Boys Health

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Interview With Laurie A. Couture – Nurturing Our Sons

HILDA LABRADA GORE: When children “act out” or “act up,” it doesn’t mean that they have poor behavior, a learning disability or a mental illness. It indicates that they are in distress— and it’s up to us to investigate the cause of the behavior and try to meet their needs. When it comes to boys, normal behavior is too often pathologized and medicated. Laurie A. Couture is a licensed mental health counselor and the author of two books—Instead of Medicating and Punishing¹ and Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons²—both of which focus on “parenting and educating the way nature intended.” Laurie suggests approaches to support boys’ health, including simple dietary changes. She also of­fers advice for protecting and nurturing sons and goes over the benefits of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) for releasing children’s trapped trauma.

Laurie, can you kick things off with a story about one or more families you have worked with where you have seen a shift or turnaround in a child’s behavior and health?

LAURIE COUTURE: That’s a great way to start off. Due to privacy laws, I can’t discuss specific cases, but I can say that there have been many wonderful cases of success. When you walk parents through the secure attachment cycle,³ you help them with their own trauma, and then you help them work in real time with their child’s behavior.

For example, in the waiting room of the clinic where I used to work, there were times when a child started acting out and throwing toys. The parent would start being punitive, shouting or getting physical with the child. In one case, I took a hard hat that happened to be there and put it on my head. I got down on the ground and started throwing the children’s chairs, saying, “Are we doing a demolition? Let’s do it.” The children thought, “What is up with her?” You say something like, “Let’s do some demolition,” and then you’ve got the child’s attention. You realize that what they really need is connection.

When I worked with parents, it was a beau­tiful thing to watch them learn that the acting out is nature’s alarm signal that is telling them “My child needs something,” and then to see the parent stop and respond to the situation in a way that met the child’s need.—rather than react in an abusive or aggressive way, I watched the progression not just with my clinical clients but also with my coaching clients. I was able to do that myself in homeschooling my own son, doing something different from when he was in public school before I adopted him [at eleven years old]. I see all these beautiful stories in my head.

HG: I love that image of nature’s alarm signal. When we choose to medicate children who we say are “acting out” or “behaving poorly,” we’re doing the same thing we do with Tylenol to eliminate a headache—we’re treating the symptom and not the root cause.

LC: When our children act out or when they have emotional, behavioral or learning problems, that is nature telling us that something in the child’s environment is not meeting their needs. They are not at homeostasis. It’s not bad behavior, a learning disability or a mental illness—the child is in distress. It’s on us as adults, parents and caregivers to put on our Sherlock Holmes hats, get to the bottom of that behavior, figure it out, fix it and meet the needs. By drugging our kids with psychiatric medications, all we’re doing is suppressing the symptoms, not to mention harming their bodies and their brain chemistry.

HG: How many kids would you say are on psych meds in the United States?

LC: These numbers are according to a CDC report that I looked up, but I believe the number is higher because they only studied schoolchil­dren. What the CDC showed in a report from June 2023 is that 8.2 percent of children ages five through seventeen years old are on psychotropic drugs,⁴ and the majority of those children are boys. This does not take into account the two-to four-year-olds or those in school who are eighteen through twenty. That’s 8.2 percent of schoolkids ages five through seventeen. That’s astronomical. It sounds like a low number, but that’s millions of children. We’re saying that millions of children are somehow, by their la­bel, “defective” or “disordered.” I can’t believe that our system can’t understand that. It’s the systems and institutions themselves that are the problem, not our children.

HG: What are some of the ways in which these drugs and mental health labels negatively affect our children, and particularly boys?

LC: Psychotropic drugs come in a variety of dif­ferent classes. There are stimulants, neurolep­tics, hypnotics and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Every single class of these drugs harms children on every developmental level: epigenetic, neurological, physical, psy­chological, behavioral, social and sexual. Every aspect of their development is harmed. These drugs can also increase suicidal and homicidal ideation in children. In other words, these drugs are not safe. There is no such thing as a “safe” psychotropic drug. They’re not sugar pills.

What is the biggest damage that these psychotropic drugs do? They let adults off the hook for not meeting the needs of children and ignoring the alarm signals. The reason why boys are more affected by this is that more boys than girls are labeled with fraudulent disorders like “ADHD” (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) and “conduct disorder,” which are collections of symptoms of trauma or other medical/neurological issues. Boys are more likely than girls to be medicated for behavioral and emotional issues. They are labeled, and their behavior is pathologized as if it’s an anomaly instead of normal childhood behavior.

It’s important to understand that these alarm signals that kids give off—labeled as ADHD and mental illness—are collections of symptoms of trauma or of the environment not meeting chil­dren’s needs. They could be a medical issue or a food allergy. There are a number of things they could be. Medicating these kids is extremely dangerous and can be fatal because you are not looking at what these other underlying issues are. I’ve worked with children showing some of these symptoms. Luckily, I used my intuition and had different evaluations done. I was able to save their lives from potentially fatal conditions.

HG: Can you give an example of a child and condition that could have led down the wrong path if you hadn’t evaluated them well?

LC: There were a few cases of kids who had ac­tual physical brain issues; these were potentially fatal conditions had they not been found. When these conditions developed, the children began to act out and show symptoms. Had they gone to a different therapist, they would have been referred for medication. But it didn’t seem right. When I looked at the history, I didn’t see any obvious psychological trauma, so I referred the children to neurologists who found out the ter­rifying news. Some of these kids needed emer­gency surgery. Lives were saved. Eyesight was saved. I had other kids who had issues similar to muscular dystrophy or autism. I also saw a lot of different food sensitivities and food aller­gies, and foods that were damaging these kids.

There are so many reasons why kids give off emotional, behavioral and learning alarm signals. We should never take that lightly and go to a therapist who says they will do individual therapy. They are going to play Tiddlywinks and Monopoly, and then put them on a psychiatric drug with a fifteen-minute appointment. It’s terrible. I have witnessed psychiatrists write out a script for a child who said, “I feel sad today.” Maybe they felt sad because something happened at school or their pet died—and the psychiatrist wrote out a script. This is the real­ity. Children need to be medicated in order to endure the conditions of public schools.

HG: That’s a powerful statement. My husband was a coach and athletic director for many years in public schools, and there was a high school student who was misbehaving and grabbing food off the teacher’s desk. They found out that this kid was simply hungry. It wasn’t compli­cated. If they had not paid attention to his home life and who this individual was, he could have ended up in one of these therapy sessions where they were giving him drugs or writing him off, when the solution was very simple.

LC: He could also have ended up in juvenile hall. I have known many cases of children and adolescents who have been brought in due to theft, and the reality was that they were hun­gry. Their families didn’t have enough money for food, or they were being starved at home. Child abuse factors into so many of these cases of kids acting out. Symptoms of mental illness are almost always due to trauma in children if they do not have a medical condition. They almost always relate to trauma or an environ­ment that is deeply distressing, either at home, school or somewhere else. We should never be sweeping this under the rug saying, “The child has a brain disorder.” Nature does not make 8 percent of children have brain disorders, which is upwards of twelve million children.

HG: Tell us what role diet plays in the well-being of these children.

LC: I believe that diet is an important piece. Even though I’m not a dietician, I have de­veloped the Couture protocol.⁵ A part of that protocol focuses on making sure children have a full workup on food sensitivities. I want children to eat an ancestral diet and especially get refined sugar and soy out of their diet. We know that refined sugar is disrupting the gut microbiome, contributing to chronic inflammation in kids’ brains and bodies and affecting their immune systems, which causes autoimmune disorders. All of this inflammation leads to mental health issues.

The soy in the food supply since the year 2000 has wreaked havoc on our children. What I’ve noticed, especially with boys since that time, is that the shape of boys’ bodies is changing. It’s feminizing. It’s also affecting the seven- or eight-week fetal window where boys are exposed to androgens in utero. Soy will negatively affect that. It’s important to under­stand that genistein in soy (an isoflavone) is an estrogen product and an endocrine disruptor.⁶ I am convinced that it’s at the root of the trans­gender phenomenon in children, especially in the 2000s and 2010s with boys. The issue with girls is more of a social contagion, but I am also convinced that the soy and too much estrogen in girls are wreaking havoc on them as well.

We have two generations, the Millennials and the Gen Z kids, who have been exposed to this estrogen in the food supply. Everything pro­cessed—even if you get it in a so-called “health food store”—has got soybean oil, soy lecithin and tocopherols, which are almost always soy. Soy is sometimes disguised as vitamin E. It’s in sunscreen and many products. I had to go to great lengths with my son to make sure that I was not exposing him to soy because he had a soy allergy. He would get rages from soy.

This is one of the ways that I got involved in eating in a more ancestral, Paleolithic way. We noticed that my son had a soy allergy. From that point on, we were really looking at things. My grandmother had just passed away, and she used to eat restaurant food by the truckloads. Every meal was at a restaurant. While I have lots of fond memories of going to restaurants with her, in the end, the restaurant food did her in. After her death, I said, “Nana, I need you to direct me to the best way to eat,” because I used to eat terrible mainstream food. I thought it didn’t matter because I’m naturally thin. I never gained weight, so I could eat as badly as I wanted, but what was happening was—as somebody with autism, autoimmune issues, asthma and Crohn’s disease—my health was out of control.

Once my son and I started the Paleolithic diet—and I don’t mean the trendy paleo diet, because this was before the trend, I mean the way hunter-gatherers ate—our health made a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. My son’s be­havioral issues from his abuse history before the adoption made a one-eighty. I am convinced by not only the anecdotal evidence but the research and also the work that I’ve done with my own clients in referring them to holistic dieticians and food sensitivity testing. When sugar, soy, grains, dairy and yeast were removed from their diet, the changes I saw in those kids were amazing. The rage episodes that can happen when you give some of those toxins to kids are unbelievable.

HG: Can you drill down further about foods that you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole?

LC: I would not touch with a ten-foot pole any refined sugar. I eat no refined sugar and no grains. I know that the Weston A. Price Founda­tion supports sprouted and unrefined grains, and that’s awesome, but I can’t do that. I also cannot eat any dairy, and I do not have any yeast or soy. That would be pretty much anything processed. There are some “paleo treats” that I can eat. I have to admit that I have a little bit of an addic­tion to some of the chocolate paleo treats that use fruits to sweeten them. The most important thing is you’ve got to be sure there’s no refined sugar, no soy and nothing in it that is going to be inflammatory. The way that the mainstream eats grains and dairy is very inflammatory and they are toxins. It’s different from the way the Weston A. Price Foundation recommends it be done with raw milk and sprouted grains.

Unfortunately, refined sugar, refined grains, dairy and soy are also contributing to the obe­sity epidemic in our culture and in children. I have seen it in children especially since soy was introduced into the diet. Not only is soy feminiz­ing the bodies of boys, it is leading to obesity in kids in general.⁷ I have noticed that. If you go back and look at newspaper clippings, videos, movies and books about your local community from the 1980s, you’ll see hardly any fat bodies. The obesity epidemic is a recent phenomenon, and it’s only gotten worse in the last couple of decades.

HG: Society wants to normalize being over­weight. They say, “Stop the fat shaming.” I’m all for positive body image and whatever shape someone is, but there’s something unhealthy that we’re trying to cover up or disguise by changing our language.

LC: It’s also deadly. It’s not about fat shaming. We shouldn’t be shaming anybody. It’s about saying, “This is not nature’s intent.” In every­thing I do, I cut through all the politics and all the nonsense by asking one thing: “What does nature intend?” Nature does not intend for us to be overweight. Nature does not intend for children to be sitting at desks for six hours a day, tapping on tablets, staring at screens and working on papers. Nature intends for children to be outside, moving their bodies and playing.

When I was working in the clinic with kids in school, it was so heartbreaking because these kids were sitting all day long. It was all ages, from preschool to high school. They are all sitting and either tapping on tablets or doing paperwork, and then they have to go home and do homework. When they are finally free, they want to sit in front of a screen because they have no energy for anything else.

Having been an unschooling-homeschool­ing mom, we would go to homeschool groups or large unschooling or homeschooling confer­ences. It was amazing because every single age—from the youngest children to the twelfth-graders who were nineteen years old—were running nonstop all day long. From morning until night, those kids never stopped moving. It was such a joy to see my son say, “Hi, mommy. Bye, mommy,” and zip right past me. He would come get a quick hug and then run off again. They were indoors, outdoors and all over.

Here’s the interesting thing. When there was a sit-down activity that captivated them— something fun, artistic, a music jam or one of my son’s chain mail workshops—those kids could sit without a problem. The reason was that no one was forcing them to do so. They were doing it because they were captivated and because they had the freedom to run around. When they were finished with it, they’d get up and run. That is how children used to be in Paleolithic tribes—hunter-gatherer children. This is what nature intends. School, which is diametrically opposed to the needs of children, doesn’t know this.

I recently came across something that was a head shaker to me. This is from one of those free little things you get in health food stores where they want to sell you a bunch of supplements. It said that according to the American Heart As­sociation (AHA)—and that organization is sup­posed to be for heart health—“Active children have better bone health, physical fitness, brain function, attention and academic performance.” We agree with this so far. It continued, “They stay at a healthier weight and have fewer symp­toms of depression. Therefore, the American Heart Association offers the following guide­lines.” The AHA then goes on to say that three hours a day of active play is a good goal for ages three to five, and for school-age kids and teens ages six to seventeen, the goal should be just sixty minutes (one hour) per day of moderate to vigorous intensive activity.⁸

This is shocking when you think of Pa­leolithic children. What that tells me is that according to the American Heart Association, 95 percent of your child’s day can be sedentary. That’s what that is saying. Let’s reverse that— from ages two to nineteen, what our kids need is to be moving nonstop. They probably should only be getting an hour of sitting down quietly. What our mainstream is doing to us and our children is harming us. It’s killing us. It’s lead­ing to these emotional, behavioral and learning problems that kids have.

HG: I know your most recent book is about nurturing and empowering boys. Why did you focus primarily on boys?

LC: In my work with children over so many years, I noticed that there were certain problems that were unique to boys. For example, they are pathologized in school. Natural boy behavior is drugged and medicated instead of seen as a natural part of who boys are. Research shows that boys are starved of skin-to-skin contact and emotional and physical nurturance. Boys go through circumcision, which traumatizes them to some degree. They are the neglected victims of sexual assault. They suffer the most child abuse and neglect. They’re dealing with body shame, but it’s not being recognized by pop culture or the helping fields. Boys are the primary victims of suicide in the zero to twenty-four age group. It’s not that newborns are com­mitting suicide, but according to the CDC, boys ages zero to twenty-four years old make up 78.5 percent of suicides. In the ten to twenty-four age group, boys make up 81 percent of suicides. Also, boys hear incessant anti-male vitriol in the media. Boys are being neurochemically hijacked by video games, porn and screens. Even in the movies, there is this idea of rebooting all the movies to reboot the males out. The boys are noticing all of this.

In addition, there are hundreds of philan­thropic, private, federal and grassroots initia­tives and programs to help girls and young women, but there are none to help boys and young men. Any initiatives that do exist are very negative toward boys and young men. I’m a child advocate first, and I fight for all children, but I also focus on those who have no voice. I realized that since the 1990s, boys’ voices have been drowned out almost to the point where by the 2020s, boys are being wiped right out of the conversation.

HG: I recently watched a pop culture movie because I was curious why it was so popular. I was scandalized and horrified at the way they were depicting boys as they turned into men. It was as though they were simply accessories to a woman’s life. They were very much emasculated and maligned. It was sad.

LC: I think I know which movie you’re talking about. The fact that little girls are being fed this garbage and boys are watching it is devastating to male-female relationships. This type of hatred and sexism against boys, young men and grown men is devastating to both girls and boys. It is harming their relationships with one another. It is harming them romantically when they get to young adulthood. It is causing boys and young men to feel like they don’t belong in this world, and they don’t have much hope for the future.

HG: You’ve talked about the trauma that is inculcated into boys’ brains as they’re being programmed and hearing these messages. How can we avoid traumatizing boys further?

LC: First of all, we have to stop exposing them to these media. We need to get them off the screens and get them out in nature.

Second, we need to get them out of the pub­lic schools and place them in schools that honor natural boy and child behavior. Those could be child-centered schools, nature-based schools, arts-based schools or, better yet, homeschool­ing. The public schools have proven themselves time and time again to be a toxic environment for boys.

Third, we have to get away from mental health treatments that pathologize boy behavior and put chemicals into them or use behavioral modification to help their symptoms. Instead, we want to focus on attachment treatments that help repair the parent-child relationship and use treatments like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to help heal boys’ traumas.⁹

Fourth, we need to get them off of toxic diets with sugar, soy and all the ingredients that are not even food.

Finally, what we need to do as parents is to start advocating for our sons. Speak up when you see these media messages. Don’t walk away from it. Years ago, when all of the “Girls Rule and Boys Drool” merchandise was in many stores, parents would walk right by it and not say anything. I would always discuss it with my son, nephews and niece. We talked about how hurtful it would be if boys were looking for the counterpart to that and couldn’t find it. There would be a “Girls Rule” shirt or hat for girls, but my son would notice that there was no counterpart for boys. Is that fair? Is that kind? Start advocating for your sons and aligning with nature’s intent. Nature intends for boys to be moving, playing and kinesthetically learning. These are some of the ways that we can stop traumatizing them. Simply stop shaming them. Stop exposing them to this.

HG: Can you elaborate on what EMDR is?

LC: Eye Movement Desensitization and Repro­cessing is a neurosomatic or brain-body treat­ment that targets trauma in the limbic system. If you drilled your fingers through the middle of our brains, the limbic system would be there. It is the “fight, flight or freeze” part of the body. That’s where trauma gets stuck. Talk therapy doesn’t work because it can’t grasp trauma in the limbic system. It only works on the prefrontal cortex. In people under twenty-six years old, the prefrontal cortex is the least developed part of the brain. It doesn’t finish developing until about twenty-six years old. That is an “under construction” part of the brain, so talk therapy is developmentally inappropriate for kids.

In a nutshell, EMDR hooks trauma and al­lows it to digest. It pulls in and consolidates the files, if you will, that get scattered around in the cells of the body and around the limbic system, and moves them to the prefrontal cortex where the brain can then store them as part of our narrative. At night, whenever we go to bed, it’s almost like our brain tries to do a little EMDR on us during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is stage-four sleep. Our eyes move in this algorithm or code that trips up this system to help us reconsolidate, process and digest all of the residue of the day. It helps us learn and understand, gain insights and make use of everything that we have processed. EMDR takes that algorithmic mechanism of REM sleep—although we are not sleeping when we do it. It uses the bilateral stimulation of the eyes and directs it, through a protocol, very specifi­cally toward a trauma. It’s highly effective and rapidly successful in remedying traumas and healing traumas that sometimes are years or decades old. When my son was doing EMDR, he was the most stable. He had many years of thriving when he did EMDR. I’ve done it my­self—because when we are trained in EMDR, we have the opportunity to do it ourselves—and I would not be the person I am today if it wasn’t for doing my own EMDR treatment.

I highly recommend EMDR as the primary treatment for children as well as skilled, gentle attachment-focused family therapy. That means family therapy that works on the attachment cycle. The purpose of it is to help parents and children reconnect at the heart. The purpose of therapy should not be about going behind closed doors with a therapist who is one-on-one inventing. That’s not developmentally appropri­ate for children.

HG: I’m going to invite readers to investigate EMDR and gentle attachment therapy as ways to help boys be boys and nourish and nurture them. Finally, if the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recom­mend that they do?

LC: It’s going to be a three-way tie. I would say eat a Paleolithic or hunter-gatherer diet, homeschool your children (or, if you’re an adult, get out in nature and off screens) and heal your trauma with EMDR. Those are the three things that would be life-changing.

This was Wise Traditions Podcast episode 476 (May 20, 2024).

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Weston A. Price Foundation does not advocate any particular type of schooling.

REFERENCES

1. Couture LA. Instead of Medicating and Punishing: Healing the Causes of Our Children’s Acting-Out Behavior by Parenting and Educating the Way Nature Intended. Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2008.
2. Couture LA. Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons: Healing the Wounds of an Anti-Boy Culture by Parenting and Educating the Way Nature Intended. Mindstir Media, 2023.
3. Pittman D. What is secure attachment and how does it develop? Talk­space, Nov. 13, 2020.
4. Zablotsky B, Ng AE. Mental health treatment among children aged 5-17 years: United States, 2021. NCHS Data Brief. 2023 Jun;(472):1-8.
5. https://laurieacouture.com/about/
6. Morell SF. Soy’s estrogenic effects. Weston A. Price Foundation, Aug. 2, 2021. https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/soy-estrogenic-effects/
7. Daniel K. Soybesity: soy and weight gain. Weston A. Price Foundation, Mar. 4, 2014. https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/soy-alert/soybesity-soy-and-weight-gain/
8. How can I help my child be more physically active? American Heart Association, last reviewed Oct. 24, 2023. https://www.heart.org/en/ healthy-living/fitness/fitness-basics/aha-recs-for-physical-activity-in-children
9. What is EMDR therapy? EMDR Institute, Inc. https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2024

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