Hi everyone, and welcome back to Airway First, a podcast
from the Children's Airway First Foundation. I'm your host, Rebecca St. James.
I'm excited to welcome back today's guests, Karise LeGair, a registered dental hygienist
and myofunctional therapist. She is the founder of the myospot, the practice aimed at amplifying
oral wellness to whole body wellness. Through teletherapy, she helps clients of all ages overcome
tongue ties, TMJ disorders, sleep apnea, grinding, anxiety, and various breathing and oral facial
dysfunctions. Passionate about education and self-help, she published, accomplished, how to sleep
better, eliminate burnout, and execute goals. When not working with clients globally, she spends
time with her husband and her four kids. You can find out more about Karise at the myospot.com.
And now let's jump into my conversation with Karise LeGair.
Okay, perfect. Good morning. Thank you so much for joining me again on the show, Karise. I really
appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be back. Absolutely. So as I just kind
of alluded to, you've been on the show before, and I'll make sure that we put a link to the previous
episode in our show notes. But we were talking before, I'm not sure how I missed this, but you
have this book, which I will, oops, it's not going to really show us. I will put that in our show notes.
There we go. Your camera's cooperating. And I'll put this link in our show notes as well. But after
reading it, I really felt very strongly that I wanted to have you back so we could talk because it
felt like the precursor to our discussion. And I think it was something important for parents
to hear, not just for themselves, but for their children. Absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome. All
right, so let's just jump right in. And the first thing I would like to talk about, because it's
where you start the book, and it's, it makes sense to me. So let's go ahead and tackle the
difference between accomplishment and achievement. Okay, so accomplishment is really the
penultimate when I think about it. So when you imagine that you have a big audacious goal that
you're trying to get to, something that you're looking to accomplish, you have steps that you
have to make in order to get there. So I am not a runner. If I wanted to do a marathon, I am going
to have to actually every day dedicate and carve out time so that I could start getting into shape
and running. That way I can make a wonderful 26 mile marathon. I can't just get up tomorrow, decide
that that's something I want to do and get it done and accomplish that goal right away. That
accomplishment is the prize of all those little achievements I make in making sure I'm getting
up every day, making that daily run, making it a little further each time those small goals,
those little achievements all build up to the big accomplishment. Okay, okay, and I'll just
tell parents they're listening. Hang on, this all ties together. It seems like we're going down a
very different path, but it all makes sense. So when it comes to accomplishments, you talk about
that there are two barriers. What are these these barriers and how can they impact your health or
your child's health? Absolutely. So there's a lot of different barriers that might come up, but I
like to group it into two big barriers. So there are the psychological barriers. These are the
things like your mindset, limiting beliefs, trauma, the things that will impact you from being able
to mentally or cognitively approach any of those achievements as you're working towards becoming
accomplished. And then there's physical barriers. These physical barriers are the things that's
actually within you. Structurally, these are the dysfunctions that might present that are going to
inhibit you from getting to your goals and to your accomplishments. So when we are thinking about it
from terms of airway, breathing and function, there's a lot and I'm sure we're going to dive into it,
but there's a lot that goes in psychologically into getting through these barriers. We have to be
able to regulate our audit and service system, that freight or flight, rest digest system. We're
going to have to be in an optimal state in order to get to any sort of achievement. And so if there's
that psychological barrier there, we're already meeting a hurdle or we can almost call it a full
roadblock where we can't limit that roadblock until we've addressed it. And then the physical
barriers would be things that are out of our control as far as what we might present with at
the time that we discovered that there's a problem. That could be craniofacial structure not being
optimal. So you could have narrow arches, you might have deviated septum, you could have enlarged
turbinates and large adenoids caught like these things that will structurally impair you from
reaching your goal. And when you first, and again we'll dig into this a little bit more,
but when you first meet with a child, how do you start to figure out what these barriers are?
We have to ask really good questions. I want to know a life story. So it really begins with the
pregnancy and how everything really began in that child's formation. So how did pregnancy go? Was
that traumatic? Was mom alone? Did she have a support system? Was there a lot of stress,
strife? Was this a pregnancy that was planned, intended? There's unintended and that has different
psychological impacts as well, the preparedness, which did the pregnancy go as planned? There's
so much before the child even gets to being born. We have these images of a mind, you know,
as a mom, I remember I'm pregnant and I'm ready. I think it's going to go a certain way. I'm going
to have a labor that's going to go this way. Breast feed is going to be so smooth. It's going to be
amazing. You have all these wonderful dreams and little by little by little life kind of chips away
in certain aspects. And that has an impact on the fetus as it's developing. That has an impact on,
of course, with the mother who is the vessel. But all of this is going to play a role in addition to
the physical stuff that's going to happen. So birth and labor and delivery, that's its own
traumatic event. That has its own consequences and impacts on our cranial facial structure.
If you're delivered vaginally or if you're delivered via C-section, if there's a vacuum
involved, there's a lot of different pressures or strains that become created in that cranial structure.
And then how are they fed? And we're looking at the whole story. I need to see everything from
the very, very beginning, from conception all the way through to where I meet them now,
what is impacting them. And so when you see them, you're seeing the entirety of their story instead
of just looking at what's going on right this second. And I love that. And you've talked about
this before in a previous podcast. It is about holistic. You have to look at everything. It's
not, let's just, here's what we see. Let's treat it. Let's go deeper. How did we get here? What
caused this? Let's look at the child as a whole. Exactly. Exactly. It's incredibly important because
we can't begin to tackle these things. That winds up becoming part of our barriers that we're looking
to overcome. Right? What are the psychological things that may have impacted on the way and then
the physical things we'll look at as we go. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, again, this is another step towards
get away from this mentality of let's just throw a pill at it. Let's just do this quick fix and
move on. Because when you do that, this is my own personal soapbox. And I realize that when you do
that, you end up with an adult that is dealing with airway dysfunctions like I am versus things we
could have handled at the root with our children. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's always our goal
as parents that we want to have a better future for our children. We want them to have better
good. And so we're trying to tackle as early as possible. It's just in our nature as parents.
And so, yes, it's important to look at the whole global scheme of things that way you can address
all that and prevent them from being where you may be currently. I love that. So as we're starting
this journey, there's one more piece that may seem odd for people, but it does make sense.
I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about the Maslow pyramid and how that plays into
this process. So first, for people that don't know what this is, would you explain it and then talk
about how it plays into the process? Absolutely. So Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it may come up for
a lot of you as maybe something you had to unfortunately study during college and then
go by the wayside after your site class or requirements were done. But it's important if
you're looking at the grand scheme of things when you're working with complex individuals, which,
you know, we all are complex individuals. Look at anybody as the same as anybody else. So we have
to look at what are the different needs that they need to get to the peak. So when I look at that
pyramid, I look at it as like a mountain almost, right? So we're trying to get to the peak of the
mountain and at the top of the mountain is self-actualization. That's this wonderful euphoric
state where we really reached our potential, but you can't get there until you started down at the
bottom at the foundation of the mountains to start climbing up. So at the very, very bottom, we have
all of our physiological needs. These are the essentials. We can't function without food, water,
oxygen. Period. I don't care what you're going through. If you are without water, without oxygen,
without food, you're not getting anywhere to reach any higher up on the mountain. And that
winds up being focused and the primary driver for your brain at that moment in time. And so that's
going to come into play as we start talking about this a little later, especially the oxygen part.
But then after that is safety. Safety is something that we really, really need as humans. It really
goes into this whole drive of community and so forth. But really, we just need a roof over our
heads. We need to know that we are taking care of in that next basic level way so that there is a
support system somewhere around us. We're not alone in the world. So even if that's just connecting
another like-minded individual and feeling like, okay, I am not a lone warrior. So safety is the
next thing. Belongingness, which really all want to belong and feel like we fit in and we're not
the odd ball and we're not the odd man. And so we need to all kind of come together and understand
that, okay, this is a journey that many others are going through. And then a steam is going to be
right before we hit that steam. Is that self-worth? That self-love? That self-acknowledgement?
Self-recognition? You have value. You have value as a person and this is something that you need
to be able to accept in order to really overcome a lot of those psychological barriers, but definitely
accept if you're going to start chipping away at those achievements to get to that final goal of
accomplishment. So how does that all play into airway? How does it all play into airway? Yeah.
A lot of people might take what's up at the top or a problem that they think is up at the top. So
let's say it's sleep. Okay, not getting great sleep. What can I do? Let's try to address it at just
where we are at the top here. So belongingness might tell us that, yes, a lot of people are
getting good sleep. So it's a common problem. And so a steam, I'm going to go and I'm going to get
myself a nice little new mattress where I'm going to get myself a nice new pillow. And I might just
buy this thing I saw on this ad on television and that'll help me get better sleep. But we didn't hit
anything down at the bottom. What's going on with food? How is your nutrition? How is your diet?
How is that contributing and playing a role and a factor into how your body is able to now process
and digest and allow you to get into sleep and stay in a good state of sleep? Are you drinking
enough water? Are you properly hydrated? But then oxygen, our airway, we can go for days without
water, weeks without food. But not any of us can live but for a few minutes without oxygen. We need
to be able to breathe. And so our brain, that primary driver, if we are not oxygenating well,
if there's mouth breathing going on, if we're unable to properly respirate and intake enough oxygen
and then expel enough carbon dioxide, we are going to have issues where the body now has to
reprioritize tasks. So now we can't get proper adequate brain cleansing and neurological renewal
at night when we're supposed to get that. We can't get cell rejuvenation and we can't get our immune
system to be restarted and to really work harder for us at night when we're sleeping. All of these
properties are actually supposed to be occurring. But if we're not breathing, our body is like, help,
help, help, help, help, help. Multiple times at night. But none of that happens. And then you
when you're groggy, you're tired, and then you wind up addressing it in ways that really aren't
going to help because we didn't look at the very, very root cause. We didn't start at the bottom
of the mountain with things. Before we start getting to those things that might be at the top,
that might help. That may very well help. But we've got to hit this bottom of the hierarchy of needs.
That way our body can then allow us to get to the next step of safety, belongingness, esteem, and so
forth. Right. Which again, we're back to you got to look at the root no more band-aids, no more
let's just throw up hell. You got to get to the root. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Which is at the core.
And I mean, just to continue on this a little bit more, because you noted two things in the book that
I don't know. You'd think I'd be used to this now after a couple years of doing this, but every time
I hear it, it's still kind of astonishing. Make sure I get these correct. Two thirds of us are
sleep deprived, according to the National Sleep Foundation. And 20% of the population
suffer from sleep-breeding disorders of some kind. Okay. This is not a small number. This is massive.
So how did we get here? And how does this manifest in our children? I mean, I know we've talked about
it before, but I really want to make sure we hammer this home because as a parent, you may be looking
for the same signs, but a child's not going to have the exact same present in the same way.
Very true. Very true. Even in my own house, things didn't present the same way. But before I get into
that, I really just want to double down on the fact that 20% of the American population is 20% of
over 300 million people. So that's not a number to just like discard and throw away. I think
when we think the numbers seem smaller, 20% of 300 million is a lot of people. That's a lot of people.
That's huge. Yeah. So dysfunction manifests itself differently in different people, even people who
are genetically similar. And I'm sure I told my story before, but we'll just kind of briefly touch
on it again. But for children, when my son is my oldest, I am the only boy and he had a lot of
different issues with behavioral impulse control. Very, very difficult to kind of get him to focus
and just corral his energy into just one specific task. Every sort of clinical sign you can have
of ADHD, he present here. It was all there. My oldest daughter had every sleep issue under the
sun. You name it. Every night we were guaranteed to have at least bedwetting, but then there was
always something else. It was the night terrors, it's sleepwalking, it's the soaring, it's falling
out of bed, the tossing and turning. It was always something for 10 years in a row, every single night.
We got no peaceful nights. And then my little two, they were the only ones that were relatively
similar where they had a lot of upper respiratory issues. They had the sore throats, the frequent
congestion, the ear infection, on repeat. It was just frustrating, very, very frustrating.
But these children who are genetically similar presented very differently for what was eventually
the same common group caused. So even in your own household, and I think all of us know with
multiple children that each child is different and unique, but they're tackling with the same thing,
not breathing well, the mouth breathing, you know, we're not really getting in oxygen as they should.
That is very wildly different how it will manifest. Some may even manifest it very, very minimally.
You might just see one or two little signs and you don't feel like, oh, okay, it's not a big deal.
But it's all going to compound as they get older and as they age. It doesn't self-resolve.
And that is the biggest issue you're going to find is that there's no self-resolve. So if we're
not dealing with it when they're young and when they're easy and malleable and we can get their
body while it still has growth potential to adjust, that's going to be the biggest issue.
I think I missed part of the other part of the question unless I'm supposed to answer.
No, and I'll back up to it, but I really want to hone on when you said that it doesn't self-resolve
because I can't tell you how many parents I've spoken to. And we did the same thing over again,
and this is not a Dr. Bash, but they were told they'll grow out of it. Let's just watch it for a
while. No, because as you watch it, the damage is being done. It's not going to self-resolve,
so let's not watch it. Let's get to the core of what's going on.
Absolutely, absolutely. And I've been there, all four of my children,
quite their different issues, every single one of us told, it'll be fine. The bed wedding,
that's fine. She won't be doing that when she's 15. Like, oh, we're just supposed to let her sleep
poorly until she's 15. Right, right. And we'll talk about a little because that's doing huge
damage to the gray matter in her brain and just, and then her body functions. And, you know, we
don't wait and see. So the other part of my question was, how did we get here to these
astronomical numbers of 20% of our 300 million? How did we get here?
Our world is changing. It's changing so fast. Since the Industrial Revolution, we've had different
modern, you know, implementations into our life that has made life wonderfully easier. And it's
kind of made us evolve a bit as far as our structure. So our skulls are changing. We're
not eating the same foods. A lot of us are having more processed foods. We don't eat like the
hunters and the gatherers used to. We would have these harder, tougher foods to chew and eat.
We don't have the natural inclination most times to really follow through with a lot of
what's difficult for us. So being difficult for us sometimes might be the breastfeeding and then
we just fed his best, which is true. Fed is best. But sometimes we just not pushing through because
we're willing to just kind of let it go. And there's a number of bottles. There's a number of formula.
There's a lot of different things that can absolutely take the place of breastfeeding.
And so that's going to change our early developmental function. Then you get into sippy cups.
And sippy cups have no oral function purpose. Zero. The only functional purpose is to not make mom
mad when there's right all over the floor. Right. Right. functional purpose of a sippy cup.
Outside of that, it does not help them develop good oral function. I mean,
that's already problematic is that we have these things that we think are stepping stones,
the pacifiers, the sippy cups, the little habits that we think are just oh, so the fruit pouches.
These fruit pouches, I never get a time where I go to an airport and there's not like a seven,
eight year old with like a fruit pouch in their mouth. Yes. I can actually eat fruit. This is not
an 11 month old that maybe in your mind, you might be able to justify, okay, they need a pouch
because we don't want them to choke while we're in the airport. Older children that have teeth,
they need to be chewing. That chewing actually does stimulate a lot of jaw growth and development.
And when they're lacking that, that's going to be problematic too. So when we think of,
and I think a lot of people don't think of this consciously, like why we do this,
I think they think of it more of a habit. But when we give children teethers, when we know
that their teeth are coming in, we think that sometimes it's just pursuing or just that's
what we're supposed to do, you know, there's we give our children teethers. But what we're
but what we're actually doing is we're encouraging them to chew because that chewing is stimulating
to get that tooth to erupt through the gums. And that's how we're giving our children relief.
But we don't think of it like that. What we need to do is actually keep that going. And so there's
this wonderful book, baby led weeding, weaning, that actually does encourage that chewing, but
that chewing, we need to keep it going beyond just the tooth erupting through the gums. There is
functional purpose to chewing. And so we need to keep our children chewing, even after all the teeth
have erupted, that way they can continue to grow and develop these big broad arches that they're
going to need. Does it help to prevent the inconvenience of braces? Sure. But what it's
really doing is it's helping us to develop stalls that allow us to have optimal upper respiratory
space, which back to Maslow, we actually need air in order to do anything else. And so having
proper development while we're young isn't just to prevent braces. It's to actually help us to
thrive as we go on throughout life because we need oxygen more than anything else.
Yeah. And I think this is the part of this podcast that comes up every time. So
for every mom out there, me being one, let's all just take a deep breath. It's okay.
You didn't know what you didn't know. We all goldfished and fruit pouched and sippy cupped our
way through it. Hey, here's where we are. And now let's just move forward. So it's okay.
Mom guilt. Just let's just park that over here for a while.
You're listening to airway first with today's guest,
Carice Legeur. You can find out more about the Children's Airway First Foundation and our mission
to fix before six on our website at Children's Airway First.org. The CAF website offers tons
of great resources for both parents and medical professionals. In our parents portal and clinicians
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our recommended reading lists, comprehensive medical research, podcasts, events, parent support,
and educational opportunities. Parents are also encouraged to join the Airway Huddle,
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Are you a medical professional or a parent that is interested in being a guest on the show?
Then shoot us a note via our Contacts page on our website. Or send us an email directly at infoat
childrensairwayfirst.org. As a reminder, this podcast and the opinions expressed here are not
a medical diagnosis. If you suspect your child might have an airway issue, contact your pediatric
airway dentist or pediatrician. And now, let's jump back into my interview with today's guest,
Carice Legeur.
All right, so now that we kind of have this baseline, let's talk a little bit about when
you're doing your evaluation with children that come in.
And I found this really fascinating because I've been reading so much lately about the
vagus nerve.
It's everywhere.
We're all talking about it.
So you start your evaluations with this cranial nerve symmetry, and I'd like to talk about
why you start with that and then how does the vagus nerve, especially with kids, come
into play?
Absolutely.
The cranial nerves are important for us just for daily function.
These are the 12 nerves that are really running a lot of what goes on in our body.
They fire in sequence, and if there is a dysfunction somewhere, that's going to affect the rest
of the chain.
And so I always start my cranial nerve exam because I have to know what's going on with
them just on basic biological function, right?
What's going on there?
Cranial nerve 10, okay?
So almost at the top of those 12, if you've got dysfunction below, that's definitely going
to affect the top.
But cranial nerve 10 is the vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve is a very big responsible nerve.
You want to think of that as like the big guns of all the nerves.
This is our organ.
We're definitely doing a lot of the soft palate, the oryferinjial space.
It is like the guy that is running things.
Big daddy.
Yeah.
So we love the vagus nerve.
But the vagus nerve is actually pretty complex.
When we think of it, we can actually divide it to the polyvagal theory.
Divide it instead of just into two, parasympathetic and sympathetic, where we might know as
sympathetic being our fight or flight and parasympathetic being our breast and digest.
It actually divides it into three, where the sympathetic still exists there as like mobilization,
that fight or flight.
But then there's the two areas of the parasympathetic.
So the ventral vagus and the dorsal vagus, and they're going to have different impacts
as well.
So there's three different states we can be in.
So when you're in high skin tone, you're going to find that you've got a lot going on.
You're in that heightened blood pressure is pumping.
Like you're in a heightened state of awareness.
You're ready because you have to mobilize.
You have to engage.
You're either running or you're fighting.
Like your body is in that state where it really needs to be on high alert.
We don't want functioning like that.
That is not the optimal state that we want our children to be functioning in.
But then we're going to look down and when we look down into our ventral vagus, our ventral
vagus system is going to be more of that safety, social engagement.
So we're able to engage.
We're able to interact with those around us.
We're able to learn and intake information because we're not on high alert.
We're not ready to fight.
We're here.
We're present.
We're engaged.
We're learning.
Then our dorsal system, that dorsal system is kind of like a deer in headlights is what
I like to like in it too.
You see a deer in headlights and it's frozen and it's there and there's danger coming,
but it's not doing anything completely immobilized.
That's what mobilization is that dorsal vagal central.
So when you have to know where our body is functioning in with this very big daddy of
nerves, where's our body functioning?
Because if we're in immobilization and if we're in or if we're in, I should not say
and it's for or if we're in that right light, we're not going to be able to make any progress.
We're going to struggle.
These are going to be the kids that we can't get through to do these high compliance programs
like myofunctional therapy where I need you to engage.
I need you to actually working on the steps.
I need you to be in taking the information.
We need to create neurofunctional change.
We can't do that when the body's not in the optimal state for that.
So the vagus nerve is the big guns.
I need to know what's going on and what state we're in.
That way I can get to where we need to be so we can make our steps towards progress.
We can't get any little achievements if we're stuck here.
Right.
We're back at those barriers that we talked about in the beginning.
Exactly.
We're right back there and it's a big roadblock.
That one is a big roadblock.
So I have to start know where we're at.
That way I know where we're going.
So where would, because along with ADHD, another one that we see a lot is a child that has
anxiety.
So where does that fit in here when you're presented with a child that, you know, that's
one of the main signs we're seeing.
Those anxious children, a lot of the times they're in high sympathetic tone.
So high sympathetic tone, fight or flight, they're really trying to brace their body
for whatever the mobilization is going to be.
So whether it is us going into, you know, we've got to go into a fight or we're going
to flee and get out of this danger, the body is just ready.
It's in the state of hyper anxiousness.
Okay.
Got it.
And let's talk a little bit more about some of the psychological signs of this A&S state.
I mean, first, you explain it better in the book, let's just kind of touch on what that
is a little bit.
And you know, I understand why it's so important to identify this and why it's so important
for the journey, but could we just talk a little bit more about, you know, what this
is and how you identify it.
It's an interesting, coming to identification of it requires a lot of self-awareness.
As a parent, it's very difficult for us to see our child in any way other than as our
amazing, beautiful, wonderful, amazing child, right?
As you see every day.
Yeah.
There are certain things that we'll see and we'll see without problem in our children.
And you know, I, no one knows their child better than their parent, but to really come
to that awareness of it, it takes a lot of, you know, self reflection and, you know, where
is this coming from?
Where is it stemming from?
And then you start to feel guilty about certain things.
So I don't want it to be oversimplified as in like, you know, you're going to see these
things and these things definitively mean that this is absolutely where they are and
don't take, right, right.
Don't take it there.
But what we can say is that you can notice certain signs.
So if we're in immobilization and your child is not able to really interact well with
others, so a lot of social anxiety or maybe unable to really develop quality friendships,
have engaging conversations, that's probably going to be a good sign for you that your
child is in a dorsal state that they're not able to really engage with others.
So social engagement may be your social butterfly, your academic achiever, the person that is
really actually thriving and doing really well.
But then your high sympathetic tone might not be able to adequately verbalize certain
things to you, might have a lot of difficulties with impulse and behavioral control issues.
Being able to, yeah, because they're in that fight or flight.
So that's where, you know, the control issues come in.
I remember that with my son, that was one of our biggest, biggest things.
A kid might say something to him on the school bus and immediately he's going into
violence.
Like, you know, somebody just said something and kids say things all the time.
How they react to that is a big indication of where they are.
Are they able to engage verbally?
Some of them are just not able to really engage and you'll kind of be able to know where your
child is based on how they interact with others around them.
And impulse control can also go into, I don't believe it was the Dunn-Even story, the research.
The marshmallow, I remember they put the marshmallow out and when they're not the kid would take
it or the cookie and those are all, that's a different kind of impulse control.
Can you put something in front of them and they can reframe from it so it can present,
again, in different ways?
It's not always an emotional.
You can see it.
It could be something as simple as you gave them a cookie, you turn around, there's four
gone because they just couldn't stop.
Yeah, so it's, again, it's back to that presenting.
And you touched on this.
I want to back up to this because this is really important because we talk about mouth
breathing a lot, right?
And if you're on our website and if you haven't been, we totally encourage parents, check
out the Parents Portal.
Right there's images of kids, you know, playing video games, just, we've all seen that.
Snoring, we all know now, snoring is not cute.
You know, so you think we talk about mouth breathing, it's easy to see.
But in your book, this just, this really struck me.
It isn't always obvious.
So I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about that because on the surface it seems
like, well, yeah, it's obvious you're going to see it.
What, you know, what did you mean by that?
It's not always obvious.
I mean, not everybody that has their mouth open is necessarily mouth breathing.
Sometimes they are still respirating through the nose.
They just haven't, they have an inability to close their lips and facilitate lip closure.
But sure, exactly.
So it's not always easy though, in that, you know, sometimes it is an issue where the
body is just on the backup system because of the congestion.
And so it's not necessarily a mouth habit.
It's a mouth breathing necessity.
And we can't just jump to now, okay, well, they're mouth breathing and we haven't rooted
the source of such.
And therefore now we're going to start doing things like lip taping or whatever.
We don't want to get into all of that until we know what's physiologically stemming and
causing that to happen.
So there are people who would have it, not congested, can totally breathe through their
nose.
It's how they respirate is through their mouth.
That is it.
And there's nothing else.
But there's other people who it's physiologically, that's the way they just have to, to live
and get through so that they can keep breathing because we need that oxygen.
You have to breathe.
Right.
He has that backup source for that purpose.
So kind of coming to the conclusion of why the mouth breathing is happening or if the
mouth breathing is happening and it's not just like an open lip posture with nasal breathing
is a big thing.
But the key for me as a myofunctional therapist is the tongue posture during all of it.
I want that tongue to be there, stimuli, that nasal breathing and so forth.
So even with your mouth closed, your tongue might not be where it's supposed to be.
And you're still not breathing properly.
Right.
And it's funny.
I read that I felt like, gosh, I wish I could go back over the last two years and apologize
to every parent whose child I stared at and aligned because I was thinking, do I tell
you your child's a mouth breather?
You should go see an alfantanal therapist or an aerodentist.
What in fact, they could have been breathing normally.
They just had an open posture.
Yeah.
So, so tricky.
It's so tricky.
And this again, you touched on earlier.
And we've heard this from so many people, you know, Dr. Moraleo, Kevin Boyd, I mean,
just everybody, just because it's common does not mean it's normal.
It just, that, that just to me, that's, well, there you go.
There's your answer.
And in your book, you cite that the C.C. actually calls insufficient sleep a public epidemic.
So knowing that great sleep, it's very personal to all of us, you know, what's great sleep
for you might be different for me.
But breathing is the most important.
So when it comes to our kids, how do we turn this ship and help them with their long term
health span?
First step is to really seek out and advocate for them.
So seek out, aerodentists seek out a myofunctional therapist, not always the easiest thing to
do.
But there are resources, plenty of spaces and upon which you can, you can seek out this
information.
AF is a wonderful one.
It is a primary step, though, to definitely advocate for them.
There's going to be a lot of steps that you make along the way where maybe you're not
at the right source and you may get dismissed or it may be like, yeah, they'll be fine.
They'll grow out of it.
It's imperative to push through that and to continue to advocate until you get to the
start of your journey.
Start of that journey is absolutely with the airway dentist or myofunctional therapist,
though they're going to be able to guide you on the best way for your particular child.
Because we have to look at everybody as a complex individual, the best way for your
child to start.
So it might be starting right away with some expansive treatment and structural intervention
or it might be starting with functional intervention and myofunctional therapy.
Yep, everyone is different.
So and we did this in our last episode, but at the end of every episode, I'd like to
completely hand the floor back to you, our guests, because you are the experts and let
you have the last word, be it for parents or our medical community that listens or both.
First thing I can say, be very, very alert.
Start to implement a nasal hygiene routine.
I think that that is like key.
We focus so much on cleaning all other parts of our body and again, breathing winds up
being the most prominent thing.
So cleaning out that is essential.
Make sure that you are taking that first step actually before you even seek out anyone.
Just start implementing nasal hygiene as a part of your routine.
You can thrive on routines, adults require routines too, but that's a conversation for
a whole other type.
You can thrive on routines.
So nasal hygiene, implement that into your routine and just get the ball rolling on good
oxygenation.
Perfect.
Thank you again for coming on.
I really appreciate it and I really, really encourage any parent that hasn't read the
book.
Get it.
It's not a fast read, but it is packed with so much information that can help your child
as well as you.
It just, it will change your thinking.
Thank you so much.
I've enjoyed being here and yes, the book is a very quick read and it was intentional.
I want the information to really sit.
I don't want you to have to go through 300 pages to kind of source out where is the good
stuff.
It's all, it's all good stuff.
It's all good stuff.
Thanks again to Carice LeGair for sharing her medical insight into each of you for listening
to today's episode.
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Stay safe and happy breathing everyone.