Hello, my name is Dr. Alex Coleman. I'm the owner of Maximized Chiropractic, and today I want to talk to you about something that I've found a lot in my practice, and that is… I've titled it "It's Not the Pacifier, It's Your Baby." We're going to talk about how the chiropractic lifestyle can help your baby have the perfect latch, basically how offices like ours can help you and your baby reach the breastfeeding and health goals that you've been wanting.

So, I've titled this slide "It's Not the Pacifier, It's Your Baby" because over the years, I've gotten questions all the time of, "What type of pacifier should I use? Because my baby just doesn't seem to like any. I keep trying different brands, I've went through every single type of pacifier that they have at Target, and they still don't like any." And the reality is, it's not the pacifier, it's your baby. The pacifier is not the answer. You could keep trying every single size and shape and color that there is. The reality is that your baby likely has a sign of oral dysfunction. So today, in this webinar, we're going to talk about why you shouldn't just go back to Target and try a different brand, why you should try something else instead.

So, why won't my baby use a pacifier? Maybe your baby… when you put the pacifier in, it just falls out immediately. Maybe they won't suck on it at all. Maybe they'll keep it in for a little bit, but it keeps falling out. Pacifiers can be a nice tool in the first year of your baby's life to help calm them down. There are very mixed feelings about pacifiers. I'm not on either side of the fence. We use pacifiers for our kids. Some of them, they use them way too long. I wish they wouldn't have used them as long as they did, but I'm not necessarily for or against them. But if you are wanting to use one, there are some things that we can look for if your baby is not using them well.

So, some of the causes of your baby not being able to use a pacifier… The first one is having a high palate. So, the roof of your baby's mouth is very important. We'll talk about that one in a second. The second cause of your baby not being able to use a pacifier is poor oral function. So, this means their jaw, their tongue, their lip, and how well the muscles coordinate with each other to be able to suck and swallow and use that pacifier. The last one is nervous system stress. This is the most commonly missed one that can have not just an effect on how they're using a pacifier, but this can affect all of their health. It can affect how gassy they are, how well they sleep, how happy they are, and tons of other things that will cause them to be healthy later on.

So, the first one is a high palate. I have a picture here that kind of shows what a high palate looks like. The top picture here is kind of an ideal palate. I mean, this is a cartoon, so it's definitely more complicated than what this picture looks like. But if this is where the baby's teeth eventually will be, right inside of that, it should be nice and smooth. There shouldn't be a big dome. It should be relatively flat, but there should be a little bit of an arch to it, this direction. There should not be a line that goes down the center, and there should not be a line that goes across the back here that's very prominent. This is an example of a high palate. So, right here you can see that these bones are kind of coming down, and in the middle, there's this big cavern. So, this isn't necessarily a good example of what a high palate looks like, but you can kind of get the picture. The roof of a baby's mouth should be more like this. You shouldn't see shadows and a big gap in there. You shouldn't be able to take your finger and go way up inside of it. The way that you can tell if your baby has a high palate is just lay them on their back, open their mouth… It works even better when they're sleeping… open their mouth and kind of take a peek through here. Does it look smooth, or do you see these ridges right inside of where their teeth will be? Does it look like the roof of their mouth is pretty flat with just a slight arch like this, or does it look like you could fit a grape shoved up into that thing? That's kind of what this looks like. It just looks like you could fit an entire finger way up in there. From a baby's perspective in real life, it's much more dramatic, and it's pretty easy to see, usually. But there's a lot of varying grades. It's not just a good palate or a high palate. There can be a kind of bad one, or a really bad one, or a medium one. There's everything in between. And there's varying grades of how much this can affect your baby.

The reason this affects your baby is because… Let me see if I can get this on camera. This is confusing. Oh boy. There we are. Okay. So, here is the roof of your baby's mouth. Here is the baby's tongue. The tongue needs to go up and down against the roof of their mouth, and it needs to seal here. So, if the pacifier came in right in the middle right here, or the nipple if you're breastfeeding, or the bottle, the tongue needs to sandwich that and make a seal. So, if this is the roof of the mouth, the higher the roof of that mouth gets, now the tongue has farther to go. It's got to go way up in there, way up in there. And the extra height means the tongue has to be extra stretchy to be able to fill that void. And what usually happens is the tongue goes up and it loses suction and it clicks off, and you hear… Whether that be on the pacifier, you hear that noise, or in the bottle or the breast, you'll hear that noise. That's a sign that the baby's getting extra air, which will make them miserable. And it's also a way that makes it hard for them to use a pacifier.

So, this is a big sign of oral dysfunction, and this is a huge part of what I do in my office is help correct these. We'll talk about that later. So, another big issue is poor oral function. So, this is a picture of a baby with a pretty severe tongue-tie. I'm not going to go into depth about tongue-ties in this topic, but that is something that we deal with a lot in our office. We help to analyze and help refer you to the right places to make sure that they're taken care of if they're there. This is a very severe one. This is the one that you'll find if you type in "tongue-tie" on Google. You'll find the very easy ones, ones that they'll even catch in the pediatrician's office. These are not super common. Tongue-ties are extremely common, but ones that are this extreme aren't as common. Tongue-ties can be very severe, like this one, or they can be pretty mild and hard to catch. So, if they're not addressed properly, then your baby can have lifelong issues. So, on this picture, it's kind of hard to see, but if you look at this spot right here, you can see how the baby's tongue is sticking all the way forward, and it's able to use that tongue to push up against the nipple to be able to draw a nice vacuum and pull milk back, deep back by their soft palate here. The baby is tongue-tied. The tongue is not able to go forward very far. And most of the time… So, this baby has a pretty wide gape and a nice, deep latch, but normally with tongue-ties, you have kind of more of a… Like, just the tip just barely grabbing the nipple latch because the baby can't open their mouth very wide and use their tongue. So, the tongue isn't able to go up and down very well in this picture, and they're not able to drop milk back effectively where they should. This causes air to leak in, this causes poor drainage of milk, this can cause a whole range of problems.

Like I said, tongue-ties is a whole webinar all by itself. I'm not going to go into that super in-depth today. Tongue-ties are just one small piece of oral function. Getting a tongue-tie release is not an automatic fix-all. There are so many… If you look at this picture, there's so many muscles and fascia and tissues around the tongue, and then there's also how the brain controls the tongue, that has to be addressed for the tongue-tie release to do its job. So, in our office, we help to retrain the muscles and relax the muscles and the fascia around the tongue before and after release, to help make sure that things are going well. Even if a baby doesn't have a tongue-tie, there are tons of exercises and things that we do in our office, and we assign to you to do at home, that help your baby use their tongue better. If you could picture having, like, peanut butter stuck to your tongue, and how hard that would be to breastfeed at the same time, that's kind of what happens when a baby has oral dysfunction. And when we can recognize these oral dysfunction issues and help them from when they're a baby, they end up breastfeeding much easier, or bottle feeding, and they end up happier because they're not gulping in air and getting gas and too much milk or too little milk, and they're just healthier.

So, the last thing that can cause a baby to not want to use a pacifier and not latch very well is nervous system stress. This is by far the most missed one. Every single baby… Almost every single baby I've ever seen in my career… 12 years… Almost every single baby has had some level of nervous system stress at birth. We're talking less than 10% of the babies that I've ever seen had clear nervous systems at birth. This is an example of what a C-section looks like. The last webinar I did was on C-sections and how stressful they are on babies. I would encourage you to watch that if you had a C-section. This is the moment where they have to take the baby out of the womb, and there's a moment of a lot of head and neck pulling and stretching. This can create a ton of stress on the baby's nervous system. This isn't just C-sections that this happens with, though, folks. This happens with vaginal deliveries too. The amount of pulling and twisting that has to happen to a baby during this time… We kind of overlook that and assume it's just, "Oh, they're fine. They didn't say anything's wrong, they're good." I'm not saying that this procedure is unnecessary, or what this doctor is doing in this picture is wrong at all. This is what is needed to get a baby out of a little, tiny hole. The thing that needs to happen after this, in this picture, is to check this baby and help this baby recover from that nervous system stress.

So, this moment places a ton of pressure on their delicate spine and nerves. Those nerves control their mouth, they control their tongue, their lip, their swallow, their breathing, their ability to turn their head left and right. So many things are controlled by those nerves that can get stressed out right here. Trained pediatric chiropractors are trained to find these subluxations and these twists in babies' necks and fix them gently. It's so easy, so gentle, and it helps a ton to help a baby latch.

So, here are just some signs that your baby might be struggling with a poor latch. A lot of times these things… Oh, there's a typo. Sorry folks, that's beneath me. That's supposed to say "mouth," not "mount." If they have a mount, then that's a whole problem in and of itself. But if you are suffering from painful, sore, or cracked nipples, that is a sign your baby is not latching effectively. If the tongue is basically flicking your nipple every time they're sucking, that doesn't feel good, and it's going to start to cause damage. If your milk supply is going down, it can be a sign that they're not drawing out enough milk. So, milk supply is kind of a concept of supply and demand. If your body is not releasing as much milk as your baby needs, your brain thinks that that's all the baby needs, so that's all that it makes. So very quickly, your supply can go down when your baby is not draining enough out. If your baby's gaining weight too slowly, that can be a sign of an issue. Mastitis or recurrent plugged ducts… That's a sign that you're not emptying your breasts fully each time when you're feeding, which is a sign that they're not getting enough. If your baby is gassy, that's a sign that they could be clicking and getting air in every time that they're sucking, and that can cause them to kind of fill up their stomach like a balloon. Clicking noises, leaking during feeds, sleeping with their mouth open… Yep, all these things are signs of a poor latch. If any of these are happening with your baby, it's a sign that a pediatric chiropractor would likely be able to help.

Breastfeeding is hard enough already. This is a picture of my beautiful wife, Whitney, and our youngest, Story. She is an absolute rockstar. Whitney… I mean, Story is a rockstar too, but Whitney is an absolute champion of a human. She has been pregnant or breastfeeding, like, actually non-stop since 2014. Like, six months after we met, we got pregnant, and she hasn't stopped being one of those two things since then. And this is a picture of her nursing our youngest, Story, who is turning three in a couple of weeks, which is crazy. So, breastfeeding is hard enough already. If this is your first baby or your tenth baby, if they have signs of oral dysfunction and a poor latch, it can be exhausting and miserable. We have been with so many moms during this process that have been stressed out and crying and just feeling down on themselves and feeling like it's their fault. It's not your fault. All of these signs of a poor latch, all these things… None of this is your fault. There are things that you can do to help fix these problems. Reach out to somebody that's trained in this field that can help you through this.

So, here's some of the ways that we specifically can help in our office. My wife Whitney and I are both CLCs, and we're trained to help with lactation. Whitney works with moms on the latch side and helps you find the right positioning and mechanics and helps coach you through it. I help as a CLC from the baby side. Obviously, as a chiropractor also, I will remove some of the spinal trauma and the nerve stress. So, that picture you saw earlier of the C-section baby… That same amount of stress can happen in others, whether it's too fast or too slow of a labor. That can happen to most babies. So, my job is to remove that spinal trauma, remove that nervous system stress. Those are some of the obstacles that can get in the way of your baby breastfeeding and latching easily. We help to find specific exercises for your baby. We don't just give you general exercises. We make sure that your baby has the exact ones they need to minimize the amount of work that you have to do at home and to maximize how fast that your baby can get better. We're going to help your baby's latch mechanics. So that goes down to me helping make sure the palate is shaped properly, making sure the bones in their head are shaped properly, making sure their jaw can move up and down properly, making sure their neck can turn properly. There's a lot of physical things that have to happen from the baby's perspective that we can help with.

And I think the most important one is helping you find the confidence. Because when I first meet a lot of these moms, and they're stressed out and depressed and exhausted… Sometimes they just need somebody to listen and to care about them and to be reminded that you're doing a great job. Because raising kids is freaking hard! And when you do it by yourself, it's even harder. So, finding a good support system is such an important part of raising kids.

The biggest thing with chiropractic care and care in our office is that it needs to be consistent. Good things take time, unfortunately. This is not something that we can just adjust once or twice and magically your baby is fixed forever. Just like you can't go to the gym today and work out super hard and then go home in shape. Doesn't work like that. Good things take time. This is no different. So, keeping to a plan and staying consistent with all of the things that we talk about usually helps a ton.

Who should see a pediatric chiropractor? Which babies specifically? So, C-section babies… I have a whole webinar on why C-section babies specifically should be seeing a pediatric chiropractor immediately after they're born. Fast births and slow births… Fast and slow… There's kind of this Goldilocks level of birth where right in the middle is the sweet spot. If you have one that's super fast, a baby goes through a lot. If you have one that goes through a super slow birth, they go through a lot. And even the Goldilocks level ones, they still go through a lot. When you start adding interventions, things like inductions and Pitocin and vacuums and forceps… This isn't me saying that those are good or bad, or that those are necessary or not necessary. That is not for me to say. But when these things have to happen with your baby, they add another layer of stress to their nervous system that needs to be checked.

So, babies that are struggling with latch, gas, colic, or sleep… Pretty much any one of those signs of a poor latch that we talked about a minute ago… Any one of those signs is a sign that your baby should probably see a pediatric chiropractor. So, I'm obviously biased. I feel like every baby should be seeing a pediatric chiropractor because I have seen the changes in not just my own kids, but the kids of the thousands of families that I've taken care of over the years. I know that when a baby starts out their life with a nervous system that's healthy and clear and connected, the kid is happier and healthier as they get older. So, the best time to start is now. A baby can be adjusted right away after they're born. All my kids were adjusted immediately, within minutes. There's a picture of each one of my kids in their first adjustment, in each of the rooms here at the clinic. And they all were just a few minutes old. Like, one of the first times I ever touched each of my kids was to adjust them. We see moms all the time. They come straight from the hospital, even before they go home, really. This can happen as soon as you're wanting to get out of the house. There is no "too soon" with babies. The adjusting is extremely gentle. Most moms, when I hand the baby back to them, they didn't even know that I did anything. I have to point out what I'm doing because it's so simple and so gentle that you hardly even know anything's happening. So, call or text us if you want to schedule… or you can schedule online on our website. If you're not in Bismarck, go to icpa4kids.org and find somebody with the letters "CACCP" after their name. Those signify that they have received advanced training in pediatrics. Any chiropractor can see kids legally, but the ones that don't have CACCP after the name do not have advanced training.

Alright guys, so I hope you learned something today about… It's probably not the pacifier. Don't go to Target and keep shopping and trying different pacifiers. It's probably your baby. There are things that can be done to help your baby, and if you've been curious and wondering if this is your baby, we would love to help you. Please reach out.