In the months before we welcome our most precious packages into the world, we spend time planning: planning nursery colors and wardrobes, baby-proofing, and planning for daycares and career changes. As parents, we pass on so much more than just our genes. And as we plan for our children’s futures, we can make the choice to make positive changes in ourselves and pass along healthy life habits that they will carry with them long after we’ve packed them off for college.
Make Mealtime Colorful
Eating colorful meals isn’t just fun for kids; it’s also healthy. You can get around kids’ aversion to vegetables by starting them off on a healthy diet early and making mealtime fun. Bento box lunches are a great way to incorporate food items that kids may otherwise shy away from in creative, cute ways, and introducing healthy snacks at a young age will encourage kids to bypass fast-food lines or junky snacks in favor of grabbing a banana or bowl of grapes and passing on fries in favor of fresh-steamed broccoli.
Breakfast: The Most Important Meal of the Day
Enforcing regular mealtimes and snacks early in childhood can increase the likelihood that your kids will keep their good meal habits with them when they get older. And of all of those meals, breakfast is proven to be the most important. A healthy, low-fat breakfast not only gives kids the boost to jump start their mental and physical energy for the day, but it has also been shown to help with weight maintenance and lowering risks of chronic illnesses. A study by Harvard Medical School shows that skipping breakfast can quadruple your chances of becoming obese, and high-fiber content in healthy breakfast cereals can help reduce the risks of heart disease and diabetes, among others.
The Family That Eats Together
Eating breakfast together is a great way to chat about daily schedules, plans, coming activities and assignments, and to keep a pulse on your child’s life. But regularly eating together has been shown to have many long-term benefits for children. It can be hard to find time in our busy schedules to sit and share a meal, but according to research by the University of Florida, these invaluable experiences can lead to:
stronger family bonds
happier, well-adjusted children
more nutritious meals (for both parents and kids)
kids who are less likely to be overweight or obese
children who are statistically less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol
Get Physical
It is so important to get kids off the couch and outdoors. Children who watch more than an hour or two a day are at greater risk for poor school performance, emotional and social problems, attention disorders, weight problems, including obesity, and irregular sleep patterns. Children should have limited TV, video game and electronics times and should be encouraged to engage in 60 minutes of physical activity per day, even if broken up into 15-minute sessions.
Not every child will take to sports, and some dread the thought of even participating in gym class, but helping your children find physical activities that they enjoy can lead to healthier behaviors later in life. As a parent, it’s important to expose them to a range of physical activities, whether it’s swimming or playing at a playground so that they can stay fit and get their daily dose of Vitamin D. And by planning family activities, it’s a great way to boost our own physical fitness, which will keep us around for our children longer.
Read Every Day
Reading and writing are two of the most important skills that your child can develop and will be strong determiners for their success in school and later on in their careers. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, developing a daily family reading routine — which may start with bedtime stories for young children and toddlers and evolve into set family reading times later in life — can help boost your child’s love of reading. It’s important to start young — the AAP recommends beginning a daily reading routine by the time your child is six months old and choosing books that are interesting to them so that reading becomes an enjoyable treat, rather than a chore.
Hydrate in a Healthy Way
More than 60 percent of our body mass is water, and staying hydrated is essential to good health and body functions. But how we hydrate our bodies is just as important as how much we hydrate. For young children, sodas and juice drinks are loaded with sugar, caffeine and other additives that are unhealthy and can lead to obesity. Teaching your children at a young age to enjoy drinking water is a great way to keep them healthy and avoid weight problems later in life. For many children, the sugar rushes and crashes that come with these drinks can cause behavioral issues, and opting for healthier beverages can help with regulating schedules for naptime and bedtime, as well as keeping them from feeling sick and cranky when their sugar crash hits them.
Focus on the Positive
Kids internalize the messages we send to them about their worth, and they learn how to cope with stress and disappointments in life by watching their parents. As a parent, it’s important to instill in children a strong sense of self-worth, offering praise for accomplishments, teaching them a sense of ambition, and making sure that they know that they are each unique and perfect creatures in their own ways, despite any challenges, disabilities or setbacks that they may encounter in life. Managing our own stress and passing on stress management tools early in life will help them bounce back faster and more completely from disappointments in life and may reduce their risk of developing dangerous behaviors, including smoking and habitual drinking, later in life.
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