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Dad Joke: What kind of phones do ants use? Microphones

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Your face (zygomae, maxillae and mandible to be precise) is one of the most malleable parts of the human anatomy. An arm is and arm, a leg is a leg but a face…everyone’s is slightly different…because everyone has been through something slightly different.

As countless of the books on the subject say, if the adult face morphology was entirely up to genetics then the upper, middle and lower thirds would all show similar change over time but it is the lower third (zygomae, maxillae and mandible), which is under many more variable stresses (eating, speaking, breathing etc), that shows much more variation than the other two thirds. And that means we are in charge of growing our own face. Form Follows Function.

And it can grow into many variations, but if conditions are right and the environmental variables are what the anatomy expects…then the development becomes optimal, leaving space for the airways, growing the palate flat to allow space for all 32 teeth and creating a jawline that Henry Cavill would be proud of.

One look around your local town will show that you are not (unfortunately) surrounded by superman jaws and full sets of pearly whites…but why not…if facial development is up to our function…then what are we doing wrong?

Paahlenty!

Growing into the genetic potential of your face boils down to 3 ideas

1. What you eat and how you eat it

2. What you breathe and how you breathe it

3. Has your swallow matured

A good snippet to share here is when baby is being weaned. Using a spoon to feed puree vs allowing baby feed themselves with their hands and testing their jaws against tougher stuff can be an easy change with huge benefit.

Infants don’t realize that they need to wait for the spoon to leave their mouths before swallowing which pushes them into creating a compensated suck where the tongue stays low under the spoon instead of progressing to the adult type swallow which aids in building the maxilla.

Also, working on harder foods grows the length of the ramus of the mandible and ends up creating more airway space for future.

This, in between allergic diets, dust, soft foods, sugary foods, mouth breathing and dummies amongst others

If you would like to take a deeper dive…we’ve just covered this topic in depth in the masterclass series and created a road map for our chiropractors to give guidance to their paediatric patients and parents on what choices they can make today that will maximize their outcomes tomorrow.

If you are interested in adding this to your skill set you will find it under “Latest” in our masterclass replay section. It will also feature in our upcoming Cranial Kinetics for Kids Seminars in Guildford Surrey, UK and Amsterdam Netherlands.

Chat soon

Mike

• 1 & 2 Nov 2025 - Management of the Neonate, Newcastle, UK​
• 15 & 16 November - Amsterdam - Cranial Kinetics for Kids ​
• 29 & 30 November - Surrey, UK - Cranial Kinetics for Kids​

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info@connectedpaediatrics.com
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Connected Paediatrics – Dr Mike Marinus is a registered paediatric chiropractor treating babies and children and helping chiropractors learn effective paediatric techniques that they can use in their practice