About
I am a traditionally trained doctor, former teacher and parenting coach turned holistic wellness strategist who, these days, carries a yoga mat and a green juice instead of a prescription pad.
Raised in New Zealand and educated in England and the United States, I have an honors degree in Modern History from Oxford University (Christ Church), and a medical degree from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I trained in pediatrics at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, and worked as a teacher at several schools in Dallas, New York City and Washington, D.C. I am a certified Parent Coach and studied holistic nutrition with the Institute of Integrative Nutrition.
I started The Well Child Way because I am deeply concerned with the increasing “pathogizing” of childhood, occurring against a background of increasing threats toxins in our environment, the food we eat, and developmentally inappropriate educational practices.
I believe that if we want to raise a generation of children who are happy and healthy today and are prepared to tackle the challenges of tomorrow, we must focus more on wellness and less on illness. In my practice I help parents and children to create ease, not treat disease, using my proprietary system that looks at wellness from a whole child perspective — Brain, Belly, Body, and Being (the 4B’s). Working in partnership with dedicated parents, I devise highly personalised, comprehensive, whole-child wellness solutions that help kids thrive.
My clients often come to me after they have been to multiple specialists and tried a variety of medications, yet are not seeing improvement in their child’s level of functioning.
They come to me because they have heard that I get results through my uniquely insightful, comprehensive approach. I have a relentlessly curious and probing mind, which leads me to look beyond the obvious and seek out root causes for problems. In doing so, I help my clients uncover the real reasons behind their child’s physical or behavioral problems (and design workable solutions to these problems), rather than just slap on a diagnosis and hand out a pill.
I have expertise in child development, children’s physical and emotional health, fostering creativity, creative thinking, social-emotional learning, resilience, grit, growth-mindset, early-childhood education, parent education / parent coaching, research, and grant writing, teaching mindfulness, ADHD, gifted children, learning disabilities, chronic allergies, frequent infections, holistic nutrition, food sensitivities, elimination diets, environmental toxicity, sleep issues, alternatives to medication, natural healing.
My Story
A born “kid-whisperer”,
I have worked with children all my life
(yes, even when I was still one myself, volunteering one summer, at the age of 10, as a “teacher” at a school for children with developmental disabilities).
I have always wanted to help children grow up happy and healthy, and it was this mission which initially led me to medical school to train as a pediatrician, after graduating from Oxford University. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize that the medical model is highly focused on labeling and diagnosing what is “wrong” and aims to “help” people by giving them a medication which, in most cases, they don’t actually need (and which may, in fact, be harmful).
Every day I would see patients in my clinic brought in by well-meaning but frustrated parents, asking for “something for ADHD” because “Alex can’t behave”. I knew instinctively that this wasn’t right, Alex probably could behave, he just needed different support, and/or something else was going on. But when you have to see 40 patients a day, there is simply no time to unpack what is really going on with this child.
As my awareness of this disconnect grew, so too did my dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the typical western medical model, and I left the practice of medicine to become a teacher, hoping that maybe in the classroom I could help children reach their fullest potential in a way that I couldn’t in the clinic.
At the same time, I was battling my own chronic health issues. Nothing was specifically “wrong” and I didn’t have any actual disease that anyone had diagnosed and yet, at the same time, everything was wrong.
I suffered from frequent upper respiratory infections necessitating round after round of antibiotics, as well as chronic skin problems, debilitating fatigue, joint pains, and even anxiety. Finally, at my wit’s end, I turned to an Integrative Medicine doctor in New York City. He suggested that I start by doing a cleanse and an elimination diet to find out what hidden food sensitivities might be causing my symptoms, and try yoga and mediation exercises.
I was enormously skeptical, to say the least. I was a typical western-trained doctor and, as such, I knew absolutely nothing about how food really affects us, and how interconnected our brain is to our body. But, of course, I thought I knew everything, and that this guy must be a quack.
But nevertheless, I (begrudgingly) followed his two-week program, thinking nothing would happen. Instead, at the end of two weeks, I felt like a completely new person. The results were so dramatic that I could not ignore them (even if, at the time, I didn’t understand them). Those two weeks forever changed my life, and, today, I am a fully converted, green-juice-drinking, yoga-mat-carrying, meditating, wellness warrior, and I have never been happier or healthier. I now know that I cannot tolerate corn, wheat, or dairy products, and I vigilantly avoid them. I also generally avoid soy, sugar, and all processed foods of any kind (although I occasionally cheat on the sugar, because I’m human). Good thing I love to cook!
My own personal wellness journey has been a revelation, and the more I learned about my own health and wellness, the more I sought to translate this awareness to my work with children.
If my own food sensitivities could be mis-diagnosed as anxiety, acne, etc, and could cause me to have frequent infections, surely this is happening to children as well. And I discovered that, not only is it happening, but it is happening at such an alarming rate that I am not being dramatic when I say that our children’s future is at risk. Yes, medications save lives, but we are starting to over-rely on them and to prescribe them when they are not appropriate. The consequences of this, not yet fully known, will not be good. And what is really sad about this is that it is not most often avoidable, simply by choosing to focus on wellness instead of disease.
Combining this awareness with what I already knew about children’s physical and mental health, as well as all that I had learned about education and intellectual, emotional and social development, I developed a framework of total wellness, and thus the 4B’s were born.
There are plenty of experts out there who recognise and teach the importance of nutrition, or of good mental health, or of creative learning, or of free play, but there are not nearly enough people who undertand just how interrelated all of these things are. If one aspect is out of balance, no matter how sound the others are, your child cannot be at his or her best. They will not be well. They will not thrive. Instead of experiencing ease, they will suffer disease. But it doesn’t have to be this way.