When talking about kids and Chiropractic, the question often arises: Why? Why bring your infant, child, or teenager to the Chiropractor?

The answer to that question is due to stress and the child’s ability to adapt to it. If infants, children or teenagers are not sufficiently adapting to their environmental “stress,” they can potentially be living with vertebral subluxation within their tiny spines.

Stress confronts all ages and stages of development. Yes, even infants and babies encounter stress. 

Infants confront more stress than they receive recognition for, probably because parents are under more stress than they’ve ever been confronted with. Think about that concept. Most parents are trying to adapt to less sleep, more unknowns, and just the physical day to day demands of having a tiny living breathing infant to care for. With all that stress on the parents’ plate, do you think the infant is experiencing any of their emotional rollercoaster and suffering from that extra stress in the household? 

Let’s consider how stress might be negatively influencing infants right before the parent’s eyes.

Ever hear a baby cry because they’re hungry? This is a process of communication, but the process itself can become a form of stress on the baby’s well-being. Have you ever been so hungry for food that your blood sugar levels drop drastically and before long your attitude and behavior turn for the worst? Our internal body chemistry has a profound impact on physiology and when babies get hungry, this can become an emotional and physiological stressor on their overall well-being. 

What about sleep, how is your well-being after a poor night’s sleep? Losing one night of sleep might just affect your mood and focus, but add a few more consecutive nights of a loss of sleep and now you’re seeing physical signs of fatigue which greatly impacts your well-being. Sleep is vital for infants, as well, and can become a stressor on them. 

To be fair, some families and infants may be adapting to this stress, and growing up and developing in a great environment. Children have an amazing ability to adapt to stress, but being aware of the concept of stress and the potential threat it can have on well-being over time is crucial.

Stress is all around us and infants are no different. Being aware of the fact that infants, babies and children live in the same world of demands, and adaptation or compensation to those stressors, as adults do. 

The effects vertebral subluxation may have on the well-being of infants and children may go unnoticed due to the fact that we are unable to measure the relative aspects of health and well-being. A loss of relative aspects of health and well-being at an early age may take months or years to show up as physical signs that compensation has taken place to stress.

The inability to measure the loss of relative aspects to well-being can create a false definition of well-being in our children. We know with certainty that you cannot determine the quality of well-being by the degree of the presence or absence of symptoms.

If vertebral subluxation has developed as early as infancy, finding a Chiropractor with a practice that is focused on evaluating infant spines is the first step in facilitating the correction with a gentle and specific adjustment. 

Chiropractors who are trained in proper analysis and correct for vertebral subluxation in infants, children and teenagers can provide the parent with their professional recommendations for frequency and response to care for the ability to benefit from regular chiropractic adjustments at an early age.