 Thank you all for coming today. I'm Laurie A. Couture. I'm a specialist in childhood developmental trauma and attachment. I'm the author of instead of medicating and punishing in the upcoming book nurturing and empowering our sons. Give you a little background I'm a licensed mental health counselor and I worked with children youths and families for over 20 years in various fields behavioral health education social services and juvenile justice and for work now I provide consulting presentations training and research reports to industries and agencies and programs that work with children youth and families. My disillusionment with our society's institutions including the ones that I worked in brought me to this topic of paleo parenting and educating hence the title of our talk paleo parenting and educating the way nature intended. There's a little bit of a lag between my slides so I just want to give that a moment to load. As I researched it wasn't long before I started to see the connection between paleolithic parenting and educating and paleolithic or ancestral health. Ancestral health is actually nature's wisdom and ancestral health is holistic health. Holistic health is comprised of nature's principles and food health care and behavioral health care living and parenting and educating. Before we delve into ancestral health it's helpful to understand the core issue of why we are so misaligned with it today. Let's talk for a moment about public health. What would you say the greatest public health crisis is affecting our country and even our world right now? You can call out answers. Does anybody have any thoughts on that? The greatest public health crisis affecting our country right now? Okay any others? Okay I heard some of them. I couldn't hear them all but the ones that I heard I noticed that those are all symptoms of a much deeper more malignant and gangrenous issue. The greatest public health issue of our time is actually childhood developmental trauma. Many people are surprised to learn this but childhood developmental trauma is at the root of early mortality, poor medical health, mental health and behavioral problems, violence, behavioral and chemical addictions, and suicide as well as how people treat the earth. As such childhood developmental trauma is our industrialized world's greatest public health problem. To understand why this is the case let's return to nature for a moment. Nature is beautiful because it's in perfect balance. In my career I noticed that anytime there was an imbalance in a child's holistic health it was due to that child's environment being misaligned with nature's intent. And by environment I mean the home environment, the educational environment, the social environment, and the community. I use this concept of nature's intent in my work constantly. Nature has a clear intention for every living organism. Nature doesn't care about our personal dietary, parenting or educational philosophies or any other of our belief systems. Nature does what's necessary to help every living organism and natural habitat thrive. Everything else is superfluous to nature. We can easily identify what nature's intent is for plants and animals. For example, we know that the frog needs a specific diet in order to thrive and be healthy. We don't feed that frog sugar, grains, dairy and endocrine distroying soy. Yet we feed our children refined sugar, grains, soy, dairy, and other inflammatory toxins. We know that a frog can't be restrained sedentary in a chair all day long, yet that's what we do to our children every day in school from ages five at least to 18 and sometimes much younger. We understand that nature's intent, we understand nature's intent for other living organisms. Why do we assume that anything goes when it comes to how we treat our children? Let's take a look at one of nature's most exquisite cycles of homeostasis built into nearly all of its living organisms, but especially mammals. This is one of nature's most brilliant symphonies, yet it is overlooked by nearly every one of our society's institutions, including health care and behavioral health. Nature's intent for growing young brains and bodies is the mammal attachment cycle. This starts when a child has a need, the child expresses the need, and then the parent meets the need as soon as possible or responds with sensitivity. This leads to the child feeling feelings of relief, calm, joy, trust, and what's called homeostasis or all systems inside and out of good. These feelings are associated with the parents, and this builds what's called secure attachment. When needs are met and attachment is secure, children thrive on every holistic level. Paleolithic children enjoy secure attachment almost by default, and their stable behavior reflected it. Here's my son Bryson and I together when he's at age 11 and age 21. He's clearly thriving. I parented and educated Bryson, according to nature's intent, and I followed nature's secure attachment cycle with regards to his needs. I set up Bryson's home and educational environment so that when he had a need, it was met, and he felt homeostasis. Naturally, when a child experiences this cycle of homeostasis over and over, he or she has a secure attachment and thrives on all holistic developmental levels, except that Bryson didn't have a secure attachment. Before I adopted him, Bryson spent the first 11 years of his life suffering profound abuse, neglect, loss, and trauma, permanently altering the attachment blueprint that nature had intended for him. By the time he joined my life through adoption at age 11, he had already been in 15 different residential, respite, and foster homes. Like Bryson, most children in our culture have a very different experience than nature's secure attachment cycle. Most of the children living in industrialized cultures today, while not suffering trauma as extreme as Bryson's, are living the antithesis to nature's secure attachment cycle. When they have a need and they express the need, the parent delays or fails to meet the need or ignores the need. This leads to feelings of anxiety, dysregulation, anger, mistrust, and distress. And this distress leads to insecure or disrupted attachment. Again, this doesn't have to be extreme. Chronic insensitive delayed or denied response equals insecure attachment. Sometimes even one severe incidence of intense distress from one unmet need can injure that parent-child attachment relationship and lead to developmental trauma. Why? Distress triggers a fight, flight, or freeze reaction in the limbic system when a need is unsuited. This cascades an intensity if the need remains unmet until dissociation occurs. Dissociation is an altered state of consciousness that occurs when a child is exhausted, his or her ability to cope with a situation. This results in trauma and the definition of trauma is when an individual feels powerless to cope with an intense or chronic level of distress and it's very individualized. Now, why are we talking about this? Because insecure attachment is a form of developmental trauma. Developmental trauma harms children on every holistic developmental level, including epigenetic, neurological, physical, psychological, behavioral, social, sexual, spiritual, and moral. Thousands of studies, including the mainstream adverse childhood experiences or ACEs studies by the CDC, confirm that developmental trauma has negative effects that affect holistic health outcomes for life. And they don't even count most developmental traumas in their ACEs studies. Cutting-edge neuroscience and epigenetic research, however, on developmental trauma has discovered that developmental trauma not only alters the expression of one's genetic inheritance, epigenetics, is respond to subsequent generations through the DNA. It even affects the DNA's telomeres, which are the end caps on the DNA proteins, causing these telomeres to decay and age in young children. Neurochemistry in a child is permanently altered by developmental trauma and primed for a process of behavioral or chemical addiction as a way of surviving. Most industrialized people have at least a behavioral, if not a chemical addiction. Today, we see rampant screen addiction in our millennial and Gen Z children and young adults. But addiction is more than a coping mechanism. It's a strategy to jumpstart a brain that was depleted or dehydrated of natural endorphins, natural opioids and natural oxytocin that results from that secure parent-child attachment relationship. Childhood developmental trauma also kills. On the left is Bryson at age 10, while he was still in the foster care system. He would wait another four months before he even learned of me from the time that photo was taken. You can clearly see the despair and anguish in his face. On the right is Bryson at age 23, almost 24. You can see that same level of hopelessness and pain in Bryson's eyes and face. He took this selfie weeks before he ended his life by suicide. In spite of the unconditional love, affection and enriching life that he had in our family, the developmental wounds had cut too deep. His brain, his neurochemistry, his genetic lottery and even his body had been so badly compromised by the losses, the lack of love and the sexual, physical and psychological abuse and neglect that he endured that any distress would throw Bryson into an abyss of panic and hopelessness. The addiction called reactive attachment disorder. He had post-traumatic stress disorder with delusions and failure to thrive syndrome. So even his body failed to grow properly, even after he was with me. In 2016, a series of personal stressors, including some birth, family contact led to a relapse of all of these mental health issues, as well as a history that he had of suicide. In fact, Bryson's first suicide attempt was in his therapeutic preschool. The crucial role of attachment in children's health and mental health received so little serious attention in our medical, behavioral healthcare field and almost none in education. Our society's institutions focus on a behavioral biochemical model of labeling symptoms of children's health, medical, emotional, behavioral and learning problems. And these systems are so completely out of sync with nature's intent that all they can do is offer us more of what disrupts attachment and causes developmental trauma. To understand why children struggle with emotional, behavioral and learning problems and why our society is so unhealthy and violent today, we have to turn to the field of cultural anthropology. James W. Prescott, Margaret Mead, Mary Ainsworth, Ashley Montague, James DeMeo and E. Richard Sorison and others study the contrast between parenting and education in generally peaceful, paleolithic tribal societies versus violent, agricultural and industrialized cultures. The contrasts in mental health and in cultural violence were striking. These researchers found that most of the parenting and educational practices in paleolithic hunter-gatherer cultures promoted secure attachment. They also had low levels of behavioral problems, low levels of mental illness and low levels of violence. They also had low levels of child abuse and neglect. Almost to the opposite extreme, the equation was flipped. They found that most of the parenting and educational practices and agricultural and industrialized cultures led to insecure or disrupted attachment, low levels of skin-to-skin nurturance, early separation, daycare in school and genital mutilation, what we call circumcision. As a result, there were high levels of behavioral problems, high levels of mental illness, high levels of violence and high levels of child abuse and neglect, both professionally recognized illegal child abuse and neglect, and legal traumas that set off the limbic system, flood the child with high levels of stress hormones like cortisol and leave them to a fight, flight or freeze reaction. Let's take a look at the parenting and educational contrasts between our paleo ancestors and the cultures that began to plant food leading to civilization, then industrialization and now our digital culture. I wish we could spend more time on these. There's going to be several slides of these, but I want to give you a quick overview is more information in my first book and in my upcoming book. So let's let's remember nature's intent here. Paleolithic cultures parented innately by nature's intent and that wisdom was passed on through the DNA and through people's behavior in parenting generation after generation. However, as soon as people believe that they could improve upon nature, that's when the problems began. The choice to plant food seems to have been that tiny stone cast in the ocean that led to cataclysmic ripples and shockwaves all the time with that choice to improve upon nature to plant food came eventually this idea that we could have parenting and educational choice. So as we can see here, nature's intent demonstrated by our paleo ancestors, there were certain variables that children lived that our children do not, they had a natural birth, they had the full term breastfeeding, which was no less than two and a half years and up to six years of age. Today, children are bottle fed or if they are breastfed, it's for maybe a year or earlier and they're forcibly weaned. Children in Paleolithic cultures were held in arms for nine months to a year, whereas in industrialized cultures, infants are put down and away from parents constantly. In Paleolithic culture, there was an immediate response to cries and distress of babies, children and adolescents, whereas in our culture, needs are denied, ignored, they're delayed or they're shamed. Nature intended for children to co-sleep with their families rather than crib sleep or sleep in a separate bed when they're young. And nature intended for the child's whole body to be intact, whereas in agricultural and industrialized cultures, we believe in genital cutting. Nature's intent was also for a Paleolithic diet, not a diet full of refined sugar, grains, dairy, soy, which is an endocrine disruptor and junk food. There was a gentle way of guiding children's behavior through strong modeling and support and a respectful approach to youths rather than a contemptuous or violent approach to children or with punishment or helicoptering or permissive bulldozering or permissiveness or bulldozering. Children learn through kinesthetic play and through curiosity and dramatic play in inventions and adventures and making inventions in nature. And today, in industrialized cultures and in agricultural and pastoral tribes, there's daycare and schooling and children are sedentary most of the day fixated on screens. The environment was very safe for children to explore. We unfortunately have free access to dangers all over our culture. It's just not safe for children to explore or children suffer hovering surveillance so they have no freedom whatsoever. Children were perfect protected from sexual violence by adults, whereas now there's a sexual abuse risk in almost every institution and access to porn is rampant. Healthy neurochemistry was what children had through the attachment relationship, whereas now children are, you know, they're pulled by those behavioral or chemical addictions to fill that void. Children also experienced full term dependency, which means that they were allowed a childhood until they actually reached adulthood. There was no set time for that. Now, children are forced to grow up by a certain age, they're pushed through developmental stages or by the time they get into their thirties, they are what we call failure, failing to launch as adults. This is especially the case with our millennials. Nature makes things that are aligned with our well-being simple for us. Is there any hope for us? Yes, I believe there is. And I'm going to show you how easy it is for us to get back on track with nature's cycle of homeostasis. Healing our families is as simple as getting back on track of that simple four-step, secure attachment cycle. Parenting in this manner in contemporary times is called attachment parenting. What is attachment parenting? It's a way of paleolithic parenting in addition to the paleolithic parenting in a digital world. This involves helping your child restore homeostasis when he or she is dysregulated, being responsive and sensitive and meeting needs, providing optimal holistic development through nature's intent in parenting, education, diet and living. It means protecting, nurturing and empowering our children. It means strong modeling as an adult society, firm principles, but gentle guidance towards the child. And it means full term dependency with growing competence. Here are some ways that we can rebalance that cycle of homeostasis and parent or secure attachment. Water birds or natural birth, genital integrity when children are born, especially boys, full term breastfeeding. That means breastfeeding for at the very least two and a half years or when children wean on their own, co-sleeping with young children, skin to skin and emotional nurturance, homeschooling or alternative education and paleolithic or ancestral diet and organic or local food. Gentle behavioral guidance about the same modeling strong principles and values, heal punitive helicoptering or permissive parenting, unplug the children from screens and replace it with fun, restore dramatic and kinesthetic clay, restore abundant daily time in nature and restore family activities and one to one time with each child. And most importantly, protecting our children from trauma and the very real dangers without hovering them on them. And if there are mental health and behavioral issues, neurosomatic treatments for trauma and behavioral health issues are in order, not talk therapy. These neurosomatic treatments include eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR, attachment focused family therapy rather than just basic talk family therapy, functional medicine evaluations to roll out food sensitivities and looking at holistic health and how the body all works together and signals problems. Adjunct treatments can be had for symptoms. And then community involvement and volunteer work is important to give children a sense of being part of a community. Community mentoring for young adults is important as well, as well as unschoolish alternatives to college. We'll get we'll talk a little bit and a second about what unschooling is. Also, intergenerational households or close family connections on both sides of the family are important for children. Educating for secure attachment is a crucial part of attachment parenting. We can't treat nature secure attachment cycle as an a la carte buffet. Take what we want and leave the rest. Nature didn't intend for children's secondary for hours per day with nearly every biological, emotional and cognitive needs screaming perpetually for 18 years. These are three alternatives to daycare in public school. There's learn at home options. And as you can see there from the check mark that is aligned the most with secure attachment nature's intent. Then we look at holistic or child centered private school settings. And a little bit of a caution there from getting off of that secure attachment cycle. And then another alternative is our programs within the public school system that are alternative to their traditional program. And there we see some concerns with, you know, watch out some caution there with the secure attachment cycle possibly being affected by that. Here we see some we here see the list of alternative education, including homeschooling. We have on on the left side of learning home options. I have braided all of these according to nature's intent. You could see here that under that category of the top learn at home options. These are most in line with the secure attachment cycle. Unschooling is a child centered way of learning where the child's curriculum is based on curiosity and passion. And children end up just naturally touching on all of the subjects that are that are taught in school anyway, just naturally. It's amazing. Relaxed homeschooling is a bit of a hybrid of unschooling and homeschooling with a curriculum. Learning pods are a new phenomenon that came out of the COVID-19 crisis. Those are not as child led. So I gave those a B minus, but there's still much. There's a lot more freedom involved in that than in the public school. On the right side, we see child centered school types. Democratic free schools are what basically children get an equal vote to the adults and what they want to learn, how they want to learn it and the rules of the school. They have one in Massachusetts, the Sudbury Valley Free School, nature based schools, Waldorf child centered private schools and arts based schools. As you can see here, though, there's a caution with that attachment cycle because some of these schools can be very dogmatic and and they may they do separate children from their families because kids have to go to the building and it's compulsory. So we put a caution there. Programs within the public school system we see a huge caution for possible attachment disruption, but these are still better and superior to the typical program. Again, we put the learning pods and micro schools on top. There's even public charter schools, online public schools. But as you can see, the closer to that, the closer those options are to schooling, the more they're going to be dangerous for nature's intent. Being part of this exciting conference feels so cutting edge, yet paleo parenting and educating isn't about trying out some new trend. It's about returning to ancient, earthly and creative wisdom of nature, wisdom that if you believe in a power greater than yourself is the physical manifestation of that higher wisdom. Nature knows exactly what the tiniest single cell organism needs in order to thrive, as well as the largest living thing, the giant sequoia. You can see me there in 2019 next to the third. Well, it's actually the second largest, but on paper, it's the third largest giant sequoia. Certainly, nature certainly understands the very intricate needs of mammals, including the most magnificent and beautiful mammal of them all, human beings. Our bodies take about 21 to 24 years to mature to adulthood and our brains take about 26 years to reach adulthood. The secure attachment cycle meant to run from prebirth to young adulthood, guides parents and families in raising holistically healthy, joyful and thriving children into holistically healthy, competent, stable, interdependent adults. I believe that in this regard, my son's adoption story is a success. Due to those almost 13 years of healing attachment with me, Bryson stayed for 23 and three quarter years on this earth, 19 years longer than he had intended to stay. Nature truly intends for the best for all of our children. I'm Laurie A. Croutor, author of Instead of Medicating and Punishing in the upcoming book set to launch very soon, Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons. I'm developing the Croutor Protocol, an evidence-based whole child program of treating developmental and generational trauma in children, youths and families that incorporates the Paleolithic diet and lifestyle. My brand new website just launched yesterday and in the next month or so, most of the features will be up, including the page which isn't yet up. If you are interested in a signed copy of my first book, you can email me at this email address. And please visit my website for more information about the release of my second book, as well as the mental health treatment program I'm developing, the Croutor Protocol. If you would like to see and hear some of Bryson's creative efforts to give a voice to child abuse prevention, please visit his YouTube channel, Serenade to Darkness, spelled Serenade-I-I-Darkness. And I want to thank all of you for coming together today to be part of this presentation. And I'm here to take any questions that you might have. Thank you. Hi, can you hear me? Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Great talk. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. So, I work on an environment or on an emotional level with people just through my own work. And one thing that you had mentioned, but didn't, like there was only one bullet point around it, was in my experience, like we're talking about all of these kind of tactical or strategic ways to raise children. But healing the parents or healing basically, yeah, the parents, their traumas in my experience has been essential, because ultimately you can't get anyone to even want to do any of these things until you, or even physically, you're not able to. Like I did, I do energy work with people. And what I discovered, even just this week, I had a woman, she was devastated by her daughter's relationship, like with her boyfriend. They got, you know, they broke up and she was physically, she almost wanted to vomit, like somatically because of the difficulty of kind of processing the trauma of her daughter. Now, from an energetic standpoint, I was like, you obviously have some kind of, you've got some of your own stuff. And the problem was that I could notice that this sort of help, it wasn't really helicoptering, it was more of like a, more of a bulldozing or, whatever you want to call it, parenting mentality. And so the problem was that she was not even able to recognize that. She couldn't even, she couldn't possibly help herself, you know, because it wasn't like a cognitive decision that she made to essentially sure control these things. And the other part of it was that, you know, in terms of, like I hear what you're saying in terms of you want to create in, like it's important to create safe environments. But I also kind of noticed that there's a lot of people who, they don't have, they're way too safe and they absolutely feel anxiety because they do have any ability for themselves to like And now, do you have a question about this that I could answer? So I guess my question is sort of, sorry, my question to kind of come back and stop rambling is, is how do you, what type of thoughts do you have about healing the parent and dealing with their, their stuff and how do you enroll them in this process? Well, that's why I'm developing the Couture protocol because healing generational trauma is part of being able to heal the child's trauma. I would recommend that the parents get eye movement desensitization and reprocessing EMDR that addresses the trauma at the limbic system level. And if the parent cannot heal their own trauma, then they are going to be blocked from being able to be on that attachment cycle with the child. So, yes, energy work, somatic work is important. But that EMDR piece, that neurosomatic piece is crucial because trauma is stuck in our limbic system and it is developmentally based, which means that trauma stops, I mean, trauma stops development. And so if a parent was traumatized at age three, then there is a part of them that is stuck at age three. And we don't want a three year old parenting children. So we need to go in there and release that trauma and move it from the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex. And again, that's going to be a huge part of the Couture Protocol. And I talk about all of that, my outcome as well. Thank you. Is that answer your question? You're welcome. Yes, it does. Thank you. Hi. Thank you for your talk. I when looking at the secure attachment circle, I kept wondering what prevents the child from having needs that manipulate the parent into kind of a vending machine. What if the child needs a new video game system every few days? I guess an extreme scenario. But how do you say no in the secure attachment cycle? Well, that's a great question, because what you just mentioned is not a need. There is no need that nature has come up with that anybody needs a video game system. So needs are different from wants. So the importance is meeting a child's needs. What is the need under the want for that video game system? Chances are the need is the child needs fun, or maybe the need is they're trying to dull pain or maybe they want to fit in with their friends. So the important thing is finding the unmet needs. My first book gets huge into this deciphering needs from wants because what I see a lot of today with today's parents is that every want that the child has, it's like, OK, yes, yes, yes, yes. But their actual needs are completely being denied. And that is one of the reasons why our millennial young adults and our Gen Z little ones are struggling so much today because every want that they come up with, it's like, OK, OK, OK. But the actual needs are going unnoticed underneath. So thank you for that question. That's important to decipher. Hi, Rob Lasnik, San Francisco. You mentioned only in passing on one slide, epigenetics. But the phenomenon of oxytocin, the oxytocin receptor being methylated, vasopressin, you know, safety threat. The paradigm, the paradigm of soocardor. How does this fit into your developmental paradigm? That's the first question. And the second question is, how is your program and your paradigm different from what Gabor Mate has put forward in terms of his sense of developmental trauma and addiction? Thank you very much for your question. I think that what you mentioned is epigenetics and the oxytocin. I definitely mentioned all of that neurochemistry of trauma. I only had a very short time to present so much information. And it's absolutely crucial. And I did mention how when we don't have that natural neurochemistry nurtured as children, then we will seek it out in some sort of behavioral or chemical addiction. And epigenetics is a huge piece of that. I am not fully familiar with Gabor Mate's work. I have read some of his studies. In fact, I quoted at least one of his pieces in my upcoming book. The Couture Protocol is specifically based on my 20 year history working with children and families and based on what the process that I was doing. So I can't compare it to somebody else's. What I will say is my protocol that I'm aware of is the only one that deals with the holistic child based on all of the holistic needs that we mentioned, not just the mental health and behavioral health. It also encompasses diet as well. So please stay tuned for it so that you can learn more as that comes up in the next year or so. Thank you. We're officially on break, but we can continue having these conversations. We're going to start sharply at nine for our next presentation, but you can if you want to continue, answer questions for the next 10 minutes. We're officially on time. Absolutely. I'm happy to have people still have questions. Hi, Lori, this is Stephanie Welch. I'm based in Austin, Texas. Primarily, I just want to thank you and say that this was a phenomenal talk and I couldn't agree more about the importance of this. And, you know, some of the subjects I've talked about in the past are similar that the challenges that the nuclear family presents to being able to support kids in this needed way. And then, especially, I'm so grateful for you bringing up the topic of circumcision. That's another area where I've spoken on in the past, even to the Physicians for Ancestor Health Group. There's a I have an item on YouTube that's about the anatomy and functions of male foreskin that people don't even realize that it has functions. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And the trauma that you indicate. So I'm just I'm I'm so grateful and thank you so much. I'm so so happy to learn about your work here. Thank you. You're welcome. And thank you for speaking out about this because it is crucial and it is a very traumatizing and destructive practice that, as you said, destroys the natural penis and all of its functions as well as sex as a result of that. And it and it leads to violence. So that's that's been shown. Hi, I'm Kevin Boyd from Chicago. I can my work is involved with eliciting cooperation in kids who not don't always want to cooperate. And that's my work, Joe. Well, this might be helpful to you, too. Maybe already I came in late, so I might have, you know, you might have covered this, but I learned in my training that it's not important that the kid understands. I mean, you know, two, three Piaget says they're not even of reason. You know, they don't they don't know how to reason yet, but that you you need to convince the adult caregivers that it's important for, say, a frightened or obstinate three year old to open their mouth. I'm a dentist, OK, and many of my colleagues and I do orthodontics that they say, well, you shouldn't do orthodontics. They can't understand, even though you know they'd benefit from it at two, three or four, you've got to wait till they're older. And it's like, I wonder if you agree with cultural anthropologists who say children, mammals, actually, young mammals are hardwired to assimilate their parents' culture. They imitate, imprint all of that. I mean, Neanderthals, they watched the elder, you know, stretch the leather. And well, it's the same thing. They say children are hardwired to learn. We know this because we're here. OK, we would have gone extinct. Do you agree with that, that children are hardwired to assimilate what their parents really will be pleased if they do this? That that's all I agree with that statement. But I don't necessarily agree with the statement that if a child is in distress, you force them to open their mouth, that that's not meeting the needs. We need to find out what is the need in that situation. If it is a medical emergency, then that need would supersede. And then I would ask that the child maybe has some laughing gas or something so that they're not in distress. But no, I I'm not that kind of dentist. OK, so it's not feelings. It's not shots. OK. And it is life threatening. Yeah. If it's like, but it doesn't kill right away. It let me give you an example. Yeah. Let me give you an example. My son was was raped when he was three years old by his biological aunt. And he had an oral piece to that. So he had to get braces when he was 13 for a medical necessity. It was not cosmetic. My son, when he was lying lying in the chair, all of a sudden he got triggered. Scream, bloody murder. It sounded like a murder happened. It scared the orthodontist so much that he ran out of the room. You know, I had to hold my son shaking and trembling for the next 10 minutes. So I realized that his need, he had two needs there. He needed to feel safe, but he also needed the braces at some point. So we worked so that both of those needs could be met. We altered the way that the braces were done so that he never was lying back in his chair. It's always up. So there were all these things put in place so that Bryson could feel safe and get the medical dental treatment that he needed. Yeah. So that's like a beautiful, that's a great example and a great teaching moment. But what I'm trying to say is, is that, no, it's the same thing. I totally agree with you. A child needs to feel safe. And they also need to know that their adult caregivers really would like them to, you know, open their mouth. If they don't, I always say to the kid, you don't have to open your mouth, honey. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Oh, OK, I see what you mean. And I will leave the room and if, you know, mommy can take another day off of work and miss another day of school. And I think you're talking about modeling. Yeah. And you're right. If the adult is modeling, see what adults could model for the child when we go to the dentist, this is just what we do. We open our mouth, the dentist looks in. And what would be helpful is if the parent allowed the child to see them getting dental work done and not giving those types of platitudes. I agree with you that making those statements actually raises anxiety in children. So what I did with my son and what I recommended with clients who also had trauma around medical issues is I let him know that, OK, we're going to do the best we can to make you comfortable. This is just what we have to do, though. And my son understood it. He understood this is what we have to do. And he at the same time trusted that we were going to do it in a way that was going to keep him at homeostasis. Well, what we're introducing here is if your child needed the orthodontics of 13, he needed them at two or three or four. But most orthodontists don't have these conversations with parents. That's right. He won't cooperate. So thank you for that. You're welcome. And thank you for bringing that amazing question up because we don't get that a lot. And I think it is important to understand that how we model for our children is how they will live because, yes, modeling is how children learn. Thank you so much. And we need to.