Keeping Your Kids Active

What we first think of when we talk about child development is usually the mental and the emotional aspects of a child as she grows and matures. What we sometimes fail to realize is the fact that a child’s development also hinges on her all-important physical progress.

Still developing physically, a child needs a good amount of physical activities to grow into a physically well-balanced person later. Aside from its built-in natural advantages, a well-balanced physical development has its own list of benefits.

Benefits

Like in most persons, physical activity burns away calories in children and makes them achieve an ideal weight (as against being fat or obese). The sugar levels in the blood are kept in balance and this benefits the kids with diabetes or those with risks for the disease.

With burned calories, blood pressure and cholesterol levels are lowered. With physical activity, children develop strength and endurance. Overall, it improves sleep and mental growth in young developing bodies.

Activity Types

At age 6, children already need around an hour (60 minutes) of daily physical activity. These activities need not be done in one go but can be staggered during the day in short bursts.

Like adults, kids also need 3 types of regular exercises: aerobics, strengthening of the muscles, and strengthening of the bones. These can be incorporated within the daily 60-minute physical activity.

The aerobics (or cardio) makes the heart and lungs work. These include activities like running on a treadmill, dancing, skateboarding, basketball, swimming and biking, among others.

Activities for strengthening of the muscles (for building and maintaining muscles) include gymnastics, climbing, pushups, sit-ups, and pull-ups in bars. The exercises for strengthening the bones (making it grow and become strong) include jumping rope, skipping, running, and playing such sports as basketball, volleyball, or tennis.

Age-Specific Overview

Preschoolers can develop their motor skills in such simple activities as ball-throwing, doing obstacle courses, tag-playing, hopping around, riding training bikes, kicking ball or plain dancing around. Organized sports are not yet recommended because of the complex rules and their short attention span.

Parents of school age children need to look for sport and non-sport activities that they will fit in and enjoy and can be successful at them. These activities may include sports as basketball and baseball, some martial arts, hiking, biking, and other outdoor activities with physical mobility.

For teenagers, there are various choices for them to become active. With their almost-developed mental and physical makeup, they can do any school sports, skateboarding and just about any other physical activities that can challenge both their mental and physical skills.

Last Notes

To succeed in implementing physical activity with the kids, parents would also need to be successful in enforcing limited screen time for all age groups. Screen time here is the general activity of watching TV, DVDs, videos, playing computer games and Internet surfing.

Limited screen time can be an hour or two, based on the premise that these activities are usually done sitting still. The idea is that the activity is in complete contrast to being physically active. As parents, you can also help keep promote the values you want by being physical role models yourselves.

Family Meals and Child Development

Family meals with every one in the family present have been known to have some markedly positive effects on the overall development of a child. The most obvious signs that research had cited are the physical and the emotional aspects: lower risks in obesity, a marked drop in substance abuse and lesser incidence in eating disorders.

The positive effects regarding child development is also clearly displayed as well in the mental side of the equation. It could also be included in the list that children who had family meals with their families have better grades, and had successfully graduated, at least in high school.

Better Viewpoints

Research had also discovered that children who have regular dinners with their father, mother, and their siblings are better equipped in understanding and in acknowledging the agreed-upon parameters and boundaries given by their parents.

With better emotional perspectives, they have stayed away from high-risk behaviors outside the homes. There is a co-relation of this decrease to the amount of time spent with their families.

Nutritional Outlook

Getting past the big advantages of having family meals, the other advantage is that shared meals with the family tend to be more on nutrition. One reason given is that the children who have regular family meals are not likely to snack on unhealthy foods.

The kids who took part in regularly-held family dinners are also known to be less likely in engaging unhealthy habits such as smoking and drug use. As later adults, they have been known to have healthier diets.

Other Findings

With familiar conversations, research discovered that this had helped improve the reading abilities of the children (and expand their vocabularies) in all the socio-economic groups. This could be because the dinners let every member of the family have their say about the day’s events outside their circle.

It had also been discovered that the children (aged seven to eleven years) who spent big amounts of time eating their meals with their families did quite well in their achievement tests in their schools.

In another report, preschoolers who also had regular dinners with the members of their family did very well in skills involving language as compared to those who didn’t dine often enough with their families. The idea was that mealtimes with their families had afforded the preschoolers the unique chance of listening and conversing with the rest of their family members.

Benefits

The occasion of having dinner with the whole family provides one of the most important aspects of family life – communication. Without the distractions of television, computers and phones, parents impart healthy communication values (and habits) to everyone.

In having your children get engaged in the conversation, you can effectively teach the youngsters the art of listening and empathizing. Most important, of course, is that the children are given their chances to say their minds aloud.

The exercise alone allows them to share their voices (and ideas) with everyone in the family. The dinners can help parents recognize early signs of eating disorders or some other issues.

Some people term it today as bonding.