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by Kenneth R. Moench (Author)
Every parent expects a baby to cry. What they don't expect is a baby who cries without stopping, who arches and spits up after every feeding, who stiffens when touched, who cannot be soothed by anything the pediatrician recommends. When parents bring that baby to their doctor, they are most often handed a label - colic, reflux, torticollis, PURPLE crying - and sent home to wait it out. The label explains nothing. It fixes nothing. And the baby keeps crying.
Kenneth R. Moench spent thirty years releasing pain from adults who had given up - athletes, seniors, people who had tried every specialist and filled every prescription. As a Licensed Massage Therapist and Master Therapist Instructor with four Central Texas clinics, he worked on bodies that medicine had stopped making progress on, and he got results. MLB players fly him in monthly. Austin FC brought his method in-house for their entire roster. But the deeper question - why these people had carried this pain for decades, sometimes their whole lives - didn't fully answer itself until Moench worked on his three-week-old grandson Austin, and then on his granddaughter Calla at thirty-six hours old. Both were in pain no exam had detected. Both released in a single session. And the pattern he had been observing in adult bodies for thirty years suddenly had an origin.
Moench calls it Pre-Birth Postural Deficits. In the final weeks of pregnancy, babies are folded, compressed, and held in positions they cannot change. That compression shapes the fascia - the connective tissue woven throughout the body around every muscle, bone, and organ - into patterns of tightness that do not release on their own at birth. They drive the inconsolable crying that gets called colic, the neck stiffness that gets called torticollis, the feeding refusal that gets blamed on reflux, and the touch sensitivity that gets labeled tactile defensiveness. These are not diagnoses. They are descriptions of a body locked in restriction that nobody is treating.
In Every Baby Hurts, Moench makes the case that soft tissue restriction in newborns is real, addressable, and almost universally overlooked. It does not appear on imaging. It does not come with a billing code. It requires trained hands and the willingness to treat a baby as someone who can hurt.
Readers will come away understanding:
- Why fascia can tighten before birth and produce the crying, feeding struggles, and disrupted sleep that standard pediatric care labels but cannot resolve
- Why a swaddled baby who appears calm may simply be held in the same position their restrictions have already locked them into
- Why a single heel stick activates eighteen of twenty brain regions adults use to process pain, and what that means for an infant living with unaddressed restriction across the critical first years of brain development
- Why the tongue tie that interfered with breastfeeding may be the same restriction producing migraines, TMJ dysfunction, and chronic jaw tension in the adult that child becomes
- Why the infant labeled colicky and the adult who has learned to call their pain normal are often the same person at different points in an arc that nobody connected
- How fascial restriction in newborns can be released gently, often in a single session, and what becomes possible when it is
Moench makes no claim to traditional credentials. What he has is a thirty-year record of results in people who had exhausted every other option - results that hold across every therapist he has trained, in every clinic, with every kind of body that walks through the door. Every Baby Hurts is written for the parent told to hang in there, the provider willing to look where they were never taught to look, and the adult carrying pain they have learned to call normal.
