Your Kid Isn’t “Bad,” Their Reflexes Are Just Running The Show

What if your child’s “behavior” is actually their nervous system asking for help? We sit down with Kim Hazleton, pediatric OT and founder of Sense Able Brain, to unpack how retained primitive reflexes, sensory processing challenges, and modern classroom demands collide—and what families can do to restore calm, focus, and joy. Kim’s journey from accounting to three decades in pediatrics gives her a rare blend of rigor and heart, and her lens is refreshingly clear: behavior is communication, not defiance.

We dig into the brain’s “wild garden” phase at birth and the natural pruning that should follow. When stress, limited movement, or fast-tracked academics disrupt that pruning, reflexes linger and pull on posture, attention, and emotion. Kim explains how to spot the signs—from after-school meltdowns to food aversions rooted in oral reflexes like suck-swallow-breathe and an overactive gag—and how targeted movement re-tunes the system. Expect practical takeaways you can use today: cross-crawl patterns, rotational play, heavy work, graded sensory input, and family-friendly regulation tools that fit real classrooms and busy homes.

We also share how collaboration across OT and chiropractic care speeds change by lighting up underused pathways and downshifting chronic fight-or-flight. Progress isn’t instant; reflexes can take years to integrate, especially when a child has leaned on them for a long time. That’s why Kim built Sense Able Brain Academy—an enrichment space where kids practice new skills in small groups, outdoors and indoors, with supportive coaching that helps them swap defensive habits for adaptive ones. Walk away with hope, a plan, and a deeper understanding of how movement rewires the brain for learning, sleep, and everyday ease.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life Podcast. Great guest today and friend and colleague down the road, Kim Hazleton from Sense Able Brain. Uh, we've known each other for a while. Thanks for being on the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Thank you for inviting me.

Kim’s Path From Accounting To OT

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Yeah, we kind of overlap a lot with our patient base with kids. We both have a passion on helping them and we both influence the brain. And I thought this is we should have been my first, you should have been my first uh guest on the podcast. I mean, but here we are, and we'll do we'll do more too about this because questions come in and uh we'll dive deep. What got you into all this? How did you start this? Um yeah, where did it start?

Sensory Processing And Early Pushback

SPEAKER_01 1:00

So funny. Um, I growing up, I really had no interest in kids, having kids, being around kids, babysitting, all of that. Uh, wanted to go into accounting. So I did. I spent my first 10 years out of high school getting an accounting degree and working in banks and credit unions and small business, but um really realized that I I missed having contact with people. And so I went into psychology, went back to school, was majoring in psychology. A friend told me about OT. I fell in love with the concept of OT and um went to my first uh pediatric field work and thought, oh my gosh, what have I been missing out on? These kids are amazing. I love working with them, I love seeing the progress that we can make. And so um switched my major to OT or uh switched my path in OT because I was going into hand therapy. So switched my path, uh was specialized in pediatrics, been doing it for 30 years now, and um realized that, you know, early on, uh so 30 years ago, when you would say something about sensory integration or sensory processing, um it was like talking about snake oil. And I was ridiculed and I was ostracized from the OT community a lot. Um, but I knew that there there was something to it. And so that was the path I took. And I've we've specialized in sensory processing, sensory integration, and we've taken that a step further because a lot of times we don't know why children's sensory systems are struggling. And in OT school, we're taught about primitive reflexes and kind of how they relate to stroke patients and children with cerebral palsy, but not how they relate to children with anxiety and how they relate to children with learning disabilities and communication disorders and feeding disorders and things like that. So we've gone even deeper and realized that a lot of these sensory issues stem from reflexes that are either never integrated or have become reactivated. Then we took it a step further and started trying to figure out well, what is holding on to these reflexes? And a lot of times we've realized that um even if trauma or stress was not the reason that the reflexes didn't integrate, it prevents them from fully integrating. So I know this is probably way more of a longer answer.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

No, this is how we're gonna go on this podcast. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Yeah, but we go ahead.

Primitive Reflexes And Root Causes

SPEAKER_00 3:31

What what are kids what are kids' um conditions with with this stuff that you've been seeing? What are they coming in with?

School Demands, Stress, And Movement Loss

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Yeah, so it's funny, a lot of them are coming in without diagnoses. And so we're seeing kids that are just struggling with behaviors or they've been kicked out of three or four preschools, or their private school is not a good fit for them because they can't, they they do great all day, they mask, they regulate in school, they hold it together, but come home and collapse. And the parents are just realizing this is just too much stress on them. And, you know, some of it could be that we're changing the way we're educating children. We are not treating, we we're putting a lot of stress on children with the tests and the demands. And, you know, I didn't learn cursive until second or third grade, and now we're teaching it to kindergartners and multiplication. We're teaching that earlier. And we're not giving kids an opportunity just to develop those neural connections, the developmental process that they have to go through. We're adding stress on top of that. We're eliminating the freedom of movement. They have to sit in chairs all day long, and movement very often is um in a natural developmental state, is what helps them make these connections. And so we ask them to sit still for six hours a day, and they don't get to develop these little brain pathways. And then we say, okay, now perform for us. And so they are stressed and they're anxious and they're traumatized. You know, they are traumatized. There is a chronic trauma there, and it it prevents them from moving forward. All of this prevents them from moving forward.

The Brain’s Garden And Pruning Analogy

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Yeah. So um, sensory, motor, these can be mild things, they can be behavioral, they can be, they can be everything, uh, physical, mental, emotional. These can all be ways, and it's all the brain. And both you in the PT world, me and the Cairo in the medical world, medical doctors, we're all taught the same fundamentals as far as pathology. And when you you spoke about reflexes, we do reflexes every single day from birth all the way to my 92-year-old patients. And we're looking, we're taught medically for pathology. If you have hyperreflexia or no reflex, then we have some type of nerve involvement, and it's our job as doctors to go back and figure out how to diagnose this. And that's pretty much it. Then you're left to go into the world and find pathology. But as you and I have both experienced over 20, 30 years doing this, is that these reflexes tell us a lot about how the brain works. Why does a child have hyper or hyporeflexia? And why do they have primitive reflexes that should be gone by three, six, or nine months? This is what Kim is talking about is, and I teach you like this, and tell me if it's wrong. Um, your brain in utero is completely developing like a wild garden. It's it's growing every plant imaginable, every weed imaginable because it's trying to grow into a full human. You're born, and what the brain needs to do now is adapt to the real world. And what happens is I call it a pruning. It's a it's a natural pruning the brain goes through by 12 months of age, by by year one. We should have a pruned and nice rose garden of a brain that can then be uh damaged by the world in real life, right? Uh, but but what ends up happening is if we don't prune properly, we're left with pathways that we call primitive reflexes that should be gone, like the toe flex in the baby that should be gone by six months, or the the startle reflex. I see 40-year-old men come in. I touch their back with the activator, full full startle mode. I'm like, wow, you have a retained reflex from when you were two months old. Yeah, and then we get into a whole brain thing there. So I think that's I don't know if you like that analogy or not, but that's how I teach parents and families. It's it's a garden, and we now have to go back in there. And it's through motion, through motion. Now the next question is going through all our listeners' mind is like, well, what does that mean? What do I what do we do? It's through proper motion and recalibrating the left and right brain. And there's many ways to do this, right? OT, I think, even as a P as a Cairo, don't tell anyone I said this, is the best way to do this. It's through motion and guided motion. And that's exactly what you do. And that's why I think we we work really well together, helping all these families. Um, and you do your thing. So the the assessment is, I think, similar, and then the treatment's a little different. So you're trying to influence through motion, and I'm trying to influence through removing the interference and pruning a lot of the a lot of this interference that we call it through the the central nervous system only. You're working with peripheral, you're working with the full body to do this cross crawl pattern, climb pattern, spinning left, spinning right, all these patterns that we're supposed to do. I mean, all of it. We're doing all this stuff too. And we're doing it on vibration plate and with lasers, like speech here, motor, you know, we're here and in the back. We're trying to light up the brain. We're trying to use as many modalities as we can to do this to help kids prune and regulate better. There you go. There's my two-minute speech on the brain. Uh to catch to catch all the parents up that are listening so that we can move forward and get into the exciting stuff. So when you're working with these kids and families, uh, what do you find the biggest uh we'll talk about rewards at the end, but the biggest struggles that the kids come in with that make it difficult as a provider to help them? But you do, you end up working around it. The most difficult thing that the kids do when they come in, whether it's behavioral, sensory, motor, whatever it is.

Modalities And Cross-Disciplinary Care

Behaviors As Communication

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Well, uh, usually the primary complaint when families bring their children to us is behavioral. And so, but we recognize behavior as communication. So we don't try to change the behavior, we try to help them adapt and provide us communication that helps us figure out exactly what the culprit is. And again, we're looking at movement patterns, we're looking at sensory motor responses to see exactly where we don't have that adaptive and functional neural patterning so that we can help train the brain to do a better job in the environment that they have to be in. So, for instance, these children that are being kicked out of three and four preschools, it's it's not that the preschools are wrong, it's that the child is not developmentally ready to be in that environment and perform to the standard that they are requiring. So they may be um having a meltdown when they have to sit down and eat because they are they're food aversive or something like that. And then those meltdowns are causing the daycares and the preschools to say they're just not appropriate for us. Well, why are they food aversive? We would go in and say, okay, yes, they've got they're having meltdowns. When are they having them? During snack time or during mealtime. Well, are we having problems with feeding? Yes, we are. Why are we having problems with feeding? Well, maybe we have a suck swallow breathe reflex that's not working properly or a gag reflex that's overreactive and the child doesn't feel safe to eat. So we'll go in and start looking at these reflexes and the sensory motor patterns and the ability to volitionally coordinate movement. So can they be in control of their movement and coordinate it to be able to meet the needs of the environment? So a lot of times we, you know, we would we would recommend to some parents maybe we need to change the environment, at least for a period of time. But if we can't or we're not going to, then let's adapt the child and adapt the family so that they can meet more of the demands of the environment. And so we teach the families as well. This is how to help your child be able to do what they need to do in the in the classroom, in the school.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Perfect. Yes. So those that's the challenges, the most common ones that uh parents come in with. Then the reward. I mean, when when kids go through this, I mean, of course, families are are um ecstatic, but for you as a provider, the reward that you see uh with it, you know, how does that progress? Because this doesn't happen in a week. No, parents are working with us for a long time to help this. It's the brain, it takes it takes time. Right. Uh the reward process. I love talking with providers about that. How does that work for you guys as as they climb and achieve the next levels?

Feeding Struggles And Safety Reflexes

Coaching Families And Environmental Fit

SPEAKER_01 11:37

It's uh well, we we actually so when families come in to see us, we give that we give them a goodie bag. The first visit that they come in, the evaluation visit, they get a goodie bag, and there are two books in there. And I wrote both of the books, and I'm they're self-published on Amazon, but the parents get them for free. And the I actually have them here. I forgot I had them. So this one, Calm Down, Child. I wrote this in 2020 when the world shut down and we had families calling us saying we're all melting down, and I forget all the I forgot all of the things that you taught us. And I literally had families, I would talk to them on the phone and say, I gave you videos. You watched me do this, you have videos, and they're like, we just can't think. And they were asking, you know, how do we regulate in this environment? And so I said, I'm gonna write it all down and send you a PDF. And I realized we had so many regulation techniques that we use. There's over 50 techniques in this book. Um, so I wrote it all down and it turned into a book. And so I published it on Amazon and it we give it away to families for free. Um so one of the first things we do is we educate the families. And when families start to go, aha, I see how I can help my child. Oh, that is so rewarding because very often the families just feel lost, they don't know what to do. Um, and then the second thing, the second book that we give them, I have this one here too, is called Neuroroots. And this is just a um kind of a workbook, like a follow-along workbook for families when they come in, and this is the path that we take with your child. And we have a diagram in there of the reflex path, and we kind of show them, you know, a lot of the reflexes develop and integrate kind of together. And so we've got this little group of reflexes that are connected here, and then this little group here, and they kind of integrate all at the same time so that they understand when we're working on these reflexes why we're working on some of these together, but we also know some of them are connected, and we'll say we have to address this first so we can address this one up here that's really holding back maybe the ability of the eyes to track left and right for reading skills. So we are we are helping this family see this as they are watching their child get better, and they're feeling more empowered to be able to help their child at home and to help the school support the child while we're changing these neural pathways. So it's it's a wonderful and amazing. I love what we're able to do.

Hope, Lifelong Impact, And Adult Patterns

SPEAKER_00 14:04

To teach them, I mean, the hope, the hope what parents get when they first come in for our office is at least is I'm like, your child is gonna catch up. We we all do. We just want them to enjoy being a four-year-old. We want them to enjoy and adapt to being a five-year-old because by the time they're 18, their brain's going to catch up and 25, their brain's still developing, they're gonna work around the pruning, which I think that's why the 40-year-old that comes in my office and still has the the startle reflex, they've just live the rest of their life with that. How that affects them in life is through behavior, too. They get startled very easy, they don't adapt to stress very easy, and they're anxious. And when we work on that, they're like, I for the first time in 20 years, I'm sleeping more than three hours, right? So, so the brain we adapt, we adapt. And that's what we're trying to do with our kids is get them what they need early so that they can enjoy being the first grader and the third grader and the fifth grader. So that I that's the reward I see with all this, which is fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

And you know, you know better than I do that when these reflexes remain active, it creates asymmetries, musculoskeletal asymmetries. So then you end up with back issues and neck issues and shoulder issues and sciatic joint issues. And so if we can get these things regular or integrated much earlier in life and not have to end up as an adult with um asymmetric tonic neck reflex, which is pulling your your your body in you know a certain pattern, um, then we can possibly prevent at least that cause of musculoskeletal issues. So it's, I mean, it's it's more long-term reach than just being able to stay in preschool or just being able to learn to read. It's it's like you said, it truly is a lifelong issue.

Clinic Experience And Family Involvement

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I I think uh parents, I mean, my parents didn't put me in any type of physical barrier as a kid. I mean, I wish I had access to that as a kid, but we parents are well versed at knowing that traumas early on can lead to lifelong things and the negative stresses can. I think when it comes to positive stress, we think maybe, you know, sleep and uh and nutrition mainly come to most parents these days is you know, we got to put in good fuel and and proper sleep. But the little things that we think about as well, posture and how we hold ourselves and and taking care of our brain. That's just that's a newer thing. I think that's why we were you were ridiculed 30 years ago. I was ridiculed 20 years ago, is because they're like the brain's the brain, it's just uh it's just a sponge in our skull and there's nothing you can do about it. And now the research is completely different. We were taught, I mean, uh the genetics I learned in 2001 in college, it no longer is taught anymore because it's completely obsolete. And uh we were taught there was uh 34 uh billion cells in the human body, there's just 11 trillion cells in the nervous system. So it just shows you where we're going here and how much we just do not know. Uh, it's it's super great. When you work with kids, the experience that they go through, describe that. What is it? Not a typical, because there's no such thing as a typical. This is not a cook and cutter program. It's what's the typical experience that they go through. I mean, not just the openness of your office, not just the welcoming environment and the playful environment that you've created for safe uh child care, but what is their experience? What do you what's the feedback you get from parents?

Timelines, Neuroplasticity, And Patience

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Yeah, well, so my the our office is um the experience that the families and the children get to uh walk into is very intentional. I've said for years, I want this for the kids, I want them to feel like they're walking into grandma's house. So the colors are light and welcoming and calming, um, lots of natural um elements to it. And the families get embraced the soon, not physically embraced unless they want it, but um, everybody is welcome. And we want the families to join the treatment sessions as much as possible so that we can get them involved. They get on the balls, they get in the swings, they get on the mats. And I'm talking about the parents, siblings. We want everyone in there as much as possible, as long as we can manage it. Now, if it becomes a distraction to the child, we will say we need a few minutes, you know, to be able to work with them alone. But I want this to feel like going to grandma's house. I want it to feel like our clinicians are the aunts and uncles of the child, the sisters of the parents. We want to take a sisterly sibling approach and say, we're gonna treat you like you're our little sister, we're going to teach you the things that you don't know yet. Um, we're gonna hold your hand, we're gonna walk with you through this, and we're going to love your child and help your child progress. And I want to come back to something you said earlier where you said something that this is not a quick fix. And I think it's important to recognize that for the reflexes that we work on at Sensi Able Brain, we'll work on reflexes that should take up to three years to fully integrate. So we are, if it's if these reflexes take three years to fully integrate in a typical neurodevelopmental pattern, and we are working with an eight-year-old, that means we're working on reflexes that are five years behind. And if we've been using these reflexes for five years longer than we should have, and we're just working around them, it takes a long time to get the brain to decide that it's going to be willing to use a different pattern. It digs in and wants to hold on to some of these patterns because it's been using them for so long.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Yes, great point. I mean, that that's the truth of this. I mean, it takes a long time to get there. Yes, we have our initial phase of care where we're trying to make and influence the brain as quickly as possible to get change in behavior, but the brain's neuroplastic and it takes time. And and kids work a lot faster. I make, I mean, I'd rather catch you at eight than at you know 16. Um, so absolutely, you're you're absolutely right about that. So the time frame on that is patience, learn as much as you can. A lot of this can be done at home, of course. You're learning, it's it's something that's take on none of this is uh magic stuff that you have to come into our office for. Um, we just try and facilitate it in a linear manner, try and take something very non-linear, like the brain, and try and move it in a linear pattern.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Right.

Sense Able Brain Academy

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Uh yeah, it's complicated, but uh that's what we're here for is to use our expertise to help families move forward in the right way. Um, great. So we have the Sense Able Brain Center, and then we have the Sense Able Brain Academy. Yes. Uh tell us a little bit about the Academy.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Um, the Academy is an is an enrichment and learning center. It's it's sensory rich. We've got outdoor space that we can take the kids out and let them get fresh air and get in the dirt and you know, touch the weeds and and play in the grass and all of that. Um, it is where we are offering classes for children, neurotypical and neurodivergent children. The classes are small. Right now we've got a preschool class. Um, I say preschool class, it's a preschool enrichment program called Stepping Stones for three to five year olds. And then we've also got a wrestling basics class for eight to 12-year-old boys. Um, and that class has just exploded. That's been a very popular class for those boys. They love getting in there and just kind of, you know, roughhousing with each other, but they they get to do it with direction. So we have a wrestling coach and then his assistant, and um, and our wrestling coach is a two-time state champion wrestling coach. So uh he knows what he's doing, and he's he's also um coached other teams before. So um what we're doing with this, the well, how this came about is for years I've had families ask me to open a school. And I'm not interested in opening a school. I don't want to deal with all of that, but I do see the benefit of as our children that we're working with in the therapy, as they're getting more progressed and and they're they're catching up to their neurodevelopmental peers, age-appropriate peers, um, they need practice. They need, they need a chance to practice with a little bit of extra support, a little, you know, knowing eye watching them for some of their triggers and their some of the warning signs that they might be starting to dysregulate, and then reminding them hey, these are your compensatory techniques. You have the processing skills now, but now you need to stop using these behavior patterns that you've been using. And we're just going to support you with using more adaptive and functional behavior patterns in a typical learning environment. So again, it's it's a it's a smaller Environment, but it allows us to kind of redirect sometimes or to offer more support where somebody might need it until they don't need it anymore. So it's a really good transition from therapy to being able to go into some sort of learning environment.

Community, Next Steps, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Wonderful. Yeah, that's great. Kim is a mile and a half down the road from our office. We service the Lutz community here in North Tampa. Um, so if you're listening and you're struggling with your kids, reach out to Kim, start there because the direction is going to be absolutely wonderful on that. Uh, and maybe we'll see some Sense Able Academy wrestling champions down the road here in Florida. That'd be that'd be amazing. Um, very cool. Uh keep doing the work that you do is phenomenal. I'm gonna have you on the show again. We'll dive deeper into neurodivergence a little bit as well. Um, but this is a great introduction into what you do, what we do, and how we cooperate in the community to make the community better. So that's absolutely fantastic. Thank you for your time. Is there anything else you want to tell anyone?

SPEAKER_01 23:25

No, just thank you so much for letting me come on here and just share what we do. We absolutely love it, and we would love to see more families come in and get the help that they need.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Kim. Appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Thank you. I appreciate you as well.