Help Children Live a Healthy Lifestyle

By Janet V. Johnson, MD

Loving Care Pediatrics

More Family/Primary Care Articles

Help Children Live a Healthy Lifestyle

Part 2

Have Them Participate

Teach your children healthy lifestyle habits by having them help create them in your own home. Let them help grocery shop for healthy lunches, send thank-you notes and holiday cards to friends and family, keep up the house, and make decisions. Teaching your children to make the right choices for the family can help them understand everything that goes into creating a positive atmosphere.

Focus On Extracurricular Activities

Extracurricular activities give your children a chance to make new friends, explore new skills and talents, and increase their self-confidence. A healthy lifestyle includes socializing, enhancing skills, learning new talents, and achieving goals. Extracurricular activities allow your child to explore these areas of healthy living in a safe and nurturing environment with children of their own age.

Teach Them Responsibility

Giving your child responsibilities is an important building block for future success. Giving your child responsibilities early teaches them ownership and how to complete tasks required of them, as well as consequences. Giving your child the responsibility of planning their snacks or lunches, or planning breakfast for the family gives them the opportunity to take ownership, and also allows you the opportunity to correct their choices along the way.

Never Use Food As a Reward

Making sure that you are instilling a healthy relationship with food starts with making good choices in the way you present it to your children.

Using food as a reward is one way to create food motivation, which can be detrimental if your child grows up seeing food as a special reward and was not taught how to limit this reward.

Expose Them To Good Influences

The more positive your child's environment, the more positive your child's outlook will tend to be. Expose your child to a positive environment with positive role models, healthy food options, outside activities and intriguing mental challenges.

Make Sure Their School Offers Daily, Quality Physical Education

Quality physical education programs are needed to increase the physical competence, health-related fitness, self-responsibility and enjoyment of physical activity for all students so that they can be physically active for a lifetime. Physical education programs can only provide these benefits if they are well-planned and well-implemented. And consistent! Find out what is available at your child's school.

Lead By Example

One of the best ways to instill a healthy lifestyle in your children is to lead one yourself. Make sure that you are active, healthy, and also explore activities, socializing, and other interests outside of work.