Sixty Percent of Your Child's Development Happens by Age Six: What Parents Miss About Airway Structure

A structural problem began in infancy—never named, never addressed—and shaped decades of life. Crooked teeth weren't cosmetic. They were a signal: underdeveloped jaws, narrowed airways, fragmented sleep, a stroke at a young age, exhaustion without explanation. Dr. Shereem Lim brings clarity to what conventional medicine has left invisible: the connection between infant breathing patterns, facial development, and the chronic conditions that follow into adulthood. She unpacks why 85% of sleep apnea cases go undiagnosed, what tongue ties reveal about ADHD misdiagnosis in children, and why the critical developmental window closes by age twelve. On Health Is a Skill, you'll learn how breastfeeding, nasal breathing, chewing mechanics, and even adult palate expansion can restore what early dysfunction disrupted—and why recognizing these patterns in children prevents them from becoming diagnoses in adults. Todd Vande Hei has lived this framework's stakes directly. Narrow airways. Sleep apnea since his thirties. A stroke. Problems he now understands may have originated in his own infancy. This conversation is about recognition—seeing the signals before they calcify into systems-wide failure, and knowing that airway health, like every component of Health Is a Skill, begins at birth. About the Guest: Dr. Shereem Lim is a functional medicine practitioner and airway health specialist focused on the developmental origins of chronic disease. Her work bridges pediatric development, sleep medicine, and integrative health, helping patients and practitioners recognize the early markers of airway dysfunction before they compound into adult pathology. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health