Recently a news story discussed the diet and exercise list a seven-year-old had prepared and the public reaction was largely sadness and anger, including the reaction from the mother. Use the suggestions below to craft a healthy method of discussing your ideas about diet and exercise with your children.
Spend less time talking about diet and exercise and more time incorporating healthy eating and exercise habits into your family life in order to support a healthy approach to diet and exercise in your children.
Spend less time educating your child about exercise and focus on the fun your child can have instead. One of the problems with exercise education is that it's presented by adults to children. Children frequently enjoy moving and labeling movement as exercise or work or a scheduled obligation can undercut their natural instinct to move.
Self-examine rather than blaming when it comes to addressing your child's concerns about getting enough exercise or eating the right foods. In the recent news coverage about the diet and exercise list a child wrote, the mother concluded that it was rooted in her daughter's experience with a friend who was dieting rather than considering ways she might have contributed to her child's concerns.
Consider whether your own prejudices are influencing how you discuss diet and exercise with your children, especially gender-based biases. It would be interesting to see how this mother would have reacted if the list had been produced by a boy instead of a girl.
Never allow anyone to refer to your child as fat or obese in front of your child. If you're bringing your child into the doctor for a checkup and you know your child is overweight, specifically instruct the doctor's staff that you don't want your child spoken about as obese in front of the child. Instead, accept a referral to a dietitian or ask how the doctor or his staff intends to discuss your child's weight with him or her before you go into the office.
If your child is bullied at school by people who call him or her fat, address the bullying rather than the child's weight. Bullying can occur for any variety of reasons including but not limited to weight so that addressing the bullying can empower your child to react to bullies instead of focusing on losing weight so that he or she won't be bullied.
Consider whether your supervision of your child is holding back his or her ability to exercise. For instance, if you insist on finishing your morning work before your children go outside to play, perhaps you should hire a house cleaner so that you can take your children outside more frequently.
The recent news coverage of a mom's distress at finding a diet and exercise list in her seven-year-old daughter's room is a good reason to examine your own strategy for raising your children with a healthy awareness about diet and exercise. Use the suggestions above for creating healthy ways of communicating the importance of diet and exercise to children.