Kids don't always know a healthy body feels no pain

When children are young it's often a hand-wringing, heart-wrenching guessing game when it comes to their health. They can't articulate what is going on with them.  They often don't know. A stomachache could be an illness or they could just need to go to the bathroom. Something they don't realize until after you've made them go potty.

And then sometimes something happens which breaks a parent's heart. You find out your kid has been having pain for a long time–years even–and they never told you. They weren't trying to hide it.

They just didn't realize it wasn't normal to feel that way.

This can certainly happen if a child was born with a food intolerance and they have always been eating that food. No one knew not to feed it to them. They don't know what life is like without eating it. So perhaps, to them, a stomachache before bed is just how everyone feels? Perhaps, to them, having a head that hurts sometimes is what being in a body is like for everyone?

But food intolerances are just one thing. It's just an example. Every body is different and every child is different and there are so many things out there that can cause a body to ache.

So tell your children that feeling no pain is the way it's supposed to be.

Check in with them.

Does anything feel tight or uncomfortable? Does anything take their mind off their fun? Is there something that are having to try to forget about? Find different ways of asking so that a thinker or a feeler, an abstract or a concrete thinker can identify with the question. 

Try.

Try again.

Not every day. And not from a place of worry. But often enough with gentle loving inquiry so that checking in with the body becomes a natural part of life. Tuning in. Breathing in. Breathing out.

If something is amiss you might not uncover everything or even anything (kids are still kids who are still learning how to BE) but you have at least started a dialogue that will be with them as they get older and they become more aware of their bodies and how they feel in them.

It seems obvious that a healthy body feels no pain, but to a child it might not be obvious.

And now they can know.