If you have ever watched a horse or other animal give birth, it can be surprising how graceful and quick birth can be when compared with our experience coming into the world. The difficulty we experience is a result of the size of our skull. The evolution of our brains has resulted in a tripling in size of the Cranium since our path diverged from our Chimpanzee relatives 6 million years ago. Human birth is pushing against the limits of what is physically possible, as any of our mothers will attest to*. As the neonate’s head is pushed against the pelvis, the skull bones momentarily fold inward to squeeze through the pelvic opening. Once through, the newborn’s skull bones should flex back to their proper positions. This compression obviously has no lasting ill effects and may very well initiate reflexes that assist with surviving being born – the experience is part of what makes us human.
Difficulties arise when the cranial bones do not fully return to their prior relationship. It is common to find one bone overlapping another, or two bones jammed tightly together, inhibiting any movement between them. Forceps or suction deliveries often create or compound these types of lesions. Lesions can create problems with vision or auditory processing, headaches, hormone imbalances, spinal alignment, learning difficulties, colic, emotional disturbances, and a host of other issues. Children will sometimes try to self-correct lesions by head banging or very rough behavior like running into walls or dropping their entire weight on their knees in an apparent effort to unstuck and reset the alignment of the cranial bones.
The younger the child the quicker it usually is to re-align the bones of the skull. Because of the soft spots on the head only practitioners comfortable with infant anatomy and cranial techniques should attempt these adjustments. Adjustments can often take just a few minutes, sometimes with obvious changes in the outline of the head. Craniosacral therapy is a very effective modality for releasing these types of lesions.
I was recently working on a Russian child whose grandmother was present and she recognized the Cranial work I was doing with the child. She said that when she was a child the midwife in her village would often pick up an infant and check the bones of their skull to ensure that they were properly aligned. I was once again struck by the depth of folk wisdom in our heritages.
* The evolutionary success of our species hinges on our cognitive capacity. When the demand for elbow room for the growth in cognitive capacity of the cortex exceeded the ability of the human pelvis to pass that volume of the head, our ancestors adopted a novel strategy. We folded over the cortical layers, similar to an accordion. This enabled us to build in quite a lot more cortical horsepower. Although the brain constitutes 2% of total body mass, it consumes 20% of our oxygen and 25% of our available glucose. Therefore development of these systems also constrains further growth of the cortex. However, since we learned to arrive here through Cesarean surgery, one of these constraints has been lifted.