A negative habit once formed, becomes one of the hardest things to break and requires a truly focused and dedicated approach if one is to change back to his earlier state. As such, it becomes extremely important that children are helped to acquire good habits as early as possible. Indeed the younger minds are more conducive to forming habits easily and thus it is always easier to teach them to learn good habits, so that later in their life they do not end up snacking on a candy bar or a bag of potato chips, or talk with their mouths open. Following are some tips that shall help you to instill healthy, good habits in your child, where both of you can have fun, instead of making the whole process tedious and frustrating.

Eat Right, Eat healthy

Though it’s never an easy task to compete with McDonald’s or any of the other fast food fixes, yet it is extremely important that children are exposed to healthy foods early in their lives so that their diet consists more vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals; for the more energy they get from the diet, the more active they can stay throughout the day.

Action Plan

  • Working on the goal is pretty easy and all you need to do is to buy healthy foods and make them accessible at home. It would be a good idea to keep nutritious, but tasty snacks at home like neatly sliced vegetables, fruits, whole-grain crackers, pretzels and trial mixes. Encourage them to drink lots of water and milk.
  • It often helps to explain to your children in a simplified manner why forming a healthy diet plan is important. My friend’s son wolfs down his broccoli or carrots without a complaint because they are referred to him as “brain food” or “makes you strong food”!
  • Making healthy food fun to have makes it easier for your child to develop healthy food habits. You could try making his meals colorful and attractive by inculcating vegetables in various colors and shapes and perhaps even making faces and tiny cartoon characters out of the vegetables. Inventing exotic names for each dish may also help.

Fitness through fun and games

It is recommended that children undergo physical activity of at least 90 minutes each day. But these days too many kids prefer to play basketball on their computer, rather than at the park. The situation needs to be reversed.

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