How to Get Your Child to Live a Healthy Lifestyle

It is no big secret, you want the best for your child, and the best is giving your child a happy and healthy upbringing. To help them develop and grow into healthy young adults, being healthy starts when they are children. Here are a few tips to help you and your child to a happier and healthy lifestyle:

Start young: The sooner you start teaching your child about a living a healthy lifestyle, the easier it will be for them to make better decisions as they get older. You can start showing them a healthy lifestyle as early as when they start walking and talking. Children adopt behaviors and habits pretty quickly, especially exercise and foods.

Educate and Lead: Teaching your child is key. Sitting down with them and letting them know things like why veggies and exercise are beneficial to their health will help them understand. If they understand why being healthy is good, the more likely they are going to accept it and want to do so. Allowing them to help you prepare meals is a good teaching tool. Now once you teach them this means it is also very important that you lead by example. Believe it or not, your children look up to you for everything. If you lead this lifestyle, they will follow.

Make it fun: If you make being healthy a chore, your kids will resist. Make being active fun by signing them for team sports. Not only is it great to get them active, it’s good for socializing and learning at an early age how to work in a team setting. Most kids find veggies intimidating and ‘gross’. You can make eating veggies fun by letting them play with their food. Example, ants on a log: celery with peanut butter and raisins as the ‘ants’. Or simply calling broccoli dinosaur trees can make eating veggies enjoyable.

Starting early, teaching and leading and making a healthy lifestyle fun are great ways to a healthy lifestyle. Eat more veggies and skip the junk food. Sign them up for neighborhood team sports and watch them grow physically and mentally. A healthy kid is a happy kid. They will thank you when they are older. Here’s to a healthy lifestyle!

[About the author: This guest post is contributed by Debra Johnson, blogger and editor of http://www.liveinnanny.com/. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: – jdebra84 @ gmail.com.]