Nov 23, 2021
Creating a culture of health benefits your whole family. By modeling and valuing caring for our physical bodies, families can instill healthy lifelong habits and patterns. Eating together has always been a form of human bonding and a force that influences human culture. Many people don’t realize how deeply ingrained their eating habits and patterns are unless they are forced to confront them because of a health crisis. The more healthy habits become a part of people’s daily rhythms when they are young, the fewer things they have to change later!
By bringing your intention to some key areas in your household, you can set your children up for lifelong success. In order to care for your body, you may be cultivating healthy habits around nutrition, hydration, sleep, movement, and stress management. Modeling healthy behaviors is both the quickest and most effective way to teach these habits. Communicating why these things are important and how to set up the foundations of a healthy life will only work if you walk your talk.
Whether you want to make changes for your own health or are mostly thinking about building healthy habits with your children, it helps to tap into your purpose in order to feed your motivation. What is your “Big Why?’ What are the ways that caring for your body here and now will allow you to show up for the people and projects in your life that you want to show up for? What are the ways that working on healthy habits can be an invitation to joy, vitality, and energy in your life? What are the ways that working together will enliven that process? Who do you want to be on this journey with?
It should be obvious that a family’s attitudes toward food, from sourcing food to preparing it to serving it to eating it, would make an enormous impact on what a child learns about food. We have all heard about the obesity epidemic, but there is another epidemic that gets less attention: eating disorders. The number of children who are overly concerned about their weight and who begin dieting at young ages is growing. Both obesity and eating disorders make a life-long impact on health. What are the ways we can encourage our growing and learning eaters to develop healthy habits around nutrition?
Consistency doesn’t mean that you don’t ever have some flexibility in your eating habits. What it does mean is that the bulk of the eating in your household follows some basic nutritional guidelines. If the foods that are available to eat and snack on in your household are all more or less good choices, you will have consistently healthy eaters.
Do you remember that old saying, “Variety is the spice of life?” It’s definitely true when it comes to eating! Having a wide variety of healthy options available and offering a variety of meals can help foster a sense of adventure when it comes to food. Variety also allows children (and adults!) to try new things and to decide on things they both like and dislike. Variety also ensures that you get a wide range of nutrients. We need foods that include the macronutrients, fats and carbohydrates and protein, and we also need a wide variety of foods that contain vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and antioxidants. And last but not least, we need flavor! A variety of foods ensures you have many flavors to explore.
Children need to be able to refuse foods without drama. As anyone with children knows, the quickest way to an argument is to attempt to overpower a child’s autonomy. Children who feel watched and judged about their food choices are far more likely to develop eating disorders than children who are presented with food options in a value-free setting. There are no “good” and “bad” foods. Creating desire around “forbidden foods” and creating shame around enjoyment of certain foods both lead to negative food associations. Instead, stock your home with healthy choices and although you can encourage children to try new foods (repeatedly! It can take 12-15 exposures to a new flavor to decide whether you really like it or not), learn to take their “no thank you” without drama.
Include your children as much as possible in your food journey! Children can help meal plan, shop and help put foods away, help with preparation tasks, or even grow fresh herbs or help in a garden to produce the food you serve in your household. Teaching children how to feed themselves is literally giving them skills for life.
Since our bodies are 70% water, the beverages you choose to stock in your household can make a huge impact on the health of your family. When children grow up with water as their beverage choice, they are spared developing a taste for excessively sweetened sodas. Even fruit juice, which contains the sugar of more fruits than a person could eat in one sitting, stripped of all their fiber, is a less healthy choice than plain water.
That’s not to say that special beverages can’t be a part of celebration and the rituals of home. Whether it’s a hot cup of herbal tea to start the day or wind down to bed, or a bit of sparkling water with a squeeze of lime and a mint leaf, there are ways to use beverages that are deeply enjoyable and can help mark special times and seasons. Choose water as the beverage that everyone drinks at meals, and save the special drinks for special times.
Sleep is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. Far from being a waste of time, consistently getting enough high-quality sleep is necessary for the body and mind to continue to function.
Consistent bedtime routines (for everyone in the household!) can help set your family up for good sleep. Limiting screen time, creating wind-down routines, and setting up dark, cool spaces for sleeping can all create conditions for good sleep.
As anyone with children knows, the one thing you can count on is that just when you think you’ve figured things out, they change. It’s important to keep this in mind when you are working on bedtime routines. Children go through various phases, and may need more or less sleep during those times. Consistency does not have to mean rigidity, and maintaining some flexibility allows you to problem solve as issues arise. Experiment with the rhythms and sleeping situations that work best for your family, and stay open to changing things up as children grow.
If there is one area where our children have much to teach us, it is about movement! Children are movement specialists! They are driven to use their bodies in so many ways, every single day. They seek challenges, they seek to perfect moments by practicing them over and over again, and they spontaneously get up and move when they are allowed the opportunity to listen to their bodies’ messages. By joining your children when they move, you gain the benefits of movement and also the joy of moving for fun, for connection, and for emotional regulation. Movement is one of the best ways to move stress hormones through our bodies.
Embrace movement as family time—swim, bike, dance, walk, hike, climb, jump, and stretch together.
Children learn by imitation. There is no other area where the messages they pick up are more subtle than when it comes to stress management. By intentionally modeling and teaching healthy tools, children learn to regulate their emotional state and can soothe their stressful feelings. Taking breaks, breathing exercises, writing and drawing, talking through experiences (in a non-judgmental and gently curious way), and moving our bodies are all ways to deal with stress and express our emotions. Adults often assume that children are more capable in these areas than they are, and sometimes don’t allow space for the expression of emotion in a healthy way. As a parent, explore what you need to learn in this area and create a home where it is safe to process emotion and return to a self-regulated and calm state.
It is so important to allow children time to play freely in their day. Children often process their emotions through play, and they actually need unstructured time in which to do this. While learning through structured activities can be an important part of life, it’s also essential to build in free time to play. If some of this play happens outdoors, you gain multiple benefits at once. Time in nature is a natural stress reliever, and also encourages people to move and challenge their bodies.
Try choosing just one area in which to implement changes, and invite your family into the process. By working on your health together, you can enjoy one another’s company and build momentum as a family to make healthy choices together. For healthy recipes, with many tips for feeding every member of the household, check out Dr. Kiernan’s e-cookbook, Eating on Purpose.