How We’re Raising Disconnected Adults — And How That Must Change

By Heather Ogilvie
Author of The Intelligent Body: The Real Reason for Obesity

We are not born disconnected.

Children arrive fully alive — sensing, feeling, responding. Their bodies are wise. Their instincts intact. They cry when they’re hungry, shrink from energy that feels off, and intuitively know who feels safe and who does not.

But it doesn’t take long for that intelligence to be trained out of them.

In Western culture, we teach children to ignore their bodies, override their feelings, and chase external approval instead. We reward stillness over movement, silence over emotional honesty, and performance over presence. We label emotions as "too much," sensitivity as "weak," and instinct as "irrational."

We don't call it trauma. We call it education.

The Silent Crisis

By the time the prefrontal cortex fully matures (somewhere between ages 25 and 30), a child has already spent decades learning to prioritize mental intelligence over body truth. They’ve been taught to sit still when their body wants to move. To eat when the clock says, not when hunger speaks. To focus on grades, status, and screens — instead of creativity, kindness, and connection.

This is how we raise disconnected adults.

Adults who confuse thinking with feeling.
Who chase fitness but never feel well.
Who build success and still feel empty.
Who turn to food, devices, or achievement — not because they are weak, but because they’ve forgotten how to feel.

What This Does to the Body

A body that is not listened to becomes distressed.
A body that cannot express begins to store.
And in that storage, symptoms begin.

Weight.
Fatigue.
Anxiety.
Overeating.
Chronic illness.
Addiction.
Numbness.

All of them are messages. None of them are the root.

The root is disconnection.

And the antidote isn’t more control, more restriction, or more discipline.

It’s reconnection.

We Must Raise Children Differently

We must teach children that their bodies are intelligent.

That a feeling is not a flaw — it’s a message.
That their nervous system is a sacred guide.
That intuition is not “woo woo” — it’s the oldest wisdom we carry.
That the mind is a processor, not a leader — and that the soul speaks in sensation.

We must give them space to move, to feel, to create.
We must stop labelling children as too sensitive and start honouring them as tuned in.

And we must do the work, as adults, to remember what we were taught to forget.

Because children don’t learn by what we say.
They learn by what we embody.

The Time Is Now

We are living in an era of escalating disconnection.

And we cannot afford to keep raising children to abandon themselves — only to spend adulthood trying to find their way home.

Let’s raise a generation that knows how to feel.
How to rest.
How to move with love.
How to listen to their body before it shouts.
How to lead from within, not chase from without.

Because that is the real intelligence we’ve lost.

And it’s time to bring it back.

🌀 Want to go deeper?
Explore The Intelligent Body: The Real Reason for Obesity — a bold, soul-rooted invitation to return to the wisdom of your own body and reconnect with the truth that lives inside you.

Now available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and PDF eBook.

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👉 www.islaywellness.com