Raising Healthy Children: A Family Affair

It is easy to blame media, schools, supermarkets and peer pressure for imposing unhealthy lifestyle habits on our children but the truth is parents can have an enormous role in deconstructing those habits and replacing them with healthy ones. It all starts with our mindset. How easy we feel it is to maintain a healthy lifestyle? Do we think with our busy lifestyle it is another impossible parenting challenge? Is our view of health a holistic one or we look at it as separate phenomena from other parts of our lives? I say if we as parents have a clear and unified vision of a healthy lifestyle and take it as serious as supporting our children in staying competitive academically, athletically, etc, it won't be as impossible as it seems. We can raise a family where each of us (including our children) can be an accountability agent in helping  the rest of us stay healthy. The important thing is to acknowledge that IT IS A FAMILY AFFAIR. 

Kiddos love nothing more than spending some quality time with their mamas and pappas. Right? Then lets use that quality time to instill healthy lifestyle habits in them. My focus in this post is on healthy eating and physical activity and I want to share three tips that I have found most useful with my family:

Make it a ritual to eat at least one meal a day, together. Make it a joyous experience. Turn all electronics down and make kids appropriate conversations! (Don't worry, your sophisticated topics can wait till after your kiddos are excused from the table.) Have your children help set the table. It teaches them responsibility, they feel involved and proud, and they get more excited to eat. Have them help you make the salad even if you know they wont touch it. Make up stories of the food on the table. For younger kiddos, be as imaginative as possible. For older ones, share how the food reached your table from the farm. Take turns with your children to tell the stories. My daughter's salad many nights is nothing but four leaves of romaine lettuce : mama lettuce, papa  lettuce, Lily Lettuce, and the newly addition, usually nested inside mama lettuce, the baby lettuce. She talks with them and enjoys us being part of her stories. Don't set expectations high for what and how much they eat. Rest assure that even if you are not getting positive results in beginning, they will gradually learn to enjoy a family meal with you and that is priceless. It is very important for them to witness their parents eating the same healthy food that is in front of them while having a pleasant time. 

Dance or do some other sort of mood lifting physical activity with them at least 20 minutes a day: Dedicate your whole self (physically and mentally) to this activity and you will be able to take that 20 minutes into account as part of your daily exercise. Bring out your inner child to play and dance with your real child! Let them have a blast together. Find out what kind of activities excite your child and focus on them. Every once in a while, invite them to try a new activities or re-try something they disliked before. Set them for success and feeling confident  and if they hesitate to do something, do not push! Let it go and try sometime else. My little one seems to hate riding her tricycle. She loves loves loves dancing though so that is what we do mostly every night. Maybe once in a week or two, we bring out the tricycle again hoping that this time she will jump on it. It is still in our dream list though. We learned not that easy that for the sake of her confidence and our own peace, it is best to have the environment ready and opportunities available BUT let her initiate in her won pace. 

Read children's books with nutrition and physical activity themes for them: Do not assume that it is a boring topic. You never know how they connect with a book the same way you never know how they connect and get entrained by the packaging of a toy instead of the toy itself:) I got this book called "good enough to eat" by " Lizzy Rockwell" from amazon for my daughter and right after I received it, I put it away. I thought its too early for her but one day she found the book in the office and asked me to read it for her. It was around Halloween. Of all the pages, information, and images in the book, the one page that grabbed her attention was this:

From the book: "Good Enough To Eat"  by Lizzy Rockwell

Not because of the amazing content thought! As soon as she saw the illustration, she said: "they are having a Halloween party!" like she revealed the unknown secret of the book! This book has been a favorite ever since. Papa and I refer to the book every time we want to remind her how important it is to eat our fruits and vegetables. The point is, she found her own way to connect with the book and we found great content that we know she can gradually grasp and put into use!

How do you encourage your children to stay physically healthy? 

Our Role as Parents

We hear a lot from parents complaining about their children's eating habits whether it is overeating, undereating, or eating the wrong food. Mealtime is one the most frustrating times of the day for some parents to the degree that after a while, they give up. Parents let their children decide what they want to eat, they sometimes choose to eat separate from their kids in order to have a more relaxed mealtime, or they try to entertain kids with TV, iPhone, iPad, etc in order for them to bite on some nutritious food. Eating or not eating the right food, children grow up to be young adults and they gradually take charge of the kind of food that enters their body. We see healthy young adults, as well as those with all kinds of eating disorders from Anorexia and Bolimia to obesity and being overweight. Then weight struggle begins and in most cases never ends: Rarely satisfied with their body image, they do a lot of yo-yo dieting, starvations, or emotional eating, putting too much stress on their digestive system.

You see, our eating habits as adults has so much to do with the environment that we grew up in. If we were only fed junk or nutrient-free food as kids or if our childhood mealtime memories remind us of nothing but stress of being forced to eat something we didn't like or witnessing our parents argue and fight or even each family member eating separate, do you think we naturally and voluntarily make the best food choices? No! Even if one day we decide to get healthy, that will take an incredible amount of effort to change our old habits.

Do you think there is a better way to raise children that are mindful of the food they eat? In what ways do you think we can raise such mindful children? I will gradually share my thoughts and findings on this subject and I would love to hear your thoughts as well! My dream is for us to create a happy AND healthy environment at home that teaches and encourages our children to care about what and how they feed their body. Stay tuned for my upcoming posts....

Portion size 101: how much food your whole kiddo needs to eat?

As I will mainly write about children and food here , I would like to clarify some basics related to children's food. On top my list of basics stands servings and portion size. Being mindful of how much we feed our children compared to the amount suggested by nutrition experts is important. We neither want to underfeed, nor do we want to overfeed our children as both extremes can cause health issues. So what is the proper portion size and how many servings of each food group can we offer them? Here is the answer:

Suggested portion sizes for children aged 1 to 10

If cups and ounces are not your usual measuring tools, no worries. You can use balls, dices, and your computer mouse  instead :) Your child may even enjoy learning about your new measuring tools and who knows? Maybe you end up feeding her half a cup more vegetables if she get too excited!

What are your thoughts? Do you feel your child eat enough everyday?