#91 — SPD: Processing a New Future for Kids ** November 18, 2015
Guest // Meghan Brookler ** Host //  Carla Atherton

About 5% of children have difficulty receiving “normal” sensory inputs from the environment — sound, light, smell, clothing, food, movement — and respond in ways that are deemed inappropriate, like crying, screaming, covering their ears, or tuning out.

Maybe they’re challenged in school or social situations; at the restaurant, mall, or airport; even with clothing tags or automatic flush toilets in public restrooms, to name just a few. Not all children are hypersensitive over-responders, however. Some might be under-responders who might be quiet, with a flat affect and low arousal response.

These children might have a kind of “neurological traffic jam” going on. If the adults in a child’s life don’t understand what’s happening, the child can be labeled and medicated in a variety of heartbreaking ways. The next time you hear that a child that is difficult, clumsy, picky, anxious, oppositional, quirky, etc., it might be worth looking into something called Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD).

• • What is SPD? Is it sometimes misdiagnosed as ADHD?
  • How does SPD differ from Sensory integration dysfunction?
  • What do parents wish that the medical community better understood about SPD?
  • Is there a connection between colic/gastrointestinal symptoms and SPD?
  • What kind of treatments are helping children today and what’s on the horizon?
  • How are parents leading the way?

Meghan Brookler is a certified nutritionist with an MS in Nutrition and Integrative Health, holistic practitioner, avid researcher, and a loving mom of a child with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). Ever since discovering how to turn her family’s sensory struggle around through nutrition, occupational therapy, meditation and other holistic steps, she has been passionate to share what she’s learned. Her mission is to help every SPD family she can reach to stabilize their SPD struggle and start living happy, peaceful, empowered lives together. It’s not always easy, but she believes we can tap into tools to create more ease, understanding and support that nourish our families and makes for happier people! Meghan is working on her new site: SPDroots.com that will highlight seven years’ worth of research into SPD.

Carla Atherton, MA, Director of the Lotus Health Project, Writer and Editor, Workshop Instructor, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner, Transformational Nutrition Coach, Yoga Instructor, Health (R)evolutionary, and Children’s Health Advocate. Carla is a trained Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner and Transformational Nutrition Coach, and is a creative and academic writer, lecturer, workshop instructor, acreage-living, unschooling mom of three. She is passionate about health and wellness, which, to her, involves all aspects of health including the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Carla created the Lotus Health Project, the Children’s and Teen Health (R)evolution, and its biannual online Children’s and Teen Health Summit in order to further her mandate – to let people know, both young and old, they are not alone in their health challenges or management and that anything can be overcome if you have the right mind and information.