Create Thriving Families with Dr. Lisa

Inside Your Baby’s Brain: The 3–6 Month Window Part 2 of 2 | The 8-Part Neurodevelopmental Series Episode runtime: approximately 1 hour, 16 minutes Sleep has changed. Your baby suddenly has preferences, opinions, and a personality that’s getting harder to miss. Reflexes are fading, hands are finding each other, and the belly laughs are food for the soul. The 3–6 month window is where all of that w...

Inside Your Baby’s Brain: The 3–6 Month Window Part 1 of 2 | The 8-Part Neurodevelopmental Series Episode runtime: approximately 1 hour Life has changed! Your baby is starting to look around the room with intention, reach for things they actually want, and become more themselves with every passing week. Under the surface, a whole new layer of brain is developing — and the 3–6 month window is where...

Inside Your Baby’s Brain: The 0–3 Month Window Part 2 of 2 | The 8-Part Neurodevelopmental Series Episode runtime: approximately 1 hour, 14 minutes The first three months with a newborn can feel like chaos — feeding, crying, fragmented sleep, and a coffee cup that never gets finished. But beneath all of that, your baby is rehearsing some of the most important neurological work of their entire life...

Inside Your Baby's Brain: The 0–3 Month Window Part 1 of 2 | The 8-Part Neurodevelopmental Series Episode runtime: approximately 1 hour, 6 minutes Your baby isn't just feeding, sleeping, and surviving. Beneath the surface, their brain is doing more work right now than at almost any other point in their development — and you are the environment that work is happening inside. This episode opens a br...

Beyond the Flat Spot: The Neurodevelopmental Story Behind Plagiocephaly That flat spot on the back of your baby's head? It isn't the problem. It's the sign to look deeper. One in five babies in the developed world will develop a measurable flattening of the cranium in the first six months of life. Most parents are reassured that it's cosmetic and will round itself out on its own. But a decade of l...

  ABOUT THIS EPISODE In 2022, the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics revised their developmental milestone guidelines and removed crawling. The rationale was that many children develop normally without crawling, so it should no longer be considered a required milestone. I want to address this decision directly: I believe it is the wrong call, and the neurodevelopmental research tells...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Modern motherhood is characterized by an overwhelming volume of information and a profound absence of clarity. Every week, a new study, a new recommendation, a new approach. Contradictory advice from multiple professionals. A social media feed full of curated perfection on one side and catastrophizing on the other. And underneath all of it, a mother trying to make the best decis...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Children do not just grow up in homes. They grow up inside the nervous system of the home. The emotional climate, the pace, the quality of voice, the amount of screen noise in the background, the level of unresolved stress the adults are carrying — all of this is absorbed by a developing child's nervous system without words and without conscious awareness. The home has a signatu...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Between 40 and 50 percent of children in the United States now have at least one chronic health condition. In Norway, where I practice, the rate is lower but rising. These are not small numbers. They represent a profound shift in what we consider normal for childhood health, and the rate of change is too rapid to be explained by genetics alone. Something in the environment is dr...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Emotional regulation is not a skill that children choose to use or refuse to use. It is a developmental capacity that builds gradually over years, through thousands of repeated experiences of co-regulation with an attuned caregiver. When a child cannot calm down after a meltdown, the appropriate question is not "why won't my child regulate?" It is "what is my child's nervous sys...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Food is not just fuel. Every time your child eats, the food they consume is providing information to the brain, the nervous system, the immune system, and every cell in their body. That information instructs biological processes at a level far deeper than we typically appreciate when we are making decisions about what to put on the plate. This episode is about understanding food...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Every week in my practice, I see babies and children who sit in a diagnostic no-man's land. They are not sick enough to qualify for a diagnosis. They are not thriving enough to be considered genuinely well. They are, as far as the standard pediatric assessment is concerned, "fine." This episode is about what fine actually means — and what it misses. I present a clinical case of...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE This episode is the synthesis episode — the one I would hand to every parent on their first day home with a new baby if I could. Over 23 years of clinical practice, watching thousands of children either thrive or struggle, I have distilled what I believe to be the five foundational pillars of thriving children's health. Not tips. Not tricks. A framework. The five pillars are: ne...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Sleep is not a behaviour. It is a neurological state. And it is only accessible from one particular state of the autonomic nervous system: the ventral vagal state — the state of calm connection, safety, and physiological rest. This distinction changes everything about how you approach your child's sleep, because if the nervous system cannot access that state, no amount of routin...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Primitive reflexes are among the most important and least discussed aspects of early childhood neurodevelopment. They are the involuntary movement patterns that emerge in the brainstem during fetal development and the early months of life. They are not random. They are a training program — the nervous system's way of practising the movements that will eventually become voluntary...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE The brain does not develop randomly. It develops in a specific, predictable sequence — from the bottom up and from the inside out — and each layer of development depends on the one beneath it being properly established first. Understanding this sequence is not just interesting neuroscience. It is the practical foundation of every clinical decision I make about a child's health a...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE We are raising children in conditions that have never existed before. The technologies, systems, and environments that shape their development have not been tested over generations. And unlike previous eras where parenting norms were passed down through communities of experienced mothers and grandmothers, today's parents are often navigating these decisions largely alone — with...

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Most of us were raised to define health as the absence of symptoms. No fever. Normal test results. No diagnosis. If those boxes are checked, a child is considered healthy. But in 23 years of clinical practice, I have sat across from families whose children checked every one of those boxes and were clearly not thriving. This episode is about closing the gap between "no diagnosis"...

    ABOUT THIS EPISODE Welcome to Create Thriving Families with Dr. Lisa. This first episode is not about techniques or tips. It is about perspective. After 23 years in clinical practice working with babies, children, and the families around them, I have come to understand that the way you see health determines everything that follows from that view. Before I give you any information, I...

Welcome to the Create Thriving Families Podcast! I am Dr. Lisa Pedersen and this podcast was created to provide a community for women wanting to create the best possible health and quality of life for their families.