For Healthy Family Living, Parents Set the Gold Standard

August 19, 2009

happy-family Perhaps the best gift we can give our children as they grow toward adulthood is helping them to establish healthy habits.

Certainly, as veteran parents know, this is no easy task. From cartoon programing, and in so many other ways, our children are subjected to the relentless attempts of food manufacturers and purveyors, to convince them that the good life cannot be found at the bottom of a bag of vegetables. Rather M&M’s and Chips Ahoy, and an endless array of fast food, and sugar-packed soft drinks are far more reliable sources of happiness.

Early on in life, no later, and usually well before age two, your child will begin to voice his or her own opinion about food likes and dislikes. Before that time, concerned parents need to begin the process of establishing healthy food habits.

Unfortunately the trap that most new parents fall into is the all or nothing dynamic. On one end of this scale is bringing all the wrong foods into the home and placing virtually no limits on what the child desires out of the home.

The polar opposite is the parent who keeps a watchful eye that their child not join the other children in a slice of birthday cake topped with a small scoop of chocolate ice cream.

The simple truth is that for most parents and children the establishment of healthy habits will lay somewhere between these two poles. Each individual parent will have to decide just how that balance is established. Here are three healthy rules to consider establishing in your home that should help to get the job done.

1. Remember always that 70 percent of the calories we consume are found in the home. This of course is an average, but the point is a powerful one. The most important line of defense is our front door. If you load the pantry with 24-can boxes of soft drinks and family size bags of chips and high calorie, low nutritional value foods, your children will pay the price in unwanted pounds and potentially dangerous health consequences.

2. Surround the kids with healthy options. A common complaint about healthy options is that a pint of fresh strawberries for dessert can cost considerably more than a box of cookies. Depending on where in the country you are there can be a lot of truth in that lament. So, no pun intended, think outside the box. First there are almost always choices of fruits that are on sale on any given day. Apples one day, plums another, blueberries a third. Nothing on sale? Go for canned fruits in light syrups. The purists will tell you that if you’re buying anything less than a $2 organically grown apple that your wasting your time. Nonsense. Canned peaches and bottled (no sugar added) apple sauce are much better snack choices than bags of chips and boxes of cookies.

3. Finally, don’t discount the importance of motion. For thousands of years we never had to think about our physical activity. Carrying water from the village well, or beating clothes against river rocks, not to mention dozens of other daily tasks, was enough to keep us fit. Today, those times are long gone. So parents need to take the lead in getting kids to move, move, move. Granted, for some kids that’s not a problem. But for well over half of all children, parking themselves for the day on a comfy couch and watching television, playing video games, surfing the net, and on and on is a daily reality when school is not in session. This is a tragedy, because our bodies were built for motion. Here again the parent sets the standard, from family hikes, to bike rides, even if it’s just playing an interactive video tennis game on a too cold or too wet of a day, children move when they see their parents in motion.

The gift of teaching your children to eat well, while enjoying the occasional slice of cake and bowl of ice cream, and getting them moving, can establish a pattern of healthy living that lasts a lifetime. Never mind if you regret not starting sooner. It’s true that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of all of your lives. So it’s never too late to take a new and better path to a longer, happier, and healthier life.

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Sex Education, Part 2: Answering Tough Questions