Your body

Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.

The clinician telling this story found out only afterwards that his mother, father and brother had all been low. Nobody had mentioned it, because it…

Around seven in ten people who use herbal products never mention it to their doctor. Not out of secrecy, mostly because a tea or a gummy does not feel like it belongs on a list of medications.

The useful move is to answer a wider question than the one you were asked. When someone asks what medication you take, tell them what else you take…

A real food allergy shows itself on the body: a rash, a swollen or inflamed throat, something you can see. Behaviour on its own does not identify one, although behaviour often improves once a genuine allergy is dealt with.

One child's attention and mood went back to her usual level once berries came out of her diet, and what made that findable was the rash and the sore…

Most eating advice quietly assumes a budget. Fresh food is expensive and does not keep, so a household relying on food assistance ends up buying what lasts, and what lasts comes in tins and packets.

If money is the constraint, say it out loud rather than nodding along and then failing quietly at home. The advice can be rebuilt around what is…

Health advice usually assumes a kitchen, a fridge and money for the week. If you are working with less than that, the answer is not to try harder at the advice. It is to shrink the plan until it fits what you actually have.

A plan you cannot keep does more than fail. It quietly adds to the pile of evidence that nothing you do makes any difference, and that pile is heavy…

A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.

Symptoms that arrive together are worth asking about together. If reading, mood and stomach all went wrong over the same period, that pattern is…

If you are testing whether a food affects you or your child, the test has to be complete. Among children with suspected sensitivity to artificial colouring, most reacted to as little as 100 mg, so a bit left in is enough to blur the answer.

What usually happens is that a family removes the obvious sources, misses the ones hidden in medicines, sauces and cereals, sees no change, and…

Cutting artificial preservatives out can genuinely help a child who reacts to them, because a child who feels unwell behaves worse. What it does not do is treat the ADHD underneath, which will still be there once they feel better.

Worth being clear with yourself about what you are hoping for, because these diets are expensive and hard to keep up. If your child does have…

Gluten free and dairy free eating is essential in coeliac disease and in a genuine milk allergy. Neither one treats ADHD, and putting a child on them without a reason carries costs of its own.

The cost is not only money and nutrition. It is the birthday party where they cannot have the cake and the lunch table where their food is different…

If you are going to test whether a food matters, work out in advance where the plan will leak. School lunch swaps, a grandparent's biscuit tin, your own memory on a hard week: all of it decides whether the answer means anything.

Change one thing at a time and keep everything else steady, otherwise you cannot tell which change did what. Then be honest about who is running the…

When you need to correct one person, say it to the room. Everyone gets the instruction and nobody gets the sting.

Good instructors do this without thinking: they see one child dropping their guard and say that everybody needs to keep their hands up. The teaching…

Use a timer you can see rather than a warning you have to remember. A dial that shrinks, or a light that goes from green to red, does the work that five more minutes never quite does.

Time is not something everyone feels passing. Turning it into something you can look at moves the job from guessing to seeing, which is much easier.…

When someone describes a day like that, do not answer with a lecture on living better. Say that this is hard, and that you find parts of it hard too.

They have heard the virtue speech many times already and it has never once helped. Admitting that you also struggle to exercise, or to keep up with…

Teaching a child to fight works better when it comes with a plain rule: you defend, you never start it. The rule is doing as much work as the training.

A child whose brakes are slow benefits from having the decision made in advance, out loud, many times over. Then it is not something to work out in…

Before you decide a club is out of reach, ask. Some let children earn the uniform through the levels, and plenty have quiet arrangements for families who need them.

Cost keeps more children out of these things than lack of interest does. A single phone call is worth making, and the answer is often better than the…

A scheduled break does not break concentration. It is the unplanned wandering off that does that, and a known break tends to replace it.

Teachers usually expect movement breaks to shatter the lesson and find the opposite: children come back more easily because the break is part of the…

When nobody has checked whether a benefit lasts, that is not the same as finding out it does not. Following people up for a year costs money that most studies never had.

Two mistakes sit either side of this. One is reading a gap in the evidence as bad news. The other is assuming something lasts because a trial…

Speech has a beat inside it. When a child cannot hold a steady rhythm, that often sits alongside difficulty with reading and with the flow of talking, so time spent clapping or tapping a beat together is doing something real.

You need nothing for this. Clap a slow pattern, ask them to clap it back, then keep it running while you both count or walk in time to it.…

Start the movement slow enough that it is almost boring. Speed it up once it has gone smooth, and only then add the thinking part.

Throwing a beanbag back and forth, bouncing a ball, drumming on the table: pick something plain and let it become automatic before you make it…

Arrange to meet someone. A neighbour at the gate at eight, a friend expecting you, even an app counting a streak. Turning up for someone else is easier than turning up for yourself.

Benefits that arrive in six months are weak motivators. Something that pays out today works better: a person waiting, a number that goes up, a…

If a child is climbing the walls, green space helps most, a walk down a busy street helps a bit, and staying in the room helps least. Any of the three beats none.

The research on this puts them in that order rather than saying only a forest will do. A park, a scruffy playing field, the bit of grass behind the…

Bolt the movement onto something you would want to do anyway. A game with a friend, a walk to somewhere with good coffee at the end, a route past the river.

People keep up a weekly game with a mate for forty years and never once call it exercise. The friendship is what they turn up for and the moving…

Clumsy is not a description you can work with. Balance, core strength, shifting your weight, big movements, small ones, catching a ball, keeping a beat: those you can look at one at a time.

Break it down and you usually find a child is fine in four of those and struggling in two. That turns a vague sense that they are awkward into…

Not every family can get occupational therapy. Almost anyone can get outside with a skipping rope, a long rope turned by two people, or a board.

Skipping and boarding ask for much of what a therapist would be working on anyway: both sides of the body keeping time with each other, judging the…

Children need to move before school, during it and after it. Keeping a child in at break until the work is finished takes the movement away from the very child whose finishing depended on it.

Break time is not the whole of it either. A few minutes on their feet between lessons, a walk before the day starts, something physical when they…

Unstructured play in a big open space settles a child. A structured class teaches them how to be with other children. You want some of each, for different reasons.

If you only ever book the class, you take away the roaming that calms them down. If you only ever send them out to roam, they miss the taking turns…

For a child having a hard time, one adult who plainly thinks well of them makes more difference than almost anything else. A coach or a teacher can be that person.

Studies of children growing up through poverty, hunger and worse keep landing on the same finding: those who did well usually had somebody who…

With a small child who is struggling with both movement and speech, start with the body. Balance and steadiness come before a child can take in much language or learning.

A child who is using most of what they have simply to stay upright in a chair has little left for the words on the page. Sorting out the physical…