When it comes to family wellness, sermons are always better demonstrated than preached. It’s important that both you and your partner educate your children so that you can lay the foundations for their present and future wellbeing, but this need to be done through modelling attitudes and behaviours, and making wellness fun.
Firstly, make sure your children know that exercise is important by making the time for activity every day, regardless of how convenient it is. Unless you’re ill, or having a once-in-a-blue-moon rest day, don’t allow yourself any excuses and your children will see how vital it is for better wellness. On top of this, you need to make healthy food choices for you and your children, even if they demand more popular sugary and fat-laden snacks. How you eat will make more of an impression on your children than battling with them over individual meals.
Next, respond to situations with a calm, clear perspective, seeking the best outcome in any situation and not letting yourself react to negative stressors, such as annoying people or money worries, wherever possible. You can’t avoid bad times, or shielding your children from them, but you can show your children how to deal with them – with panache, serenity, and, most importantly of all, humour.
Finally, make wellness fun by playing some educational games with your kids. You could teach your children about the basics of healthy foods by getting them to draw or build a pyramid, making sure they know that the top will have to be lighter than the bottom for good balance. Then together, put foods into different levels of the pyramid so they know which they should eat more of, and then make sure the quantities of foods on their plates matches the food on their pyramid.
You could also try teaching them by cutting out pictures of cars, and asking them things like ‘When you are a big person, do you want a body like a RACE CAR or one of the clunker ones?’, ‘Could you put any old fuel in a car?’ and ‘What do you do to take care of the car?’ Then, relate the car maintenance to wellness. Letting a battery ‘recharge’ could relate to getting plenty of sleep, cleaning the car is similar to why we bathe, brush, and shampoo. Think of as many comparisons as possible before starting the game – the list is endless!
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