Your health will be your kid’s

Chubby children can perplex parents, but the solution isn’t a secret. When it comes to diet and exercise, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, reports health.abc4.com. When parents increase their daily activity, children, including teens, increase theirs as well, research from National Jewish Health recently found. In the study, 83 families were given a goal to take 2,000 extra steps, using pedometers to measure activity.

 

When mothers reached or exceeded their goal, children also exceeded their goal. When the mother did not reach her goal, children only achieved half of their goal. Father-child activity was similar.

 

The same goes for weight loss. Keri Boutelle, PhD, associate professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at UC San Diego, studies how parenting skills and styles, along with changing the home food environment, impact a child's weight.

 

 

“Weight change of the parent is the best predictor of child weight change,” says Boutelle. “Parents have to ‘walk their own talk’ to have credibility with their children.”

Leading by example works best, Boutelle says, probably because parents who lose weight themselves are engaging in the same behaviors that the child should engage in.

 

Children, especially, follow the lead of role models. Fathers for boys and mothers for girls are respectively the person children rate they most want to be like, says research from the American Dietetic Association Foundation (ADAF), even more than music and sports celebrities. While that is admittedly heart-warming, it also communicates great responsibility for parents.

 

 

Parents aren’t doing so good when it comes to making nutrition a priority for the family. Only 55 per cent rank nutrition as “very important” when they are shopping, according to surveys. Other potentially dangerous mindsets when shopping include:

 

 

Small children eat what’s in the house and what the rest of the family eats, for the most part. Older children can buy their own food, but what a child buys is probably influenced by what their role models are buying.

 

 

The first step in setting a good example is understanding what type of example your kids need. That same study from the ADAF found that parents are surprisingly bad at this, when it comes to nutritional needs and habits.

 

For example, almost 80 per cent of parents say that their kids eat “all” or “most of the time” because they are hungry. Only 62 per cent of kids say this is actually the case. Kids report that sometimes they eat because they are bored, angry or depressed, and parents underestimate how often this is the case.

 

While they certainly don’t take all the blame, parents should not have eating as their own personal coping mechanisms. Eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. The children are watching. Most damaging is that parents rate their kids’ nutrition higher than kids rate their own nutrition. Don’t assume your child’s diet is healthy enough.

 

A fix for this problem may be talking about nutrition with your kids, but the best step may be simply improving your own nutritional habits to set a good example, research shows.