Tag Archives: children

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #117: Kari Stubbs, PhD – Technology and Children

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Today’s conversation sits right at the intersection of childhood development, technology, and a question that is becoming harder for parents to ignore: What might our children need to develop before we hand them a screen?

My guest today is Dr. Kari Stubbs, who holds a PhD in education and has spent her career in K–12 education technology. And that makes her current work particularly interesting. She isn’t approaching this conversation as someone who is anti-technology. Quite the opposite. She understands technology, has worked within it for years, and sees very clearly where the world is headed.

But she also spends her weeks talking with early-childhood leaders and school-district directors, hearing firsthand that children are showing up at school differently than they did a generation ago.

Kari raised her own two children using what she describes as a brain-based approach to movement and development, during a time when screens still largely stayed attached to walls and desks. Today, she argues for something that sounds almost countercultural coming from an education technologist: protecting significant screen-free time during the first five years of life.

Her argument isn’t that technology is bad. It’s that timing matters.

Those first five years are when children are building many of the foundational human capacities they will carry into school, relationships, and eventually the workplace—things like curiosity, adaptability, creativity, self-regulation, and collaboration. And ironically, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable, these deeply human aptitudes may become more valuable, not less.

Kari writes about these ideas in her Substack, The First Five: Before Screens, and today we’re going to explore what the developing brain actually needs from movement, play, relationships, and the physical world—and what may be lost when screens arrive too early or occupy too much of childhood.

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 23 – Back To School

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Back To School Thoughts

As summer winds down and the school year starts, our attention naturally turns to backpacks, school supplies, new clothes, sports schedules, and carpools. But getting ready for school is about much more than checking items off a list. It is about helping our children return to the classroom with the physical, mental, and emotional foundation they need to thrive.

A few simple changes now can make the transition much easier.

1) Start With Sleep

Summer has a way of pushing bedtimes later and later. Often 1 to 3 hours beyond when a school child should wind down. Begin moving bedtime and wake-up time toward the school schedule a week or two before the first day.

Sleep is not simply downtime. It is when the brain consolidates learning, regulates emotions, restores energy, and prepares for the next day. Deep sleep is critical for cleaning the brain of disruptive chemicals. Younger school-aged children generally need 9–12 hours of sleep, while teenagers need 8–10 hours. A consistent bedtime routine and getting phones and other screens out of the bedroom can make an enormous difference.

2) Feed The Brain

Children cannot consistently perform their best when they are running on highly processed foods, sugar, and caffeine. Build meals around real food: vegetables and fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds, healthy fats, and quality proteins such as fish, poultry, and meat. Breakfast does not need to be elaborate, but including protein, fiber, and healthy fat can provide much steadier energy than starting the day with a sugary cereal or pastry.

And remember the simplest nutrient of all: water. Send children to school well hydrated and encourage them to carry a water bottle when possible….. and back to school recipes.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #19 Repost – Dr. Alessio Fasano – Intestinal Permeability, Microbiome and MIS

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In this podcast repost, we rediscover the work of Pediatric Gastroenterologist Dr. Alessio Fasano from the Massachusettes General Hospital Department of Pediatric Gastroenterology. In this conversation, we discussed the research on Intestinal Permeability, Microbiomes and MIS, Multi Inflammatory Syndrome in Children .
Dr. Fasano also directs the Mucosal Immunology and Biology Research Center and is associate chief for Basic, Clinical and Translational Research. Under his leadership, investigators are studying the molecular mechanisms of autoimmune disorders including celiac disease, and other-gluten-related disorders. He has been named visiting professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He authored the groundbreaking study in 2003 that established the rate of celiac disease at one in 133 Americans. Widely sought after by national and international media, Dr. Fasano has been featured in hundreds of interviews including outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal; National Public Radio; CNN; Bloomberg News, and others.
He recently co authored an excellent book with Susie Flaherty called Gut Feelings. I highly recommend you purchase and read this book. It is an encyclopedia of information regarding gut health, the microbiome and much more.
Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Fasano,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 20 – Healthcare Policy

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Failing Them

Why Are We?

We are failing our children, the next generation.

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time studying cellular biology and mitochondrial function in order to understand worsening disease trends. Thus, I want to revisit a landmark study that is one of the most comprehensive assessments of pediatric health ever conducted in the United States. Rather than examining a single disease or health outcome, Dr. Forrest and colleagues integrated data from multiple nationally representative surveys, mortality databases, and electronic health records encompassing millions of children to evaluate whether the health of American children has changed over the past 17 years. The answer was strikingly consistent: across virtually every major health domain, children in the United States are becoming less healthy. The investigators examined mortality, chronic physical and mental health conditions, obesity, functional status, sleep, puberty, physical symptoms, and emotional well-being between 2007 and 2023. Nearly every indicator worsened over time.

“From 2007 to 2022, infants (<1 year old) were 1.78 and 1- to 19-year-old individuals were 1.80 times more likely to die in the US than in the OECD18. The 2 causes of death with the largest net difference between the US and OECD18 were prematurity and sudden unexpected infant death for infants 12 months or younger, and firearm-related incidents and motor vehicle crashes for 1- to 19-year-old individuals. From 2011 to 2023, the prevalence of 3- to 17-year-old individuals with a chronic condition rose from 39.9% to 45.7% within PEDSnet, and from 25.8% to 31.0% within the general population. Rates of obesity, early onset of menstruation, trouble sleeping, limitations in activity, physical symptoms, depressive symptoms, and loneliness all increased during the study period.” (Forrest et. al. 2025)… and literature review.

Enjoy,

Dr. M

 

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 19 – Pain

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Pain

Do we listen to its signal?

Pain: Your Body’s Built-In Warning System

Pain is one of the body’s oldest and most important protective mechanisms. It isn’t your enemy. It is a messenger.

Imagine walking barefoot across your living room and accidentally kicking the corner of the coffee table. The sharp pain that shoots through your toe isn’t there to punish you, it is there to protect you. Within fractions of a second, nerves carry a signal to your brain, telling you that cells and tissue have been injured. Your body immediately encourages you to stop what you’re doing. Protect the area and allow it to heal.

This is acute pain, and it serves an essential purpose for both protection and survival.

The problem arises when we stop thinking of pain as information and begin viewing it as something that simply needs to be eliminated. Over the past several decades, this mindset has increasingly influenced modern medicine. Around the turn of the century, pain was widely promoted as the “fifth vital sign,” emphasizing the importance of recognizing and treating it. While this movement helped address the undertreatment of pain, it also contributed, in some settings, to an emphasis on suppressing pain rather than understanding why it existed in the first place.

From an evolutionary perspective, pain is not a design flaw, it is a sophisticated communication system. It evolved to capture our attention, protect us from further injury, and encourage behaviors that promote healing. When we focus solely on silencing the signal without investigating its source, we risk missing the very message our bodies are trying to deliver, and deliver it will.

Pain is information

Every pain signal is your body’s way of saying, “Something isn’t quite right.”

Sometimes the cause is obvious like a sprained ankle, a cut, a burn, or a broken bone.

Other times the message is much more subtle.

….

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 14 – The Adult Chair


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The Adult Chair, the Adolescent Chair and the Child’s Chair

The Adult Chair by Michelle Chalfant is a practical framework for emotional maturity, self-awareness, and healing old patterns that unconsciously drive adult behavior. The central premise is that most people move through life reacting not from their grounded adult self, but from unresolved emotional states formed during childhood and adolescence. She organizes this idea into what she calls the “three chairs”: the Child Chair, the Adolescent Chair, and the Adult Chair.

The Child Chair represents the emotional self formed in early childhood. This is the place of vulnerability, fear, shame, abandonment, loneliness, and unmet needs. When people react from this chair, they often feel helpless, emotionally flooded, overly dependent on validation, or afraid of rejection. Many adult relationship conflicts, according to Chalfant, are actually wounded children (in adult bodies) interacting with each other while wearing grown-up clothing and carrying iPhones. Same child like nervous system. Better accessories. Think of the statement: lipstick on a pig, you cannot dress up dysfunction and make it disappear.

The Adolescent Chair reflects the defensive coping strategies people develop to protect the wounded child. This includes control, perfectionism, blame, avoidance, rebellion, people-pleasing, passive aggression, and emotional shutdown. The adolescent self seeks power and protection but often creates disconnection and conflict. Chalfant argues that many high-achieving adults unknowingly operate from this chair, appearing successful externally while internally driven by fear, insecurity, or the need for approval.

The Adult Chair is the goal….

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 13 – Birth Order


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Birth Order

Birth Order Is Biology, Not Birthright – so says a new paper in MedRxIV (Kramer et. al. 2026)

Here is a short field guide to how sequence shapes the immune system, and maybe the brain in children.

We’ve treated birth order like personality trivia.
First-borns are “responsible.” Youngest are “free spirits.” Middle children… well, we forgot them.

This paper suggests something more interesting: birth order is a biologic exposure.
Not destiny. Not diagnosis. But signal.

Across a very large dataset, the researchers mapped birth order against hundreds of diseases. The effects are small for any single child. But the pattern is consistent at a population level.
Children are not born into identical biology, even within the same family.
Each pregnancy changes the mother. Meaningfully. Immunologically. Successively.
Each fetus inherits a slightly different environment.
Epigenetics in full swing.
It turns out that sequence matters.

What Changes Across Pregnancies?

Three levers move, quietly, predictably:

1) The Maternal Immune System Learns
Pregnancy is not passive. It is negotiation. The first pregnancy = naïve immune system learning tolerance. Subsequent pregnancies = trained, adapted immune responses
That training alters: cytokine tone, antibody profiles, placental signaling
The fetus is downstream of all of it.

2) The Placenta Is Not a Copy-Paste Organ…
Dr. M

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