How To Keep Your Children Healthy

As we grow older, we learn how important it is to take care of ourselves. We learn all kinds of ways to do it, including eating well, exercising regularly, and visiting a doctor when we are feeling unwell to ensure nothing is seriously wrong. As children, we haven’t yet learned those skills, and we don’t have the knowledge to keep ourselves in the best condition. This is why children need to rely on their parents and carers to do everything for them and keep them as healthy as possible. Here are some useful tips on how to keep your kids healthy as they go through life.

Photo by Yan Krukov from Pexels

Exercise

Exercise is something that many children – although not all – love to do anyway. They enjoy playing sports and running around, and you can use this to your advantage when it comes to keeping them fit and healthy. Even children who don’t enjoy playing outside so much can have fun if you choose the right kind of exercise. Make the exercise fun and try to do it as a family if you can, and you can all get fitter at the same time.

Alternatively, you can enroll your child in kids karate classes or similar afterschool activities. As well as getting plenty of exercise, your children will make friends, learn discipline, and have something to look forward to.

Enough Sleep

Something that can have a seriously detrimental effect on a child’s health is lack of sleep. It is more than just being able to concentrate at school and learn new things – lack of sleep can mean that the metabolism is out of sync, and this leads to obesity because your body cannot regulate its own intake of food. Obesity is a dangerous condition at any stage of life, but for children, it can cause significant social issues as well as health-related ones, and they can be bullied, for example.

It isn’t always easy to persuade children that bedtime is a good idea, which is why you should explain to them why sleep is so important. This is when the body has a chance to reset after the day that has just happened, and, for children, it is when bones can grow. This can make them much more likely to want to go to bed.

Eating Well

A healthy, balanced diet is essential to keep children healthy. Parents should understand that they won’t always be around when their children eat – they aren’t at school at lunchtime, for example, and they can’t be at their child’s friend’s house when they are eating there. Knowing this is important because if you try to control every single aspect of feeding your child, you can have issues – they just won’t want to listen to you.

Being flexible is the best thing you can do. Children need to eat healthily, and if you can work on what is known as the ’80-20 rule’, you can help a lot. This means checking what they are eating 80 percent of the time and letting them have more freedom for 20 percent of the time. The last thing you want to do is make your child’s relationship with food a difficult or complicated one.

*contributed post*