Teaching Healthy Habits To Your Children

Children pick up more of our personalities than many of us are willing to admit. It’s true that our genetic markers can somehow turn into behaviour traits (in the hit BBC show Peaky Blinders, a character says to another “you have your father’s devilishness, and your mother’s common sense. Let your mother win.”) But it’s not just that, our lessons and the means in which we set an example can have a great effect.

Never teach a child to cook or to prepare simple meals for themselves, and they’ll have a hard time surviving on healthy food when they leave the house for the first time. The same applies to tidying the home, road rage, and a range of other factors that influence our children without us knowing.

This is why it’s so essential to practice what you preach, and also to develop better methods of teaching healthy habits to your children. If you can do this, then you can keep them on the right path as they blossom into worthwhile adults.

Let’s see how that works:

Self-Care

It’s important you teach them self-reliance and self-care. This might be going to their room to cool off after an argument with their sibling, the ability to ask for help and vent their frustrations with hard homework, or how to properly wash their face as a teenager and care for their Invisalign. A little self-care can go a long way. While you wouldn’t expect a young child to brush their teeth alone, say, there’s always something they can do to help themselves feel a little more autonomous. It’s all about finding the right, small thing they can care for at their age, with your supervision of course. 

Healthy Eating

Kids become accustomed to the diet they are given. If you’re continually giving them oven chips and pizza, they will start to gain a dislike for vegetables. If they have an important vegetable food group with their meal each night, it becomes the norm, and they can become familiar with it. Issues should not be ignored but should be worked through with a child nutritionist or a specialist able to reverse harmful food preferences or neuroticisms. Healthy eating will quite literally determine the length and quality of their lives, so it’s best to prevent this from becoming a lesson they have to learn in adulthood.

Temperance

Not everyone can be blessed with a saint-like temper. But it’s important you show your children how to vent their frustrations in a worthwhile manner, without acting out. This might be teaching them to count to ten and breathe deeply, small meditative tricks, or avoid showing any sign of aggression yourself such as in being cut up in traffic, or when our spouse is being overtly annoying. A little temperance can go a long way here, and you’ll surely understand that in the long term.

With these tips, you’ll be certain to teach healthy habits to your young children.

This is a collaborative post