National Kids’ Week occurs this month
National Kids’ Week occurs this month. Providing a safe, healthy environment in which children can flourish is the focus of this event. Unintentional childhood injury is the number one killer of children ages 14 and under. The National Safe Kids Campaign sponsors a nationwide celebration of child safety and addresses such issues as bicycle safety, drowning, fires and burns, suffocation, poisoning, choking, and falls. For more info contac www.safekids.org.
In addition to these issues, helping children develop a healthy lifestyle maximizes all the possibilities for a fulfilling life. Engaging in regular physical activity that is fun has a protective factor in terms of establishing exercise as a lifelong habit, which contributes to both physical and mental well-being. Exposure to a wide variety of fresh whole foods during childhood while also modeling acceptance of size diversity can lay the foundation for a healthy body and a healthy body image.
Given that the world is filled with war, crime, accidents, natural disasters, disease, and pain, helping children to develop stress hardiness and resiliency is crucial. According to the Journal of Counseling and Development, Vol. 84, “Resiliency is conceptualized as a combination of innate personality traits and environmental influences that serve to protect individuals from the harmful psychological effects of trauma or severe stress, enabling them to lead satisfying and productive lives”. Some of the contributing factors of resiliency include:
- interpersonal skills which help children connect and communicate well with others
- competency, i.e. academic success, creative talents, athletic skills
- high self-regard i.e. the ability to accept positive feedback and filter out negative messages
- helpful life circumstances that contribute to becoming resourceful, strong, and compassionate.
Regardless of which role(s) we play in children’s lives (parent, grandparent, other relative, friend, teacher, coach, mentor), doing whatever we can to provide children with a safe, healthy, nurturing environment is the only way to ensure the future.
Providing a safe, nurturing healthy environment around food can be a challenge in a society where high fat/sugar/salt foods prevail. Encourage healthful eating and a healthy body image.
“Eating well is one of life’s great pleasures. If a child is to be healthy and strong, and fit well into the world, she has to be able to eat the food. At the same time, if she is to keep eating in its proper place as only one of life’s issues, she has to be able to take care of it in a matter-of-fact way.
Too many people today are unsuccessful with eating, and unsuccessful with feeding their children. Parents worry about their children’s eating habits, their growth and weight, their nutrition and their manners. Adults are anxious and ambivalent about their own eating, and those feelings rub off on their parenting with food. They get into struggles with feeding their children, struggles that seemingly have no satisfactory resolution.
To find the middle ground in feeding between rigidity and uninvolvement, I have found it enormously helpful to think in terms of a division of responsibility. Here, suitable for framing, is the golden rule for parenting with food:
Parents are responsible for what is presented to eat
and the manner in which it is presented.
Children are responsible for how much and even whether they eat.”
~Ellyn Satter, R.D., A.C.S.W. author of How To Get Your Kid To Eat . . . But Not Too Much