28/06/2025
🤰Taking a good history is so important when caring for children.
It shapes your clinical reasoning and plays a vital role in mapping out a care plan and knowing how to move forward.
Here’s why:
✨ Prenatal experience shapes the nervous system.
Research shows that stress in pregnancy can influence the developing nervous system of the unborn child. High maternal stress levels can heighten sympathetic (protective) responses, affect vagus nerve tone, and set the stage for altered regulation even before birth.
Imagine being born already in a heightened sympathetic drive, beyond the natural newborn state of protection.
And then… layer in a big birth story.
✨ Birth experience — and those early days — matter.
Birth is a powerful, beautiful, and intense event for our babies. Sometimes, there is significant (macro) birth trauma, such as emergency interventions, forceps, vacuum, or severe distress. Other times, there are smaller (micro) traumas that are more subtle — a long labour, challenging positioning, or tension patterns from assisted deliveries. For many families, there are emotional elements during and after birth that can also shape the nervous system.
Those early days of mother–baby bonding are critical, supporting breastfeeding, healing, and laying the foundation for regulation.
Knowing which questions to ask — and why they matter — is key when caring for children. At Well Kids, we support you to look beyond the surface to truly understand the story of that little nervous system.
Because the way babies enter the world matters.
And how we learn and hold their story in our care… matters, too.
✨ If we want to raise a generation of Well Kids, it starts with listening to their very first chapters and recognising the impact of early stress on lifelong health. 📖