Toolkit Tuesday: Yearly Protocol Planner

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 and 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.

2:08 Tara Hunkin:
Welcome back to the My Child Will Thrive podcast. I'm Tara Hunkin and I'm excited to have you here today so we can talk about a new segment we're going to help have here on the podcast every once in a while called Toolkit Tuesday.

So Toolkit Tuesday is to help introduce to you the tools that I have used, people that I have worked with have used, and also things that maybe parents are suggesting to us or other practitioners that they use to help their child. But first, what I would like to do is to introduce you to some of the tools that are in the free digital toolkit here at My Child Will Thrive.

They can all be found at mychildwillthrive.com/toolkit, all one word, and you can sign up for free and get access to all these digital tools that I'm going to be talking to you about on these Tuesday episodes. So without further ado, let's talk about one that I actually just went over in detail in a workshop I did for the members of the My Child Will Thrive Knowledge Vault. We had a planning workshop just this past week and the first tool that I talked about in that, as part of that planning workshop is one called the Yearly Protocol Planner.

If you're listening to this on the podcast, I just wanted to let you know that you can see what I'm talking about if you go to our My Child Will Thrive YouTube channel, or you'll be able to see it on our Instagram feed on our Instagram TV channel as well. So you can go there to see these sides, but they will also go beyond the My Child Will Thrive website under this podcast episode. So without further ado, what is the Yearly Protocol Planner? It is a one page calendar format that I have liked to use.

Actually it was introduced to me through something unrelated to my child for business planning, and I actually find it incredibly helpful. And so to the people that I've worked with to help them get a big picture, one page view of what our plans that we would like to have, but also to help us determine whether or not the plans we have are going to fit into our life as a whole.

So if you, again, if you're listening to this, I'm going to try and describe it as best I can to you, but I really do encourage you to hop on over to the website or YouTube or Instagram so you can see the slides for yourself.

5:07 Tara Hunkin:
So the Yearly Protocol Planner, like I said, is a one page calendar and what it does is it lays out each month, right next to each other. So instead of seeing 30 days on one page, typical monthly calendar views, it lines up well, first of all, it lines up all the weekends in each of the month and then the months go horizontally across the page.

So the days of the week of the month. So each month is a line item on this page, lining up the weekends and making them really obvious. And the reason why this is important is because it gives us a visual representation of things that we're planning on doing with our children. But what I always recommend people do first is put in what a lot of people like to refer to as the big rocks, the things that you know you have going on in your life that you must do, or that you do regularly at that time of year so that if you're thinking of taking on a new treatment or therapy, for example, you can see how those big rocks might interfere or in some cases present an opportunity to take on something new.

So for example, the first one that I do every year is put in any planned vacations or holidays or breaks that we have as a family or their school breaks if your children are in school or whatever they may be. And I highlight them in the same color across the blocks, the blocks of time in the particular month or weeks that they occur.

And what this does is for example, in the past, when we've taken on a new, let's say we were going to do some kind of therapeutic diet, we can see is this vacation time or a break from school? Is it an opportunity or is it some time that we're going to be traveling so we definitely don't want to take on any new treatments or therapies during that time?

The reason why this is so helpful is because often we have great ideas about what we want to take on with our kids, but we set ourselves up for failure, ourselves and our children and, or the therapists that we're working with because we haven't got the right amount, or we don't have the space or time or energy in our days or weeks or months to take something new on.

It also gives us an opportunity to lay out some of the bigger things that we need to think about if we're starting or stopping something, or it may be that you want to then mark off if you do regular lab testing of certain kinds with your children, like for example, if you do a comprehensive stool analysis to see how your child's gut health is doing and digestion and other things. When we do that type of testing, we have to stop taking certain supplements and certain digestive supports and probiotics in advance of doing that type of testing by a number of days, so this is a great place to then block that off and see how that might interfere with other things that you're doing.

So having this one page, big picture view of what all the things that are happening in your family's life over the course of a year is just a starting point. It's also something you can refer back to. It also is something we're going to talk about another tool later on that helps you evaluate and determine when you're going to reevaluate and maybe change or make a decision on a particular treatment or therapy. And this one page calendar tool can also help you make those decisions.

9:05 Tara Hunkin:
But also you can mark on this calendar when you should be re-evaluating, whether on a new therapy is working for you. Again, it helps bring the pieces together, all in one place. It also helps with friends and family so they can understand what you're doing with your child and what the expectations are if you're taking on something big and new that you want to put a lot of time and energy into, or if you want to schedule yourself a break, because I'm a big believer that there are some times in the course of our children's lives and the work that we're doing with them, that you do need to take a break as a family, necessarily from treatment or therapies if that makes sense for you and your child at that point in time so you can schedule those breaks in.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs that we had as a family came after an extended break from therapy, because sometimes the child is ready for that break and also it gives their bodies and minds an opportunity to integrate a lot of the work that you've already been doing with them.

All those decisions, of course, I always recommend you make with your practitioner team that knows you and your child best and with all the information that you've gathered about what's going on with your child at this point in time.

10:31 Tara Hunkin:
So that's it. That is the tool for this Tuesday that I wanted to share with you. And I call it the Yearly Protocol Planner, and it can be found in the, My Child Will Thrive Toolkit, and you can find that toolkit at mychildwillthrive.com/toolkit. All the tools are available there for free. There are everything from more tools like this one that helps you plan, track and make decisions for your child's treatments and therapies along with your practitioners.

There are also a lot of things like cheat sheets, summaries of therapeutic diets, checklists for you to help you review some of the information that you've been gathering, all these things. One of our most popular ones is our primitive reflex integration cheat sheet that's there and our mitochondrial dysfunction cheat sheet. So they are all there for you to help you on your journey with your child.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode and if you have, I would love for you to share it with others. And also if you can take the time to rate or review the podcast on your platform of choice, where it's available, because that is how we are seen and heard by more parents like yourselves that are looking to help their children thrive. Have a great week!

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.