Low Back Pain in a 2-Year-Old?
Learning about pain
Here’s a little scenario about the experience of learning pain in a two-year-old child. I just want to give you the description or observation of something I noticed in the clinic whilst they observed someone else receiving treatment.
I was treating my mother-in-law and she had some neck pain and lower back pain. She'd been coming to the clinic for a number of weeks, and her 2-year-old granddaughter had been observing the physio sessions that she had been receiving.
She would sit in the corner of the room, draw, chatter or maybe just wandering around the clinic room as kids do sometimes poking and pressing things.
It's fascinating to wonder what's going on in their heads at that time.
Going to physio
My mother-in-law said to me that before this particular appointment, she mentioned to Erica she was, ‘Going go to see uncle Drew to get some treatment'. At that time Erica was playing with the toys or whatever she was doing, and as she recognized where she was going to go, she put a hand on her back and said oh my back's hurting now.
My mother in law laughed and I laughed when I heard.
It is fascinating to think that once she had made the association with coming to see me, and getting attention, care, or being looked after, she understood behaviours associated with that.
If you think of the world through a two-year-old child's viewpoint they only see it through their eyes, it's hard for them to interpret anything else other than a viewpoint that fulfils their needs only.
So she's making the association with treatment at the physio clinic, going to see uncle Drew and getting attention, with pain. Having pain validates getting that attention. It actually might be a way for her to get some attention, so she says, ‘Oh my back's bad!’, and she has no real concept of what that pain is or what it means.
Learning Before School Even Starts
She has no idea how to read or write and her learning is all through observation and experience.
The point of this tale is to demonstrate how easy it is for young children to follow the patterns and behaviours of adults. They do that with most of the things they learn in those early years of life. Learning about pain is part of the process and it is acquired before the child even gets to school.
They learn through observation they see how other people are attended to when they're in pain.
We've all maybe feigned pain occasionally and normally that behaviour is checked and corrected and we’re told, ‘Don't cry wolf’. It's always important to check pain out, understand the meaning of that pain and usually as soon as you get the meaning quite often the pain goes quickly.
Pain is a Signal
It’s a signal to attend to yourself, but if it's learned as a signal to get attention from others, then it is being presented as something that it isn't. That can present a danger for the development of that person.
Normally we all get that adjustment which means we do not cry wolf and we understand pain. We understand the meaning behind most of the pains, but sometimes with persistent pain we miss that meaning or we misinterpret it.
It can lead to the ongoing experience of that pain when if you could get the true meaning of it, you would be able to let it go.
When you look at the academic side of pain and the neurochemical and neuroscience bits and pieces of pain it's interesting to those who are interested. When but it's really fascinating just to observe that two-year-old child, seeing her interpret and express her understanding of pain in a really natural way.
Every day is a school day and we're all constantly learning.
Learning after school
Often we think that beyond school our ideas about pain are fixed.
Every question you ask and every answer you get changes the reality of your experience. Understand more about pain to change the reality of yours.
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