Nowadays, lifestyle of children is different from the
previous generations: children eat a lot of fat, foods with a lot of sugar, and
they don’t spend much time on physical activities. These things make the rate
of obese children increase more and more.
Parents have big responsibility in educating their children
about good health habits, values as well as their behaviors in life. However,
developing healthy eating and drinking habit and practicing physical activities
are things that need a lot of time to solve.
You need to have time and attempt to help children practice
these good habits. Period of preschool education is the suitable time when you
begin to teach children about habits and right behaviors. Since then, encourage
children to pursue a healthy lifestyle. You should begin everything with some
following secrets:
Teach children how to eat and drink with balance
According to many researches, diet with balance plays an
important part in developing mentality as well as physicality. You should
discuss about things that children can choose for their portion. Your children
must understand that choices about food will affect their health directly.
Parents have responsibility to teach their children to know how to give the
wisest decisions. Therefore, you should encourage children to avoid foods that
are rich of calories that are advertised attractively on TV.
Act as a model
Children often learn things that are taking place from life
around them and parents are also their teachers. You need to remember that
action is always more effective than words. As parents, you should pay
attention to habit about clean personal hygiene and standard behaviors to help
children learn and follow.
Eat together
Every day, your family needs to have at least one meal that
has all of the members in family. This thing brings you chance to act as a
model for children in eating and drinking and it also helps children have
positive attitude in choosing food. According to the result of researches, if
children eat and drink with their family regularly, they will get higher
studying result at school. You should have meals in dining room or kitchen,
avoid sitting in front of TV. This is golden principle for family's meal.
Every day, your
family needs to have at least one meal that has all of the members in family.
Let children do the cooking
Allowing children to attend cooking is a good way to change
their choosy eating and drinking habit. You have many ways to give children
chance to attend some small things in house such as playing with children
outside, taking them to go shopping, allowing children to cook their favorite
dish and helping you some things in the kitchen. You can let children to attend
shopping and preparing meals that can help children have a lot of useful
knowledge. As a result, they will have healthy and useful choices for health
when they go out to eat.
Do exercise together
If your children spend much time to play games and they
don’t like physical training activities, you need to explain for them that
physical activities will help body become healthy and have a lot of energy. You
should try to design activities about sport as daily habit of the whole family.
Walking, riding bicycle… are appropriate activities to family. You should limit
children about the time for using computer, watching TV, playing games with
maximum time 2 hours/day. For children from 2 years old to over, you should
encourage them to attend activities with reasonable level and at least 30
minutes/day.
Practice habit about hygiene
Teaching children about how to prevent bacteria is important
thing. You should create simple daily habit for children including activities
about personal hygiene such as brushing teeth, washing hand, using toilet,
bathing… Together with hygiene of body, children also need study about
conserving clothes cleanly and tidily.
You should create
simple daily habit for children such as brushing teeth…
Avoid foods that are bad about nutrient
Drinks that have sugar such as soft drink, fruit juices that
contain pigment and sweetener as well as foods that contain a lot of sugar (cake,
candy) provide a lot of calories and don’t bring any nutritious values. Therefore,
controlling to help children not use a lot of harmful drinks and foods is
problem that many parents must pay attention to. Instead of it, you should let
children drink a lot of water or milk.
Sometimes, you need to be strict
You must be determined in cases that children have sign
about using harmful things or bad habits, for example, smoking cigarettes,
drinking wine…. In these cases, you shouldn’t make concessions with your
children. You should explain to help children understand about mechanism of making
harmfulness of these dangerous things and encourage them to give their
wonderment to solve problem absolutely. In the case that children break rules
that are discussed before, you need to have method to punish appropriately.
Award
When children have good actions or they give up bad habits,
you can consider giving them reward. These are funny sport activities such as
playing bowling or watching film that they wish… However, you shouldn’t use
food as award for children. You need to make children understand that they are
awarded because of attempts and achievements that they have, not ability in
completing their duty.
