Practical Parenting

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #108: Halie Hauser – Storytime

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On today’s episode of Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, we welcome Halie Hauser, a pediatric clinician, storyteller, and quiet architect of early childhood connection.

Halie is the creator of Storytime Explorers, a storytelling platform designed for toddlers and preschoolers that sits at the intersection of language, emotion, and human development. With a Doctor of Nursing Practice focused on pediatric primary care, she brings both clinical depth and creative intuition to the way she reaches children—and just as importantly, their parents.
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Her work lives in the small moments: friendship struggles, big feelings, daily routines, the courage to try again. The ordinary terrain of childhood—where, if we’re paying attention, the most important wiring is happening.

Halie understands something we often forget in modern pediatrics: before a child can regulate, they must feel safe; before they can learn, they must feel connected; and before they can speak, they must be spoken to in a language that meets them where they are.

Through storytelling, she’s building that bridge.

This is a conversation about early brain development, emotional scaffolding, the power of narrative in shaping behavior—and how something as simple as a story can become a tool for resilience, attachment, and lifelong learning.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 4 – Relationships

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Literature Review:

A) “Establishment of the gut microbiome during early life is a complex process with lasting implications for an individual’s health. Several factors influence microbial assembly; however, breast-feeding is recognized as one of the most influential drivers of gut microbiome composition during infancy, with potential implications for function. Differences in gut microbial communities between breast-fed and formula-fed infants have been consistently observed and are hypothesized to partially mediate the relationships between breast-feeding and decreased risk for numerous communicable and noncommunicable diseases in early life. Despite decades of research on the gut microbiome of breast-fed infants, there are large scientific gaps in understanding how human milk has evolved to support microbial and immune development.” (Davis et. al. 2022)

Main Takeaways:

First 1000 days matter a lot for microbial and immune development: Infancy is a critical window when the gut microbiome is assembled and the immune system is learning to respond to microbes and external exposures. Patterns set early can ripple into infection risk, inflammatory diseases, and atopy later in life.

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 2 – School Food

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School Based Nutrition – Why is it happening this way?

There is a quiet experiment happening in American childhood, and we should stop pretending it’s benign.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when I attended school, school food was far from perfect, but it existed in the context of something essential: it was mostly prepared on site, minimally processed (but changing in that direction) and not laden with additives and chemicals (Yet). Oh, and most children still ate meals prepared at home at almost every other occasion. Dinner wasn’t aspirational or Instagram-worthy, but it was routine. Real food. Cooked by someone who knew the child, at a table where nervous systems could downshift. School lunch was a supplement to that structure, not the metabolic foundation of a child’s life. That has all changed in a short 50 years. Mirroring the change in weight and childhood disease prevalence.

• 1970s – some processed foods begin to enter school cafeterias at scale
• 1980s – preservatives and additives become routine
• 1990s – ultra-processed foods dominate

In 1994, new standards were added: This table lays out how much of each food group schools were supposed to offer over a week under the 1994 standards. These were the first nutrition-focused meal standards the USDA put into place:

For Breakfast (all grades K–12):
Fruit: 2.5 cups/week
Vegetables: 0 cups/week
Grains/Bread: 0–10 oz equivalent/week (depending on combinations of grains and protein)
Meat/Meat-alternative: 0–10 oz equivalent/week
Milk: 5 cups/week

For Lunch (split by grade levels):
Fruit: K–3 also 2.5 cups; grades 4–12 get 3.75 cups/week
Vegetables: still 0 cups/week (no separate vegetable requirement yet)
Grains/Bread: at least 8 oz eq/week
Meat/Meat-alternative: 7.5 oz eq/week for breakfast; 10 oz eq/week for lunch
Milk: 5 cups/week

(Hopkins 2015)

What’s notable, reflected in the structure of this table, is that vegetables weren’t required at all yet, and the standards were very much food-group based, not ingredient-level nutrient quality checks. That created space for schools to rely on industrially produced entrées and sides that technically met volumes of grains or proteins but could still be ultra-processed products with long ingredient lists, many of these foods would meet a NOVA class 4 classification (the worst type). Think fruit cup in sugary syrup…..

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 1 – Beyond Behaviors Part 3, Mona Delahooke, PhD

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Chapter 3 – Individual Differences

Dr. Delahooke starts Chapter 3 by allowing Margaret Mead to remind us that each child is absolutely unique: “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” This is more than a witty paradox, it is the hinge upon which all effective pediatric care swings. When we take individual differences seriously as neurobiological fact, we can finally stop confusing adaptive survival responses with defiance, stop labeling children as problems, and begin the real work of supporting the mind body systems that shape behavior from the inside out.

Let us review what we have learned in Beyond Behaviors so far – We are invited to descend below the waterline of the behavioral iceberg. What we see at the surface: the tantrum, withdrawal, rigidity, hyperactivity, the refusal to transition is merely a set of observable outputs from deeply personal internal variables. The sensory wiring, physiological states, immune triggers, thoughts, feelings, memories, and the child’s moment-to-moment sense of safety. Without diving into these subterranean layers, we risk treating smoke while ignoring the fire, which is the general state of current pediatric psychiatric medical therapeutics. We mostly treat the smoke. We don’t often ask about the fire. Her central thesis is simple, clinically robust, and profoundly humane:

Children behave according to the state of their nervous system, and their nervous system is shaped by individual biological, emotional, and sensory differences.

Once we understand this, behavior becomes not a moral test but a window into the child’s internal world…..

Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #100 Wayne Koontz, MD – Vaccines and Disease over 50 years

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Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, we welcome Dr. Wayne Koontz, a founding partner at Salisbury Pediatric Associates in Salisbury North Carolina, where he has spent over 5 decades caring for generations of families with compassion, wisdom, and a deep commitment to community health.

Dr. Koontz earned his Undergraduate degree and his Doctor of Medicine from Wake Forest University, where his early love of science and service began to take shape. He went on to complete his pediatric residency at Dallas Children’s Medical Center, part of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, where he received outstanding training in both academic and clinical pediatrics.

As one of the founding physicians at Salisbury Pediatrics, Dr. Koontz helped to build a model of child-centered, family-oriented care that has served the Rowan County. His commitment to children’s well-being extends beyond the clinic, reflecting a lifelong dedication to preventive medicine, developmental health, and the nurturing of strong physician–family relationships.

It’s an honor to have Dr. Koontz with us today to share his clinical insights as they relate to infection and vaccination from a longevity based pediatric career. Dr. Koontz has a unique perspective to share as his 50 plus years of experience cover the prevaccine infectious disease based practice of pediatric medicine all the way to the current vaccine centric and reduced infectious disease burden reality. That is a timeline worthy of exploration.

So lets explore.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue 22/23/24 – Acetaminophen and Autism

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Review Part III – after the Attia Podcast

After completing the interview with Dr. William Parker and now listening to Peter Attia’s analysis, let us look again at this question. I repeat that the initial question has not changed for me. The first and most fundamental question to ask is this: What is the true value of acetaminophen in health compared with the potential risk if the associated findings are indeed correct?

My response to this question has been altered by the analysis so far.

I love this from Dr. Attia: “Some people might be wondering, why did you just take so long to explain all this to us? Why don’t you just give us the answer? I just want the sound bite, man

Peter’s reply, “If you just want sound bites, you’re never going to learn.”

Honestly, if you just want sound bites, this isn’t the podcast for you. But if you actually want to be able to learn to think for yourself, then that’s what we’re here to do. And that’s the reason we killed ourselves over the past week to put together the most thorough gathering of all the data we could find and the most intense night-weekend analysis possible. “

I agree! I believe that the science and data are key. So here goes – round three!…..

Dr. M

 

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue 9

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Today, I’m diving into a fascinating article by Scott Zimmerman and Russel J. Reiter, titled Melatonin and the Optics of the Human Body, published in Melatonin Research (2019). This piece flips the script on what we thought we knew about melatonin, light, and how our bodies interact with the sun’s rays. It’s a game-changer, especially for how we think about kids’ health in our modern, screen-filled indoor living world.

First, what is melatonin? Melatonin is a hormone made from the essential amino acid, tryptophan. It was first isolated from a cow’s pineal gland. It is an old molecule as primitive bacteria made melatonin probably 2.5 billion years ago. Its synthesis in bacteria and eukaryotes is a common linkage. Most of us know that melatonin is the “sleep hormone,” produced by the pineal gland in the brain when it gets dark at night, signaling to our bodies that it’s time to wind down and prepare to sleep. It’s the chemical expression of darkness, driving our circadian rhythms and helping us catch those precious brain cleansing moments. Zimmerman and Reiter argue that this is only half the story or maybe even less than half. For decades, research has hyper-focused on pineal melatonin that is regulated by visible light hitting our retinas. Blue visible spectrum light in the early morning suppresses pineal melatonin, which is why we should dim those screens before bed. But here’s where it gets interesting, the pineal gland isn’t the only place melatonin is made, and darkness isn’t its only trigger. Our bodies are producing melatonin in ways we’re just starting to understand, and it’s tied to light in a way that was unexpected and evolutionarily fascinating. As with all things in science and evolution, we learn what we did not know and it all makes sense once the aha moment occurs…. and a literature review. Oh and a recipe.

Dr. M

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