0:01 Tara Hunkin:
This is My Child Will Thrive and I'm your host, Tara Hunkin, nutritional therapy practitioner, certified gaps practitioner, restorative wellness practitioner and mother. I'm thrilled to share with you the latest information, tips, resources, and tools to help you on the path to recovery for your child with ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, or learning disabilities. My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on research I can dig into and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey.

A quick disclaimer before we get started. My Child Will Thrive is not a substitute for working with a qualified healthcare practitioner. The information provided on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat your child. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before implementing any information or treatments that you have learned about on this podcast. There are many gifted, passionate, and knowledgeable practitioners with hundreds if not thousands of hours of study and clinical experience available to help guide you. Part of our goal is to give you the knowledge and tools you need to effectively advocate for your child so that you don't blindly implement each new treatment that comes along.

No one knows your child better than you. No one knows your child's history like you do or can better judge what is normal or abnormal for your child. The greatest success in recovery comes from the parent being informed and asking the right questions in making the best decisions for their child in coordination with a team of qualified practitioners in different areas of specialty.

Today's podcast is sponsored by the Autism, ADHD, and Sensory Processing Disorder Summit. In order to learn more about the summit and to sign up for free, please go to mychildwillthrive.com/summit.

2:12 Tara Hunkin:
Hi, welcome back to the My Child Will Thrive Podcast. I'm Tara Hunkin and I'm gonna be talking to you all by myself today. And the reason for that is I'm going to give you our 2022 gift guide and it's what I like to call a few of our favourite things.

It reminds me of the song from the Sound of Music and I want to do that and also just give you a quick update about what's coming up here at My Child Will Thrive in the new year. We are rapidly approaching 2023, which is hard to believe and we're going to be growing in the new year. The team is growing in many different ways.

Those of you that have interacted with one of my team members, Jessie. Jessie, has been with me the last couple years supporting everything that we do, supporting our members of the Knowledge Vault, supporting any of you that just email in and ask questions and then supporting me to get all these things, including the podcast and everything else out to you as often as we can.

And Jessie is embarking on her own new journey starting very, very soon at the time of this recording. Jessie's expecting her first child. So the first thing that we're gonna do is congratulate her and her husband and I wish them a fun journey with their child and we'll be waiting with open arms when Jessie's ready to return to the My Child Will Thrive team.

And it will be a much bigger team when she returns as we're currently getting more resources and more capacity, hiring a number of different people in different areas so that we can do some really big things in 2023. I won't tell you all of our plans right now, but suffice to say that we will be doing things to make information more accessible and more user friendly and making sure that we can do what I set out to do in the very beginning with My Child Will Thrive, which is reach as many parents as we can with the information and resources that they need for their children and to help you guys get where you want to go faster and with more confidence and clarity in your decision making as you go along this challenging path.

That's what's coming up next year. We are gonna take a little bit of a hiatus while we get everybody settled and also to take a break for the holidays. Take some of the pressure off of putting out the podcast and doing some of the other things. The podcast will return later in January 2023 with all new content and new interviews. I've recorded some of them already. I'm really excited for what we've got coming up and I hope that you'll join us again in the new year.

For now, I'm going to just walk you through the gift guide, which you can also find on the My Child Will Thrive website. But I wanted to just talk to you about some of the things that we've included in the gift guide and why. So like I said, if you're like me, I love giving gifts and I love the holiday season, but it's even better when we can find things that not only can people use but it can also improve their lives.

So that's sort of what we strive to do with the gift guide is I've compiled with Jessie's help, some of our favourite things and all these things that are on this list are things that I've used in my own home with my family and they are things that have sort of stood the test of time. So that's why I'm sharing them here with you today.

We were fortunate enough to get some discounts from some of the providers of these items.They are on the blog as well as in the show notes for this episode, you're gonna see links to these different products. Full disclosure, there are some links in there that are affiliate links, which means that we may receive some kind of compensation for if you do use our link.

But like I said before, the only things that make our list are things that we know and trust. I share them with you because I really truly believe that they are things that will help you make your lives easier and in some cases help improve and accelerate your results with your children. So without further ado, we have broken up our gift guide for 2022 into gifts under $50, gifts under a hundred dollars and then gifts over a hundred dollars depending on what your budget is and we all have our own budgets for these things.

6:58 Tara Hunkin:
So the first product that we wanted to talk about or company that we wanted to talk about was Wellnesse personal care products. So we're all often looking for things that we can use that are not toxic, that we can trust the ingredients. And when Wellnesse Mama, I don't know if you're familiar with her and her website, she's been around for many years sharing her experiences and journey with her family, trying to find natural ways to enhance their lives. And Katie Wells who heads up Wellnesse Mama, she has spent years also providing recipes for you to make personal health care products at home.

So things like toothpaste and deodorant and shampoos and everything. But she embarked on actually creating her own company called Wellnesse, spelled W E L L N E S S E. She has now launched things like toothpaste so she has children's two toothpaste, different flavours, but one is strawberry and she has some wonderful shampoos and conditioners that she has now in her line and actually has recently released a new deodorant product as well.

So we have a link to those products in the show notes and also on the blog. You can get a 10{4537a52abafa24f75931b694e3f6d1d9b0beb5896e18e49b3141987b78b41d96} discount if you use the code MCWT10 so My Child Will Thrive the acronym 10 at checkout to get 10{4537a52abafa24f75931b694e3f6d1d9b0beb5896e18e49b3141987b78b41d96} off. So these make great little gifts again to yourself, your family so I highly recommend those.

8:33 Tara Hunkin:
My next product under $50 is more about me. I am a tea person, have been all my life, spent some time living in England. Now I don't drink tea the way we did back then, which was with lots of milk and sugar. I'm always looking for really great teas and have a massive tea drawer in my home of all different kinds. But I came across Pique Tea a number of years ago.

I love their product because not only does it taste amazing, they have many different flavours of tea, but they have a wellness in terms of they're looking towards the health benefits of a number of these teas. So when they're developing products, that's what they're looking for. But they also are looking for the purity of the product as well. There are a lot of teas that are out there that you would not want to be drinking depending on how they are actually grown and then manufactured.

Pique Tea is a company that actually tests all the leaves and things that they're using to make their teas. They also have teas that support things like immune health and gut health with some fermented tea. It really is an amazing product line and again, you can find the links to all those different teas on our website.

9:52 Tara Hunkin:
The next product under $50 is Vibrant Blue Oils Parasympathetic Blend. You have probably heard me talk about them before. I love this particular oil and obviously the name says it all, which is the idea is to help you bring you or your child into a parasympathetic state. I happen to also love the smell of this oil probably because it has a little bit of lime in it. So you can do that through smelling it, but putting it just behind the ear is usually what we do on the bone that's just behind the ear.

Of course that's close to where the vagus nerve travels through, the vagal nerve. So it is one of those things that we want to use like maybe before you can leave on your kitchen counter used before everybody eats. If your child's having anxiety going to school, they can have it in their backpack but you can also just quickly put it on them before they go off to school. Again, the people at Vibrant Blue Oils have a special offer on the Parasympathetic Blend for you to get that first bottle for $15, which is a fabulous price. While the essential oils are expensive, these bottles that last a really long time so they're definitely worth the investment. And I encourage you to go to the link that we have on the show notes because that's where you can access that offer.

11:14 Tara Hunkin:
The gifts under a hundred dollars. So over 50 and under a hundred, there's a couple that I have here to recommend to you today. One is Ear Seeds. So if you haven't tried ear seeds before or aren't familiar with them, one of the reasons why I like them is because they are a noninvasive, safe and effective tool that can stimulate nerve endings on pressure points. So it uses thousands of years of knowledge around the idea of using accupressure points, but in particular on the ears. So the ears are all mapped out for different acupressure points.

These ear seeds can be, they're just applied to those points on the ear. The company earseeds.com, they show you how to do that. They have lots of really attractive ear seed kits. So for kids you can get them all bedazzled if you have a little girl that loves that or a little boy that loves that. Or you can get ones that sort of disappear so that no one sees 'em.

They are fabulous kits. Again, great for many different things, everything from anxiety to constipation and everything in between. Focus and memory and allergies and everything else. They even have the ability to shop by condition that you're trying to relieve. So again, I recommend you head off to their website and check out all those kits because they are a great gift to give yourself or someone in your family.

12:47 Tara Hunkin:
I would be remiss if I didn't say to you the next gift under a hundred dollars is our Knowledge Vault membership here at My Child Will Thrive. We often have people that request so they can give this as a gift to somebody else that they know and love or you can give it to yourself as a gift to you and your family for the year. The Knowledge Vault encompasses broaching about a hundred interviews now. So we don't overwhelm you, you can search, they're organised and then also searchable. So you can search for exactly the thing that you want to learn about right now or get resources around in the search and it actually tells you where that term that you're searching for is in terms of which videos. And then within each of those videos you can then drill down even further and it tells you exactly where it brings you to the point in the video and the transcript where that term is mentioned.

So you can quickly scan to see which is the next interview that you want to or masterclass that is in there or the workshop that we've held and go into the recordings there. You can quickly get to the ones that you need the most right now. Also in the Knowledge Vault, you'll get my RAIRE Method, which is the method I've developed to help parents like you and I navigate through those decision making processes, gather the information that we need to work with our practitioner team and then make sure that we are reviewing all the information that we're gathering, analysing, interpreting it, and then we're going to set out to maybe make some revisions too.

We're gonna review our plans, make some revisions, and then execute once again and go about our way. The RAIRE Method is something that I found by trial and error over a number of years and realised I was doing after a while and it's just the best way I found to make decisions with your practitioner team so that you can get the results you want faster for your child. And the intent is to obviously apply the resources you have, whether it's time, money, energy to the best places at that point in time.

So the RAIRE Method is within the Knowledge Vault so that you can take the information that you're learning and then apply it to your particular circumstances with your child. The Knowledge Vault membership, the annual membership is normally $97. We have a promotion through the end of the year to receive the Knowledge Vault membership for $67 for the year coming up. So if you'd like to join us for all the things we're gonna be doing in the Knowledge Vault in the future next year, I encourage you to take advantage of that special offer as well.

15:37 Tara Hunkin:
So moving on to gifts over a hundred dollars. So the first one I'm gonna mention to you is HeartMath. HeartMath is a tool that can be used to help your child build resilience and it really helps them build their body's ability to manage all forms of stress. And it's a biofeedback tool that is used along with an app.

And in particular the one that I recommend is Inner Balance Lightning for an iPhone or an Android phone. And there's even a wired version, meaning you can use wired headphones as opposed to having to expose yourself or your child to Bluetooth if you prefer not to. They do have a Bluetooth version for those of you that struggle to get their children to do things with wires.

But basically it is just a device that goes on to clip the ear and goes onto the body that then interacts with the phone to allow us to see the impact of our heart rate. So in particular it's measuring heart rate variability, the tool itself and the work that they've done and the research they've done around HeartMath is about developing heart rate coherence and the hypothesis around there is that the pattern and degree of stability and the beat to beat changes in the heart encodes information over macroscopic time scales, which can influence cognitive performance and emotional experience. And that's according to a study that was done in 2009.

Heart rate coherence is essential in stress management and sustained behaviour change. So this is why a tool like this and the biofeedback of seeing what's going on with the heart rate when your child is working with this tool and helping them control that because they can see what's happening is really powerful and essential. Many practitioners will tell you that they have used this with their patients or clients that it can be extremely helpful and to teach you, I mean anyone in your family can use it. That's what's so great about a gift like this. Again, it can be for the whole family. It will teach you all how to shift from stress and frustration to balance and resilience with the real time feedback based on your own heart rhythm. So again, you can go to the show notes for a link to the HeartMath tool.

18:01 Tara Hunkin:
The next gift over a hundred is, I keep on saying this, one of my personal, all the ones in here because I really love them, the Rezzimax Tuner. So I actually have just recorded an interview with the inventor of the Rezzimax Tuner Pro and that will be coming out in the new year,

but I didn't want to not include it in the gift guide cause I hadn't had a chance to publish that podcast yet. This is a vibration tool that initially was developed to help people with chronic pain, aside from the fact that it is gonna do things to also help your child. It also can help you relieve pain from headaches, jaw pain, neck pain, sinus pain, TMJ problems. In the end, the biggest thing that it can do is again help create and develop good vagal tone. So the ability to switch between the sympathetic and parasympathetic state.

It also is a tool that a number of functional neurologists now use in their newer rehab programs to wake up and stimulate the nervous system and help with things like proprioception and many other things as well.

You will hear all about that on the podcast episode that we're gonna be releasing in the new year,but I didn't, like I said, I didn't want to have you miss out on the opportunity to actually pick this up as a gift for you or your family. It is a gift over a hundred dollars cuz it is a more expensive gift, but it is completely worth it.

I've had one since 2019 and we use it every day in our household. There is a link to get your tuner. If you use the code thrive20 at checkout, you actually will get 30{4537a52abafa24f75931b694e3f6d1d9b0beb5896e18e49b3141987b78b41d96} off until the end of this year. So until December 31st, 2022. But even after that deadline has passed, you can get 20{4537a52abafa24f75931b694e3f6d1d9b0beb5896e18e49b3141987b78b41d96} off regularly by using the code thrive20.

20:00 Tara Hunkin:
The next product and the last product that I'm gonna talk to you about in the gifts over a hundred dollars is Brain Tap, the Brain Tap headset. This is a product that I came across back again and actually funnily enough, the Rezzimax Tuner Pro is something I came across at the same conference but a different year. The International Association for Functional Neurology and Rehabilitation Conference in 2018, I came across the Brain Tap headset.

I was really sceptical about what it could do, especially since I was gonna test it out in a conference environment when I was in this vendor hall. Lots of bright fluorescent lights, loud noises, I was just lying down in a reclining lawn chair to use it. But what I was amazed about it, what the Brain Tap does, it's a headset with a visor on it and it's using light and sound to stimulate the brain in different ways depending on which of the programming on the app that you use while you're using the headset.

With the headset in terms of the ear pieces, there is also light in the ear. So again, they're using acupuncture or acupressure points within the ears and using red and blue light reflection into the ear on those points to further stimulate. They also use things like binaural beats along with guided meditations and music. So using sound, light, acupressure points to stimulate the brain and induce positive change.

So when I did try it out, I was amazed at how I immediately relaxed in an unfriendly environment to be testing something like that. I immediately was sold on the product and purchased one for our family. It does get used all the time as well. It is an incredibly helpful thing for sleep from our experiences, again, for relaxation and many other things.

The Brain Tap headset, it is a high ticket gift, but it is one of those things that we can all within our families enjoy. So again, I encourage you to come to the show notes and check out the links that we have on this gift guide. I hope that gives you some ideas. I know that you're probably overwhelmed with shopping emails right now, but I just thought it would be good to provide you a set of products that you could buy that you could also then use with your family in your journey over the next year.

22:27 Tara Hunkin:
Hope this has been helpful and I look forward to seeing you all again in the new year. Bye for now. So that's a wrap. Thanks for joining me this week on My Child Will Thrive. I'm so passionate about giving you the tools and information you need to help your child recover, and as they say, it takes a village. So join us in the My Child Will Thrive Village Facebook group where you can meet like-minded parents. And stay up to date on everything we have going on at My Child Will Thrive. This is Tara Hunkin and I'll catch you on the next podcast or over at mychildwillthrive.com.