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Dad Joke: What's a plumber's favourite vegetable? A leek!

“It’s just a bit tight.”

“That area is a bit stuck.”

I used to say this ALL the time to parents and, to be fair, it always felt like good communication. I was telling the mom what I was finding with her child. This was good, this was important …this set me up to fail.

Let me explain. When you describe something as tight or stuck, you’re telling a mechanical story. You’re saying that: “there is a thing that isn’t moving, I will move it, and then the problem will be solved.”

Like a blocked sink, a rusty hinge. It’s stuck, I unstick it, that must fix it! And if that’s the story you create, what happens when the baby comes back next week and it isn’t fixed? Now you’re either the chiro who didn’t fix it properly, or the chiro who needs to keep “unsticking” it. Neither of those sound great.

The reality is we are not plumbers or door fitters. We are not freeing up jammed joints or unclogging systems. We are working with a developing nervous system. And nervous systems don’t get “unstuck” - they adapt, they organise, and they calibrate. That process takes time, and the language we use needs to reflect that.

When we improve movement at a joint, we are not fixing that joint. We are influencing afferentation, changing the quality of information going into the system. That shift in input gives the nervous system an opportunity to reorganise movement, improve symmetry, reduce protective tone, and expand variability.

But that doesn’t happen instantly. It unfolds. This matters even more in paediatrics. Babies are not “tight in the neck” in the same way a mechanical system gets restricted. They are expressing a preferred pattern. They are showing you how their system is organising itself. When we reduce that to “tight or stuck” we miss the bigger story and we unintentionally shrink the parent’s understanding of what’s really going on.

This week, rather describe what you actually see. Instead of saying something is tight, explain that the baby has found a position that feels easier and is using it more than we’d like. Instead of saying something is stuck, mention that there’s reduced movement in an area and that this can influence how the body organises itself overall. The difference is subtle, but it completely changes expectations.

When parents understand that change is a process, that the nervous system needs time, repetition, and the right input, they stop expecting instant fixes and start looking for progress instead.

Words shape expectations. Expectations shape experience. And experience determines whether families stay, refer, and trust what you do. So, when the words “tight” or “stuck,” make their way into your brain ...pause. You’re not unclogging a drain. You’re helping a nervous system learn something new. And that’s a very different story.

Chat Soon

Mike

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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