"They’ll Grow Out of It” Is a LIE: Ear Infections, Pacifiers, Mouth Breathing, Thumb Sucking & More with Dr. Ben Miraglia from Toothpillow | Ep. 127

0:00Mouth breathing is one of the most unhealthy things a child could do. It is going to turn every system in their body into a malfunctioning unit, but with a slow deterioration. You're getting an ear infection because you have a dysfunctional swallow. The pacifier might be the worst of all the choices, and here's why. Not only does the pacifier get between the tongue and the palate, it pushes the tongue low. So a pacifier, my hot take, my opinion is that a pacifier is probably like the greatest orthopedic device, but in the wrong direction. Welcome to the Learning to Mom podcast, the best motherhood podcast for first-time parents who want real practical guidance without the overwhelm.

0:38I'm so dang glad that you found this podcast. I'm Layla, the host, your official mom friend. Now, this podcast is all about informing you on pregnancy, postpartum, and early motherhood while keeping it simple and approachable. We tend to lean a little bit more toward screen-free play, barefoot outside adventures, intentional family time, and questioning the status quo, asking ourselves if that's really the right parenting choice or just today's cultural norm. So if that sounds like your vibe, you're going to love it here. Each expert guest brings their own perspective and background. So please note that the content presented in this podcast is designed for general educational purposes only and is not a substitute personalized professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

1:23Hi, Dr. Ben Moralia. Thank you so much for coming on today and welcome to the Learning to Mom podcast. Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to the time together. I think this is a topic that I think every single parent needs to listen to, but so many people will like see maybe the episode topic title and be like, I can skip this one. We need to be listening to this one because this is so important. I feel like it's the topics that you don't really hear enough about or that you think might be, oh, that's not for me. Like this is the stuff that really, really matters.

1:58I think this is going to be a really fascinating conversation. I'm pumped to learn from you. Yes, I would totally agree. There are a lot of ingredients that go into like, you know, having and raising a healthy baby, but this is one of the most important ones. Well, before we dive into just the importance of this conversation, can you give a little bit of backstory into who you are and also about Toothpillow? Yes, of course. My name, Dr. Ben Moralia. I have been practicing dentistry for 31 years. Over the last two decades, I have been doing growth and development for kids between three and 12 years old.

2:34Most people are familiar with when you're 11 or 12, you get braces. But I noticed over that time, all the kids who had braces, something was missing. And I'm watching these kids have braces from 12 to 14 years old. And I'm thinking to myself, this can't be the best there is because after they're done, the kids stop to wear on the retainer and they all start shifting back. So, well, that doesn't seem very stable. What's going on? And then the short story is I realized, oh, wait a second. The teeth are the symptom. We're treating the symptom late at age 12 or 14. Meanwhile, treating early is how you address the cause.

3:07We have crowded teeth and bad bites because the jaws are too small. The foundation isn't right. You got to work on the foundation. And what we're going to continue to talk about is what is the difference between treating early, growing the foundation, and then of course when we only treat the teeth late, we only get straight teeth temporarily. So you're telling me that if I just let my kid continue to like, there's no interference at an early age, that then they're going to have braces like automatically? Yes. It's almost unheard of that a child would grow up on their own, have their teeth go to place perfectly, and then have room for their wisdom teeth at 18 or 20.

3:44we recognize that, okay, we've got crowded teeth and bad bites coming in overwhelming majority of kids, but it's not as much about the teeth or the bite. It's what's going on with the foundation that delivers one step worse for our health because having crooked teeth certainly is a problem, but it's not the biggest one. We have the crooked teeth because our jaws are small, but the tiny issue going on underneath it all is that when the jaws are small, it affects our breathing and once we have trouble breathing through the nose we become a mouth breather so smaller jaws delivers difficulty breathing through the nose which your body compensates for and automatically opens the mouth and now the mouth is doing the breathing mouth breathing is one of the most unhealthy things a child could do it is going to turn every system in their body into a malfunctioning unit but with a slow deterioration but in order to be a healthy human being, it begins with nose breathing.

4:40When we talk about the difference between nose and mouth breathing, they're opposites. The mouth is not going to set up the air to be properly processed in the lung. And when we get a moment, I'll go into that detail of why it's so different. But mouth breathing is the first pathway children have to being unhealthy. And we want to avoid that at all costs. So my question is, how did we get to this point? because from an evolutionary standpoint, shouldn't our breathing and our teeth be perfect? You know how when you become a mom and suddenly you start paying attention to everything that you never paid attention to before?

5:16Like truly, I didn't give a flying crap about ingredients until I became a mom. It's just this realization that the choices you're making for you don't just impact you anymore. One day you look at your laundry detergent and you're just like, what is even in this stuff? And then when you actually look at the back of the bottle, it's a whole mess of chemicals, fragrance, dyes, and hormone disruptors that are just not the vibe. Especially when your baby is going to be wearing those clothes, sleeping in them, breathing them in while they sleep, living in them. That's why I made the switch to Truly Free for our family and I am never going back.

6:00It's a non-toxic refillable laundry system that I have no reservations about using in pregnancy, postpartum, or on my baby's clothes. There's no artificial fragrances, no dyes, no parabens. So if you've been meaning to switch to a cleaner detergent but don't know where to start, let me help you out and just get you pointed straight to the best so you don't have to waste your time with any of the others. Head to the link in the show notes below, use that link and my code learning to mom, all caps, all one word, which I have linked in the show notes again for you to get 30 % off. Yes. And so it is a, I'm very sad to report this.

6:43It is a self-inflicted wound. There's hundreds of years of anthropology research, all universally accepted as being basically undisputed fact where we got crowded teeth and bad bites from. Having crowded teeth and bad bites is super common today, but it's not normal and it's not genetic. But when we go back a few hundred years, there's little to no evidence of crowded teeth and bad bites in the human race anywhere. So when you look at, we'll say primitive, natural, isolated cultures, pre-industrial, pre-Western living, that's where it starts to trigger the change. So pre-industrial with the natural environment, what happens is breastfeeding is followed by a hard diet.

7:26If the food is tougher, your jaw muscles work a little harder. When the jaw muscles work a little harder, it promotes the bone growth. So you get fully grown jaws with all 32 teeth beautifully placed. No crowding, no bad bites. What's happening with the Western industrial model where all the teeth are crowded? Nobody can fit their wisdom teeth. We have a disaster of teeth. It's about the jaw growth. Soon as a culture starts to trade and advance a little bit towards the pre-industrial Western model, they start changing the softer foods. The early baby food starts popping in. Gerber, the baby food.

7:59Baby food is mush. Then we go once a farther and we have blenders. Even the best parents who are getting the right ingredients will puree it. When we transition from breastfeeding to an early soft diet, the softer food is like drinking. We don't need muscles for that. The jaw muscles are just like other muscles in the body. When you go to the gym and you work your muscles, they get stronger and they're then functioning properly. But if you stop going to the gym, they fade, right? So now the softer foods go in the mouth. The child's got a drinking swallow, not a chewing swallow. The musculature weakens.

8:36But when the muscles weaken from soft food, it only takes about two or three weeks of disusing the muscles with soft food to have them be weak enough that they don't contribute to bone growth. The crazy thing about a human being is that our form follows our function. If the jaw muscles are functioning properly, then the form of the bone will be there. It will grow. But another rule for a human is the hard tissue or bone yields to muscle. Bone yields to muscle. Muscle drives the growth of the bones. Our jaw bones are unique in that they're primarily going to grow by muscle activity. Our genes give us these jaw bones, but how they will grow is dictated by how our muscles are used.

9:16That's an environmental influence. The infant who gets an early soft diet is going to have weaker muscles, smaller jaws, and we'll start to see it right away in the teeth. And how does it look at age two or three? The baby teeth are together with no space. Okay. This is also fascinating. So now I want to get into why if we have a mouth breather, what that means and why that's an issue. Because so often I think we, oh, so cute, his little mouth is open, or oh, he's snoring, that's so cute. Why is that not good? Right, exactly. So just like you mentioned, mouth breathing, and a lot of people will think mouth breathing is the cause of the problem, but actually it's a little different perspective.

10:01With the early soft food comes the smaller jaws, and that makes it difficult to nose breathe, so we automatically start to mouth breathe. And what mouth breathing does is it makes our problem worse. Mouth breathing contributes to a lack of jaw development. But it's like you get the early soft food and now we have the small enough jaws to become a mouth breather. So the soft food is like the fire that's raging. Mouth breathing becomes more gasoline on the fire already burning. We are a mouth breather because of the underdeveloped jaws and they're there because of the soft food. But wouldn't another reason, like you can have a mouth breather from birth if there's tension in the jaw from birth.

10:36or a lip or a tongue tie. Yes. So we outlined what the primary cause of underdeveloped jaws and malbreathing is, which is the early soft food. But going down the list of things, the next item could be a level of malnutrition during pregnancy. Really? What happens is you have a developing baby in there, right? And the developing baby is part of the nutritional intake from the mom. So if a mom has nutritional or vitamin deficiencies, it can affect how the body's growing. And you can come out of the womb with slightly smaller jaws than humans used to have. It's easy to see how this can happen because the food source is so different today.

11:14A lot of things that we think are healthy aren't really healthy. And so it's not easy to get the proper vitamin supplementations and have the proper intake of food when it's so processed. It's treated with stuff. Things are sprayed on it. If it's added to, if it's processed or preserved for a while, it starts losing the nutritional value. So I didn't mean to say like malnourished, you're not getting any meals, meaning starving. or to say you're just living at fast food joints. We would understand that's a problem. We don't always see is what if the healthy foods are processed in a way that's getting ingredients to me or not getting me the vitamins that should be in that food product.

11:50Vitamin deficiencies can produce a developing baby that doesn't get all the way to full development and the jaws could come out a little smaller. Then we're mouth breathing from day one. And then on top of that list was what you mentioned, ties, lip tie, cheek tie, or tongue tie. Sometimes we have those. And if we have that, it makes it difficult for the muscles to be in the right spot to breathe through the nose. And all of a sudden we're mouth breathing from day one. And you were asking me, why is it so unhealthy? What's the big difference? There's a full difference between nose and mouth breathing.

12:16They are not similars. They are opposites. So the nose was built to breathe through. And a human being is an obligate nose breather. We have to breathe through our nose 24, 7, 365 to be healthy. So the nose, it's going to prepare the air. The nose does like 20 something functions to the air before it even gets to the lung. It's going to filter, warm, humidify, accelerate, clean that air so well, but then it also adds ingredients to the air. And it adds the ingredients to the air so that when the air gets to the lung, it gives the lung everything it needs to make the best exchange. We breathe in, the lung takes the good stuff in.

12:49We breathe out, the lung gets rid of the bad stuff. And the lung gets to do its job perfectly if we're breathing through the nose because now it's been prepared properly. So now we're going to have peak performance while nose breathing. Mouth breathing, there is no filter. When the air comes in our mouth, it goes directly to the lung without any preparation. It's like putting bad fuel into a high-performance race car. Your little Ferrari needs to breathe through their nose. Proper fuel, peak performance. But now we're going to breathe through our mouth? That's taking that Ferrari and putting an average low-grade run-of-the-mill gasoline that we would put in a truck somewhere on the road.

13:24And all of a sudden, you put a regular gasoline in a Ferrari and ask it to compete on the track over time using the wrong low-grade gasoline in a Ferrari, it's going to break down. It's a slow deterioration. And mouth breathing is a slow deterioration. That's the imbalance that throws the whole body off. Have you ever had an immediate connection with someone who says exactly what you've been thinking and then you feel like you're not so alone? Well, welcome to the Mom Club on Patreon, my friend, because that's how we roll there. Sure, you get the full unedited versions of every episode, monthly book club chats, but what really matters is the connection with me and other like-minded moms.

14:03The sigh of relief that comes from the realization of being like, oh my gosh, thank God it is not just me. So come join us at learningtomompodcast.com slash join. The link's in the show notes and I cannot wait to become real mom friends inside. So if we have a kid who's mouth breathing, what do we do? Yes. So once we recognize, oh, we see mouth breathing, whether it's day or night, it does not have to be 24-7, 365. A little amount of mouth breathing during the day or at night will start to produce symptoms downstream. So once we notice, okay, we've got some mouth breathing, there are a few things we can do.

14:40Number one is we try to ramp up the nasal hygiene because we do have to keep our nose clean and clear to be able to have that airflow through it. So nasal hygiene with natural products like natural nasal sprays can be very helpful at keeping the nose clean and clear. But then we have to think about, are the jaws a little small? Because then we want to get our attention towards growing the jaws to get back to better breathing. That's where we talk about things like the lip tie, tongue tie, or chi tie, because those can affect growth. In the youngest of kids, we would even say to the parents, like you mentioned, baby led weaning, solid starts.

15:12There are programs out there for the youngest to have some education and introduction to like, how can they start to introduce solid foods to my child? Because we're in a world of puree, number three would be consulting the dental community on growth and development of the jaws early, but now you have to find someone who does that. Most of dentistry is tooth-focused, and that's nice. We're here to help the teeth, certainly, but very rare is it to find a dental office that focuses on growth and development. So I'm one of them, but we're few and far between, which is why we built a company called Toothpillow.

15:42So Toothpillow is out there to deliver services that we normally do in our office, but remotely for parents who don't have access to someone locally. The second place, looking for an airway doctor, airway dentist, where they do growth and development early. If you have one locally, terrific. If you don't, then you go to toothkillo.com. After that, you look for a myofunctional therapist because myofunctional therapy addresses, again, the cause of this, working the muscles to grow the jaws to get the breathing back. So there are opportunities for parents to redirect their child's jaw growth along the way.

16:14And that's kind of why we exist is to offer services remotely where you may not have someone locally. We have pathways to help parents, but then the alternative becomes parents who have mouth-breathing children, usually they start slipping into the symptoms we're going to start talking about eventually, and those symptoms get treated. So the parent then is rushing to treat these symptoms that are popping up as opposed to addressing the jaw growth. Let's just get to the symptoms. What are these symptoms? Sure. So once a child begins to mouth-breathe day or night, there's a long list of symptoms that starts to happen.

16:44I'll rattle off some of the more common ones today. Number one is going to be behavior. Behavior starts to change. Now, we talked all about how the mouth breathing is unhealthy and how now we'll malfunction because we're not getting the air in correctly. So now we have bad fuel going into the child. Mouth breathing leads to poor sleep quality. So when we're breathing through our mouth at night, we are not going to have a proper sleep cycle or any quality of sleep. A nose breathing child through the night will have a quality night sleep, but a mouth breathing will not. So we cannot have quality of sleep with mouth breathing.

17:16Even if a child is sleeping through the night, from the morning to the night, and not waking up, that doesn't mean it's a quality night's sleep. And one of the first things to change is behavior. So we notice a lot of kids struggle in the category of the ADHD list of symptoms. And it's focused. It's hyperactivity. It's attention. It's scattered. It's all of these things that build that sleepy, irritable child who is dysregulated all day. Makes so much sense. Yeah. Yeah, the behavioral symptoms aren't really stemming from poor quality sleep. We believe that's the first thing that should be addressed.

17:51It doesn't mean that every single ADHD diagnosis is poor sleep, but we believe a majority of them are and have that component. Routinely, we treat children who come in with a behavioral history. When we return the child to nose breathing, the symptoms fade away. When the symptoms fade away, they either avoid the medication pathway or can come off of the medication. That has been my two decade experience. It has been unbelievable to see how common that does occur when we get to address that. Now, bedwetting is another big symptom. Bedwetting is a direct result of poor breathing while sleeping. It is mouth breathing or worse.

18:30So we say mouth breathing generally, but sloring is a little worse than mouth breathing. And then what's a little worse than that is sleep apnea. Bedwetting is the direct result of mouth breathing while sleeping. poor breathing at night triggers a response by the body it makes so much sense i feel like things are being connected in my brain from other interviews and it's just wow wow wow it's so nice to hear it all in like one place though and i i mean i know listeners can't see my face but i feel like my face was just in shock like the whole time when i think connections in my brain were just going off.

19:09And I was like, this just makes so much sense. So is mouth breathing one of the early signs that our child may have poor jaw or airway issues or is there? No, we can look at a list of things. So mouth breathing is something visible. Okay. One other visible thing would be the baby teeth together, like no spaces. If a parent sees baby teeth together, we have smaller jaws and smaller jaws come with bad breathing. So mouth breathing, baby teeth together. Waking at is certainly worse. So the child who wakes up every night or multiple times a night, that's even worse because now it's your breathing got so bad, your body woke you up to try to help you.

19:45But then ear infections are very common and they're related to the underdeveloped jaws and the dysfunctional tongue. Should I build that out a little more? You need to build out ear infections because the amount, I mean, but it makes so much sense, right? Mouth breathing is an epidemic. Ear infections are an epidemic right now. I know so many moms that it's just like my kid has an ear infection once a month. We also believe the adults. But look at how many kids now have tubes put in because of how frequently the ear infections are. It's okay. We have to talk about it. We should build it out. Yeah.

20:16So yes, ear infections. We're getting an infection because the fluid isn't draining. When the fluid sits too long, it's stagnant in there. When the fluid sits too long, the bacteria begin to kind of grow and we get an ear infection. But then we start thinking about, okay, why is the fluid not draining? That's where we start getting the real answer. because currently the treating the symptom pathway is get an antibiotic to kill the infection. Then of course, if you get too many infections and too many antibiotics, you're like, oh, let's put tubes in. But the tube kind of is the opposite because our ear is supposed to drain into the back of the throat.

20:46So the ear's connected. The fancy tube is called the eustachian tube. The eustachian tube is where the fluid in the ear should drain into the back of the throat. A tube is releasing the liquid the opposite way, not into the back of the throat. So here's what we start talking about is why is the tube not allowing the fluid to go? So here comes the big light bulb moment. The eustachian tube only opens when a particular muscle contracts, but that particular muscle only contracts when we have a proper swallow. And the proper swallow is a chewing swallow, not a drinking swallow. Going back to the early soft food, the early soft food is a drinking style swallow.

21:28the tongue is taught to stay low. It just has to receive the liquid or the puree. So when the tongue is repetitively staying low, it doesn't make the muscle that opens the eustachian tube contract. But when you're chewing hard foods, the tongue has to do a chewing swallow. So there's compression to the roof of the mouth. A proper chewing swallow, a properly functioning tongue will compress to the roof of the mouth. And then we swallow by vacuum. So a chewing swallow is completely different than a drinking swallow, but with softer foods, we don't have a chewing swallow anymore. You're getting an ear infection because you have a dysfunctional swallow.

22:04It is the direct cause of an ear infection, a dysfunctional swallowing pattern. There it is. I got it out there. I'm mind blown. No one has ever walked me through that. That's the short story. I spend eight hours teaching this stuff in a day. Sometimes we have a day meeting with doctors. I'm trying to teach and share with parents So they recognize a pathway to treat the cause. You can stop ear infections. I'm 20 years into this, so I'm confident saying it and sharing it. When we treat a child and get the guides in there, get the jaw growth going, get the muscles back, get the myofunctional therapy going, release a tongue tie, because a tongue tie will interfere with the swallowing pattern.

22:43When you do these things, the ear infections stop. If you invest the time and energy to redirect the musculature and the growth, you can stop the ear infections. We see that regularly because we're treating the cause now. get back to a properly functioning, chewing swallow, and you don't have to have the ear infections again. But typically we recognize the medical community treating the symptomless downstream. So that's where antibiotics are used to treat the symptom. Tubes are used to treat the symptom. None of that changes how the eustachian tube is functioning, which is coming from your swallowing pattern.

23:17Insane. I have so many questions. Like there's so many questions I need to ask and we're already running out of time. So we just got to keep going. I need to know, what your thoughts are on pacifiers, bottles, thumb sucking, how that affects jaw growth. Give us the hot takes. Interrupting this episode for your favorite segment, this week's mom mail. If you're new here, this is the part of the show where I answer a listener submitted situation or scenario. Basically, you write in your tricky situation and I give you advice only a real mom friend would get. Here's the email we're answering this week.

23:53Hi, mom friend. Okay, I need a neutral third-party mom friend to tell me if I handled this wrong. I had a play date this week, and my friend let her toddler do whatever. Climbing on furniture, dumping toys, pulling things off shelves. I tried redirecting a few times, but she didn't say anything. When her kids started throwing blocks at my toddler, I gently stepped in and said, Hey, we don't throw toys. Let's play with something else, in a very calm voice. she got really quiet after that and the play date ended pretty quickly now I'm overthinking it like did I offend her was I not supposed to say anything am I the bad guy for stepping in when it was happening in my house oh no no I don't think so I mean this is definitely like tricky because I don't know I don't have like any background obviously to your guys's friendship or anything like that but i feel like if anything maybe she got quiet because she she was embarrassed that she didn't step in already or like she was embarrassed that she didn't already yeah redirect or embarrassed that her toddler was throwing the blocks like i i don't think you did anything wrong by saying hey we don't throw toys let's play with something else and if you said it like you said in a very calm voice i'm thinking that's great like like you nailed that did that handle that probably better than I would have so there might have been something else going on or she just she's just embarrassed that she I don't know that her toddler was doing that um and maybe that's where it is like maybe she thinks that you're the one who wants distance so she's like giving that to you when that's not the case so I would probably just reach out and be like, Hey, I'm so sorry.