Nurturing Our Sons

Normal boy behavior is too often pathologized and drugged and medicated. When our children “act out” or “act up,” it doesn’t mean that they have poor behavior, a learning disability or a mental illness. It actually indicates that they are in distress and it’s up to us as adults to investigate the cause of the behavior and to attempt to meet their needs.

Laurie A. Couture is a licensed mental health counselor and the author of “Instead of Medicating and Punishing” and “Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons.” Today, she addresses the crisis our boys (and all of our children, really) are facing when it comes to physical and mental health. Laurie offers sound advice for supporting and nurturing our children through appropriate diet and attention. She makes specific recommendations for what foods to avoid to protect their health (like refined sugar and soy) and how to help them deal with trauma (like using protocols like EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing).

Visit Laurie’s website: laurieacouture.com

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Laurie Couture.

When our children act out or act up and exhibit emotional, behavioral, or learning problems, it’s not bad behavior, a learning disability, or mental illness necessarily. The child is in distress. It’s up to us as adults to investigate what’s going on and try to meet their needs. This is episode 476. Our guest is Laurie Couture, a licensed mental health counselor and the author of Instead of Medicating and Punishing and Nurturing and Empowering our Sons.

Laurie explains the crisis our boys in particular are facing in society, in our schools, and even in our homes. Did you know that approximately 8.2% of children in the United States aged 5 to 17 years, which represents millions of children, are on psychotropic drugs and the majority of the children on those drugs are boys? As Laurie puts it, too often, normal behavior exhibited by boys is pathologized and drugged or medicated. The drugs are far from safe for the boys’ mental and physical health.

Laurie suggests a number of approaches to support our boys’ health, including making simple dietary changes like avoiding refined sugar, soy, and yeast in the diet, for example, and the importance of investigating food sensitivities as a trigger for meltdowns or outbursts of rage. She also offers specific advice for protecting and nurturing our sons and a society and culture that can traumatize them. Finally, she goes over the benefits of EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, for releasing trapped trauma in our children.

Before we get into the conversation, remember that censorship is real. Let’s have a direct line of communication. Join the Weston A. Price Foundation email list to stay abreast of action alerts in your area along with important topics of interest related to food freedom, upcoming events, and more. Go to Weston A. Price and click on the yellow button on the homepage to sign up. You’re tuning in to the show.

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Visit Laurie’s Website: Laurie Couture

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Welcome to the show, Laurie.

Thank you so much for having me. This is great to be here.

Success Stories

This topic is so critically important. I want to kick things off with this story about maybe a family or two that you’ve worked with where you’ve seen a shift, a total turnaround in the behavior and the health of the child.

That’s a great way to start off. Due to HIPAA laws, I can’t give a specific case, but what I can do is let you know that there have been so many wonderful successes when you walk the parent through the secure attachment cycle, which I will share with your audience, you help the parent with their own trauma, and then you help work with the parent in real-time with the child’s behavior.

For example, there have been times when in the waiting room of the clinic where I worked, the child started acting out and throwing toys. The parent in the past would’ve started shouting at the child, getting physical with the child, or being punitive. I remember one case. I really took a hard hat and put it on my head. It happened to be there. I got down on the ground, started throwing the children’s chairs, and said, “Are we doing a demolition? Let’s do it.” The children are like, “What is up with her?” You get in like, “Let’s do some demolition,” and then you’ve got the child’s attention. You realize that what they really needed was a connection.

For me, to be able to watch parents be able to stop in real-time when I worked with them and see that the acting out is nature’s alarm signal telling them, “My child needs something,” and then to have the parent stop and rather than react in an abusive or aggressive way, respond to it in a way that meets the need is a beautiful thing to watch.

I’ve been able to do that myself in homeschooling my own son. I watched the progression even with my coaching clients, not just my clinical clients, and then with my own son being able to do something different from when he was in public school before our adoption to when he was homeschooled. I see all these beautiful stories in my head that I wish I could project to you.

I love that image of nature’s alarm signal because what we do when we choose to medicate children that we say are acting out or behaving poorly, we’re trying to do the same thing we do with the Tylenol to eliminate a headache. We’re treating the symptom and not the root cause problem.

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. It is that the child is in distress. It’s upon us as adults, parents, and caregivers to be able 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 psychotropic psychiatric drugs, all we’re doing is suppressing the symptoms, not to mention harming their bodies and their brain chemistry.

When our children act out, that is nature telling us that something in the child’s environment is not meeting their needs.

Children On Psych Meds

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

This is according to a CDC report that I looked up, and I believe the number is higher because they only studied schoolchildren. However, what the CDC showed in a report from June 2023 is that 8.2% of children ages 5 to 17 years old are on psychotropic drugs, and the majority of those children are boys. This does not take into account the 2 to 4-year-olds or children who are 18, 19, and 20 in school. It’s children 5 to 17 years old.

That’s 8.2% of school kids. 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 themselves and the institutions themselves that are the problem, not our children.

What are some of the ways in which these drugs are negatively impacting our children? It’s not just the drugs, but also the labels. How are they affecting our children, particularly boys?

These psychotropic drugs come in multiple different classes. There are stimulants, neuroleptics, hypnotics, and SSRIs. They come in different classes, but 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 up to age 24 years old. In other words, to make it clear, these drugs are not safe. There is no such thing as a safe psychotropic drug. They’re not sugar pills.

The biggest damage that these psychotropic drugs do is 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 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 that they label as ADHD and mental illness are collections of symptoms of trauma or the environment not meeting their 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 before who were 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.

Can you give an example without betraying the confidence or the privacy of the people you’re working with about a child and the condition that could have led down the wrong path if you hadn’t evaluated them well?

There were a few cases of kids that had actual physical brain issues that I can’t get into details about because of confidentiality, but these were potentially fatal conditions had these 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’ve been referred for medication.

For me, I said, “Something’s not right here.” When I looked at the history, I didn’t see any obvious psychological trauma, so I referred these children to neurologists and found out the terrifying news. Some of these kids needed emergency surgery. Lives were saved. I had other kids where their sight was saved. I had other kids that had issues similar to muscular dystrophy or autism. There were a lot of different food sensitivities, outright 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 and say, “We’re going to do individual therapy. We’re going to play Tiddlywinks and Monopoly, and then we’re going to put them on a psychiatric drug with a fifteen-minute appointment.” It’s terrible because I have witnessed psychiatrists write out a script for a child that 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.

Wise Traditions | Laurie Couture | Sons — Sons: 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.

That’s a really powerful statement. One thing that crosses my mind is that my husband was a coach and an athletic director for many years in public schools and there was one student who was misbehaving. This was at a high school level. They were misbehaving and grabbing food off the teacher’s desk. The administration was very concerned.

They came to find out that this kid was simply hungry. It wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t a brain tumor. It was nothing of the sort. It was that he was hungry. If they had not paid attention to his home life and the whole context of who this individual was, he could have ended up in one of these therapy sessions where they were giving him some drugs or writing him off when it was a very simple solution.

It could have been juvie. I have known many cases of children and adolescents who have been brought in due to theft, and the reality was 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 trauma in children if they are not a medical condition. They’re almost always trauma or an environment that is deeply distressing, either at home, at school, or somewhere else that they’re encountering. We should never be sweeping this under the rug and saying, “The child has a brain disorder.” Nature does not make 8% of children, which is upwards of 12 million children, have brain disorders. That’s not sustainable.

That’s true. It wouldn’t be conducive to future generations by any means. Since we were talking about food a moment ago, tell us what role diet plays in the well-being of these children.

Diet And Well-Being

I believe that diet is a really important piece. Even though I’m not a dietician, a protocol that I have developed is called the Couture Protocol. I do have a piece of that protocol that focuses on making sure children have a full workup on food sensitivities. I want children to be eating an ancestral diet and get especially refined sugar and soy out of the diet.

We know that refined sugar is disrupting the gut microbiome. It’s 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 since the year 2000 has wreaked havoc on our children. What I’ve noticed, especially with boys since it’s been put in the food source, is the shape of boys’ bodies is changing. It’s feminizing. It’s also affecting the 7 or 8-week fetal window where boys are exposed to androgens in utero. Soy will negatively affect that.

Refined sugar is disrupting the gut microbiome. It’s contributing to chronic inflammation.

It’s important to understand that genistein in soy is an estrogen. All it is is an estrogen product. It is an endocrine disruptor. I’m 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, that have been exposed to this estrogen in the food source since the year 2000. If you look at everything processed, even if you get it in a so-called health food store, it has got soybean oil, soy lecithin, and tocopherols, which are almost always soy. Soy is sometimes disguised as vitamin E. You look at it and it’s on all the sunscreens and all the products.

I had to go to great lengths when my son was alive 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 and Paleolithic way. We started to notice that my son had a soy allergy. From that point on, we were really looking at things.

My grandmother had passed away and she used to eat restaurant food probably by the truckloads. Every meal was at a restaurant. While I have lots of fond memories that I don’t regret, like going to restaurants with her, the restaurant food did her in the end. After her death, I said, “Nana, I need you to direct me to the best way to eat,” because I used to eat terribly mainstream food. It didn’t matter to me because I’m naturally thin. I never gained weight, so I could eat as badly as I wanted. What was happening is as somebody with autism, autoimmune issues, asthma, and Crohn’s disease, my health was out of control.

Once I started to choose the Paleolithic diet, and I don’t mean the trendy Paleo because this is before the trend, but the way hunter-gatherers ate and we started transitioning into that, my son and I, our health made a 180 turn. My son’s behavioral issues from his own abuse history before our adoption made a 180. I am convinced by not only the anecdotal 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, and dairy were removed from their diet as well as yeast, it was amazing the changes in those kids. The rage episodes that can happen when you give some of those toxins to kids are unbelievable.

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Coming up, Laurie talks about which foods she would not touch with a ten-foot pole and how many of them can lead to obesity and health problems for our children.

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You alluded to where soy is found in different foods, but can you continue to be specific and maybe drill down on certain foods that you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole?

I would not touch with a ten-foot pole any refined sugar. I eat no refined sugar and no grains. I know that Weston A. Price Foundation supports sprouted and unrefined grains, and that’s awesome, but I can’t, for my diet, do that. I also cannot eat any dairy. I also do not have any yeast. I have no soy. That would be pretty much anything processed.

There are some what I call paleo treats that I can eat. I have to admit I have a little bit of an addiction to some of the chocolate paleo treats that use maybe 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. It’s different from the way the Weston A. Price Foundation recommends it be done with raw milk and sprouted grains. That is not the way the mainstream eats these toxins. They’re toxins, the way the mainstream eats them.

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, but it is leading to obesity in kids in general. I have noticed that. If you go back and look at newspaper clippings, videos, movies, and books about your local community and look at those from the ‘80s, you’ll see hardly any fat bodies. That is a recent phenomenon, the obesity epidemic. It’s only gotten worse in the last couple of decades.

What does society do? I feel like they want 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.

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 bull crap by saying 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.

I’ll tell you a quick story from being an unschooling-homeschooling mom. When I was working in the clinic with the kids in school, it was so heartbreaking because these kids were sitting all day long. It was all ages, from preschool even to high school. They’re all sitting and either tapping on tablets or doing paperwork, and then they have to go home and do homework. It’s sedentary. When they are finally free, they want to sit in front of a screen because they have no energy for anything else.

When we would go to homeschool groups or large unschooling or homeschooling conferences, it was amazing because it was every single age from the youngest children to the kids that were 19 years old, 12th graders, running nonstop all day long. From morning until night, those kids never stopped moving. It was such a joy to see my son be like, “Hi, mommy. Bye, mommy,” and zip right through me. He’ll come get a quick hug and then run off again. They were indoors, outdoors, and all over.

Here’s the interesting thing. It was when there was a sit-down activity that captivated them such as when my son would do one of his chain mail workshops at one of these conferences. When there was a sit-down activity for something fun, artistic, or doing a music jam, those kids could sit without a problem. The reason is 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. If they were finished with it, they’d get up and run. That is how our Paleolithic children used to be in Paleolithic tribes, hunter-gatherer children. This is what nature intends. Since school is diametrically opposed to the needs of children, it doesn’t know this.

Right before our interview, I came across something that was a head shaker to me. This is one of those free little things you get in the health food stores. It is those free little things where they want to sell you a bunch of supplements. It said, “According to the American Heart Association, and that organization’s 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 said, “They stay at a healthier weight and have fewer symptoms of depression. Therefore, the American Heart Association offers the following guidelines.” This is shocking when you think of Paleolithic children. From ages 3 to 5, a good goal is only 3 hours a day of active play. For ages 6 to 17, so school-age kids and teens should be at only a 60-minute or 1 hour per day of moderate to vigorous intensive activity.

What that tells me is that according to the American Health Association, 95% of your child’s day should be sedentary or can be sedentary. That’s what that’s saying. What our kids need is that from ages 2 to 19, they need to be moving nonstop, so let’s reverse that. They probably should only be getting an hour of sitting down quietly. What our mainstream is doing to us is harming us. It’s killing us. It’s leading to these emotional, behavioral, and learning problems that kids have.

Nurturing Our Sons

I want to ask you because I know your book is about nurturing and empowering boys or our sons. Why did you focus on boys primarily?

I focused on boys primarily because in my work with children for over so many years, I noticed that there were certain problems that were unique to boys. There were certain issues that boys were uniquely facing. For example, they were pathologized in school. Natural boy behavior is being drugged and medicated instead of seen as a natural part of who boys are.

Research shows that boys are starved of skin-to-skin, emotional nurturance, and physical nurturance. Boys go through circumcision, which does traumatize 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. They are the primary victims of suicide in age groups 0 to 24. It’s not that 0-year-olds are committing suicide, but according to the CDC, 0 to 24-year-old boys make up 78.5% of suicides. In the ages 10 to 24 age group, boys make up 81% of suicides.

Boys are starved of skin-to-skin and emotional and physical nurturance.

Also, there is incessant anti-male vitriol in the media that boys are hearing. Boys are being neurochemically hijacked by video games, porn, and screens. Even in the movies, there is this whole idea of rebooting all the movies to reboot the males out. The boys are noticing all of this. These are some of the many issues that boys are facing.

In addition to this, 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 there are very negative towards boys and young men. I’m a child advocate first. I fight for all children, but I also focus on those who have no voice. I realized that since the ‘90s, boys’ voices have been drowned out more to the point where the 2020 boys are being wiped right out of the conversation.

I’m embarrassed to say I 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 turned into men. It was as if they were simply accessories to a woman’s life. They were very much emasculated and were being maligned. It was so sad.

I know which movie you’re talking about. It’s devastating to male-female relationships and the fact that little girls are being fed this garbage and boys are watching it. I did not watch it myself, but I had some loved ones who did watch it and gave me a full blow-by-blow of it. I’ve listened to the commentary and read the commentary. This type of hatred and sexism against boys, young men, and men is devastating to both girls and boys. It is harming their relationships with one another. It is harming them romantically when they get older and 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.

That’s such a good point that this propaganda and pushing boys and men over to the sidelines of life is affecting all of us negatively, not just the boys. I do want to go back to them. I know you’ve talked about the trauma that is inculcated into their brains as they’re being programmed and hearing these messages. How can we avoid traumatizing boys further?

We have to stop exposing them to this media, first of all. We need to get them off the screens and get them out in nature. 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, for instance, nature-based schools, arts-based schools, or, better yet, homeschooling. The public schools have proven themselves time and time again that they are a toxic environment for boys.

We have to get away from mental health treatments that pathologize boy behavior and want to put chemicals into them or use behavioral modification to help their symptoms. We want to focus on attachment treatments that help repair the parent-child relationship and use treatments like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing or EMDR to help heal boys’ traumas. We need to get them off of these toxic diets with sugar, soy, and all these ingredients that are not even food that we are putting into their bodies.

What we need to do as parents is we need to start advocating for our sons. Speak up when you see this media. Don’t walk away from it. Years ago, when all of the Girls Rule and Boys Drool merchandise was in a lot of 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, as my son said, the counterpart to that and couldn’t find it.

There would be a Girl’s Rule shirt or hat, but there was no counterpart my son would notice for boys. Is that fair? Is that kind? Start advocating for your son 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.

I love this so much. I wanted to ask you about one modality that you mentioned that I hadn’t heard of before, which is EMDR. Can you elaborate on what that is?

EMDR

EMDR, the long form is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. What it is is a neuro somatic or brain-body treatment that targets trauma in the limbic system. If you drilled your fingers through the middle of our brains, it would be there. The limbic system 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 children under 26 years old, the prefrontal cortex is the least developed part of the brain. It doesn’t finish developing until about 26 years old. That is an under-construction part of the brain, so talk therapy is developmentally inappropriate for kids.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing hooks trauma. I’m going to say this in a nutshell. It allows it to digest. It pulls the files, if you will, that get scattered around in the cells of the body and around the limbic system. It pulls them in, consolidates them, 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 sleep. Stage four sleep is REM sleep, Rapid Eye Movement sleep. Our eyes move in this algorithm or this code that trips up this system to help us reconsolidate, process, and digest all of the residues of the day. It helps us learn and helps us 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 towards a trauma. It’s extremely 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. I would not be the person I am if it wasn’t for me ending up doing my own EMDR treatment.

I highly recommend it as the primary treatment for children as well as skilled gentle attachment family therapy. That means family therapy that works on that attachment cycle that we discussed earlier. 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 one-on-one inventing. That’s not developmentally appropriate for children.

This is one thing I love about the show and about wonderful guests like you. It is that you get us thinking about where our society is and how the culture and the powers that be are influencing our relationships. You also offer us tools that we might not have heard before that we can apply to our family life.

I’m going to invite the audience to investigate EMDR and this gentle attachment therapy as ways in which to help their boys be boys and nourish them and nurture them. We have to wrap up. I’m sorry to say. I want to ask you the question I love to pose at the end. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

It’s going to be a tie. I would say Paleolithic or a hunter-gatherer diet, homeschooling your children, and if you’re an adult, get out in nature and off screens. Heal your trauma with the MDR. Those are the three things that would be life-changing.

Thank you so much for offering your insights. I loved our conversation.

I loved it too. Thank you so much for having me.

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Our guest was Laurie Couture. You can visit her website, Laurie Couture, to learn more. You can find me at Holistic Hilda. Here’s a review from Apple Podcasts from Savvynana. It says, “Amazing show and foundation. I love the practical and simple wisdom given through this show. I love Weston’s book. When I looked into him and saw his foundation, that’s what brought me to the simply sweet show.”

Savvynana, thank you so much for tuning in. Your review means a ton. If you’d like to rate and review the show, go to Apple Podcasts. Click on the Ratings and Review tab. Give us as many stars as you like, and tell the world why they should tune in. It means a lot to us too. Thank you so much for tuning in. Stay well, and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

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About Laurie Couture

Laurie A. Couture is a licensed mental health counselor and the author of “Instead of Medicating and Punishing” and “Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons”. She developed The Couture Protocol, a whole-child model of treating developmental and generational trauma in children, youths, and their families. Her holistic approach includes neuro-somatic trauma treatment, attachment parenting, alternative education, and ancestral nutrition.

Laurie is a specialist in healing developmental trauma and attachment problems in children and youths and has 25 years of clinical and professional experience in the fields of behavioral healthcare, foster and adoption social work, juvenile justice, education, and consulting. She was featured in the documentaries, “The War On Kids” and “Class Dismissed” and has presented at conferences around the country, including at the American Public Health Association Expo in 2019 and the Ancestral Health Symposium in 2022. Laurie is the founder of Laurie A. Couture, LLC, providing consulting, presentations, training, and research to industries and programs that directly serve children, youths, and families. Laurie is the proud mother of a son, Brycen whom she adopted from the foster care system and homeschooled through graduation. Laurie tragically lost her son to suicide in 2017, and weaves his profound story and beautiful voice into her work.

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