1KHO 845: Childhood Is Under Siege | Dr. Crystal Miller, Kid Magic Unlocked

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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. Dr. Crystal Miller is here today, and we are going to be talking about the fact that childhood is under siege and what we can do about it. Welcome, Crystal.

**Dr. Crystal Miller** (1:17)
It is such an honor to be here with you, Ginny. Thank you so much for inviting me.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:22)
You have got an incredibly cool background. You work with professional athletes, professional women's soccer team in Italy.
You work as a physical therapist, doctor of physical therapy by trade and profession. You say, I'm pretty fun. I do this physical therapy thing and I make it fun. Can you talk about your background of working also in schools? So you've worked with administrators and teachers and parents and kids and service providers. So you have a very in-depth background that makes you the person to be speaking about topics like childhood being at risk.

**Dr. Crystal Miller** (1:56)
Absolutely. So I consider myself a transfer student from medicine to education.
A constant student actually. But so I, like you said, I worked in, I'm a physical therapist by trade, doctor of physical therapy by trade. I worked in Italy with professional athletes. I've worked in children's hospitals, hospitals, you name it, I've been there. And then when I was pregnant with my second son, I have three boys. When I was pregnant with number two, I decided to switch into the school systems. So I love kids. I've always loved kids. I see eye to eye with them. I stand at a whopping four foot 11
So I see eye to eye with them on a lot of levels. And like you said, I'm kind of fun. So I started working in schools.
So I guess it's been about 12 years now. And I don't do like regular physical therapy. It's not like we go in and we do sit ups and push ups. I started asking questions like, what are the challenges that we're working with? What are their struggles? And I would get like really weird looks like, oh, you know, they walk into walls and fall out of chairs. And I'm like, yes, but like what else? Like, are they struggling with reading? Are they struggling with math? Like, what is the whole picture of this child? And that's not the answer I was getting. So I did a little digging on my own. And so I started making these programs for kids that weren't just to address their physical deficits, but also their challenges all around. I asked the kids themselves, like, what are your struggles, whatnot? And so, you know, if they were learning math and struggling in math, we'd do hopscotch math or we'd do leapfrogs like birds or whatever. And so I started putting movement together with all of their learning. And what I found was that my students or my kids were not just improving physically, they were improving academically, they were improving socially, emotionally, they were more self-confident. And then all of a sudden, teachers started asking me, oh, hey, wait a second, can you come into my room and look at this other kid? Can you check out this? Are there things that I can do? And so, I just kind of pooled all my resources together and I went to like my kid's elementary school principal, and I was like, do you think this would help any of your teachers? And he just looked at me and he goes, you wrote a curriculum. And I was like, oh, is that what that is? Cool. So that's really where it came from.