant reflex. And the at and r, both of those are associated with enuresis past the age of five. And oftentimes these kiddos have ants in the pants kind of posture in school and can’t sit still, and they’re squiggling around a lot. And they might have difficulties with anur resis at school after the age of five.

And they’re also, excuse me. Spinal Gallant is associated with Anis after the age of five. Both of those spinal gallant and St N-A-T-N-R are associated with scoliosis. So that’s a mouthful. So one of the things you might wanna do with that I did successfully in my California practice was I offered to do scoliosis screenings in the school district.

And I tested for Spinal Gallant. and AT& R and which was very easy to do. And then you can also maybe do a few questions to find out if those kiddos also have difficulty with learning attention behavior in the classroom because those reflexes are active. You might see a lateral curve or an actual scoliosis and they might have difficulty in the classroom as well.

So there you have some just keen eye tidbits to start doing some of these screenings in your offices. Understanding that if they have an immature developed nervous system, they are more prone to be stuck in their brainstem, thus these reflexes are active. So again, spinal gallant might be your enuresis kiddo.

Spinal Gallant and ATNR might be your scoliosis findings. Your ATNR, STNR, and Tanectonic Labyrinthine might be your dyslexic reading difficulty. And all of them can lead to inattention behaviors because that means that those higher cortical functions aren’t online. And your Maro kiddo might look like Squirrel, where there are tensions all over the place because they can’t stay focused.

Hopefully this is a good recap to try to implement some of these pearls into your office. Do a quick screening. The more reflexes present, the better. the more likely they’re going to struggle and their struggles are at a higher degree. And that means that your chiropractic care plan might need to be a little bit more enhanced, especially when they, at the beginning of the school season, because their stress level is going to be up.

They might have more struggles during that time. So even these kiddos that you might be seeing on a maintenance basis, Once every few weeks or once a month, they might need to be bumped up a little bit and be seen more frequently in order to calm their nervous system to make those first months, weeks of school more successful for them.

Hopefully that gives you some pearls and again, ChiroSecure, on behalf of me and Elizabeth, we want to thank you for this opportunity. Docs, keep out there, keep doing your amazing work. Keep changing the tide for these kiddos so we can foster healthy generations for the future. And we will see you in September when school is going to be back in session.

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