Liver Energy and Your Child

I find myself discussing the liver energy and your child almost every day in my clinical practice.

The liver organ and meridian plays a crucial role in our energy system, because in a general sense this circuit is responsible for giving us the energy and ability to deal with stresses in our environment as well as internally.

This can take the form of detoxifying on the physical level, counteracting the stress response on the emotional and energy level, and keeping one's thoughts organized on the mental level.

Especially given today's modern world which is filled with external and internal stressors that kids have to live with, I find it imperative to address this topic of the liver energy and your child.

This figure shows how your child's liver energy system fits in with the other three contributing circuits, the gall bladder, the pericardium and the triple heater. The puzzle pieces are meant to show the collective functions of these four organ and energy circuits according to the Chinese medicine system.

From an energy perspective, the liver works in concert with the others, meaning your child's energy system will seek to balance and maintain all four of these circuits in the context of the whole system.

For this discussion, we will focus on the liver energy subcircuit, but keep in mind there is not a distinct demarcation between the liver, gall bladder, pericardium, and triple heater meridians.

They are all part of one continuum within your child's meridian and energy system.

According to the Chinese medicine system, the following functions are attributed to your child's liver energy circuit:

As you can see, these functions have a lot to do with coping with the modern world and demands of daily life.

Liver energy related issues come up often in my visits with children and their families in my practice.

Liver energy related symptoms can present in different ways.

When I am evaluating a child in my office, I pay special attention to any of these following symptoms as they come up in the history taking process.

These are clues that can lead us to investigate your child's liver energy system in more depth and from a holistic standpoint. The most common symptoms in children are anger episodes, restlessness and waking up at night, difficulty dealing with stress, decreased ability to plan and make decisions, and eye problems.

All of these can contribute to how your child's liver energy is functioning at any given time and in any scenario.

I have found it to be extremely useful to describe and explain how the liver energy system contributes to a child's overall energy functioning.

This conversation gives meaning and clarity to a set of symptoms a child may have that otherwise don't make sense.

Let's look at an example of how a child with liver energy related symptoms might present for an evaluation in my office.

If you look at the multiple energy functions your child's liver energy is supposed to take care of, it is easy to see how an imbalance can develop like nervousness and anxiety.

Let's say your child has had seizures and they are on chronic medications on a daily basis. They have not had seizures in a long time and remain stable from a neurological standpoint.

It is their liver energy circuit that will be most affected and called upon to breakdown the medication and detoxify the system.

In this context, you can see where more energy will be devoted to the liver's detoxification function, and less will be available to counteract feelings of nervousness and anxiety, as well as many of the other functions depicted in the puzzle piece figure above.

Knowing what jobs are supposed to be taken care of by this same liver energy subcircuit, we can take an intelligent, educated energy approach to helping your child's system seek out and maintain balance.

This gives us a plausible explanation for why a child might be reacting with nervousness and anxiety which is out of proportion to the actual reality of the stressor affecting them.

Very often, I have found that most kids will have a clustering of their symptoms in a pattern which tends to localize on one or two of the Chinese medicine organ and meridian subcircuits.

I believe this concept is one of the most important things for parents to know and I have found it to be extremely valuable as I evaluate kids in my practice.

The overall picture of what's going on with your child at any age is a useful goal to keep in mind. The concepts of energy priority and distribution are ones that I think are important for all parents to know.

One final comment I'd like to make is that children nowadays are much more sensitive and intuitive than we may give them credit for.

I have seen many kids in my practice who fit this definition of the sensitive child. The liver energy circuit plays a prominent role in the dynamics of this common situation.

I feel it is my obligation to help parents understand this process, and to reassure them that there are things that we can do to improve their child's situation.

As always, the more the child and parents understand, the easier it is to encourage the underlying energy system to get back on track.

I encourage you as parents to find out more about the energy medicine paradigm for the benefit of your child and family.