If you’re a parent, you know how hard it can be to get your kid to eat their vegetables, wash their hands, take a bath, or stop touching their face. Kids are curious and kids are stubborn, so it’s not unexpected that you have to make deals or bargain to get them to do things you need them to do. The problem is that making sure your kid is healthy, and thus happy, is a non-negotiable thing. Being a good parent isn’t about doing the bare minimum, it’s about excelling at providing your child with a bright future.
That bright future is predicated on making sure they do those tasks and those responsibilities they have to do. Partially it’s due to the fact that it makes you a good parent, but also because you want to instill good habits in them while they are younger. Learning these things at a younger age makes them more ingrained as they get older. If you’re a parent who needs some help making sure your child is healthy, here are 7 ways you can do accomplish that goal
1. Teach Them Proper Hygiene
Never has it been more apparent that proper hygiene is a must. Washing hands, taking baths, and safer habits are all things you should be teaching your kid from a young age. Washing hands with soap for 20 seconds is one that a child can learn easily, but getting them to take baths and make sure they rinse behind their ears is more difficult. Regardless of how stubborn your child maybe when it comes to touching their face, touching public surfaces, or playing in the mud, you have to make sure they understand that bacteria can and will make them sick and to be hygienic.
2. Help Create a Healthier Diet for Them
Diet is also a difficult task to corral your kid into eating healthy. What you like and dislike when it comes to food or beverages begins young and can persist well into adulthood. You might not like Brussel sprouts because your mom would make them for more meals than not, but you should introduce healthy vegetables and fruits gradually into your child’s diet. There are plenty of recipes and techniques out there to help sneak in healthy food for kids so it’s becoming much easier for parents to teach healthy food habits. This is likely the hardest thing to help a kid learn about being healthy, but it is also one of the best ways to make sure they grow up fitter, happier, and better.
3. Introduce Them to Vitamins
If the diet is too hard, and it will test you, then there are solutions. The closest thing to helping you conquer the food dilemma is introducing vitamins and/or health supplements to help your kid. This selection of best supplements in Canada would be helpful for a parent that needs to get their kid more vitamin D because of winter, a parent with a lactose-intolerant child could take calcium and vitamin C, and a girl could take iron because of the natural deficiency. The solutions to diet aren’t solved by vitamins or supplements, but they can help manage some of the shortfalls when it comes to the food they are or aren’t eating.
4. Foster Strong Mental Health From an Early Age
Not all health is physical and we now know that mental health problems begin at younger ages than we once thought. Mental health can be a lifelong struggle and helping children cope with problems they can’t understand is not easy. Asking a child why they lash out, why they cry, or why they feel the way they feel is difficult for parents because children have a much more limited understanding of their subconscious and psychology. There is no surefire solution, but opening up an accessible dialogue to talk to your child about their feelings and emotions is a good way to help make sense of their mental state.
5. Encourage Active Play
Technology is great and there’s no knock on having access to the internet on tablets, phones, computers, instant streaming, and all of the software that makes our lives easier, but it’s also causing higher rates of sedentary lifestyles. Kids need to be active for at least an hour a day, and it’s harder now when they have video games or TV to interact with. Encouraging active play by participating in things they want to do outside is helpful, and so is enrolling them in sports. Anything to get your child to that minimum of one hour of exercise, and encouraging them to move around more during the day is a must for their health.
6. Introduce a Wider Variety of Foods
Going back to the point about a healthy diet, it’s also about the variety of foods they are eating. It has been shown that a diverse diet helps the body handle different kinds of nutrients, absorb more nutrients, and prevent issues like stomach or intestinal problems. Building a healthy diet is easy, and so is a diverse diet, so introducing more whole foods and a better range of options will help you figure out what they do and don’t like as well as giving their body a more expanded palette that prevents health problems.
7. Focus on Sleep and Rest
Finally, getting your kid to bed is also a chore. They have a lot of pent-up energy that they need to burn off (active play can help), but it’s necessary that kids get the right amount of sleep on a daily basis. It’s also good that they take naps and that they have a consistent sleep schedule. Better quality sleep helps their body recover from rest, avoid succumbing to sickness and synthesize the nutrients in their food.
The life of a parent is surely a never-ending list of chores. Most importantly is ensuring your child is happy and healthy, which is often easier said than done. Looking at this list of 7 ways to keep them healthy, you can see how it’s possible and some strategies for getting them to a point where they are following your rules.
