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Is Your Child a Healthy Weight?

About one in three American kids is either overweight or obese, according to the American Heart Association. Obesity rates in children has more than tripled between 1971 and 2011. We’re now at a stage where obesity is the number one health concern among parents – and rightfully so.

But what exactly is a healthy weight for children? That can be a difficult question for parents to answer. Conflicting messages from doctors and the media can leave parents scratching their heads. After all, every body is different, right? A healthy weight for one child may not be healthy for another.

overweight child

Using BMI to Determine if Your Child is a Healthy Weight

Measuring the child’s body fat level is a better way to determine whether he or she is at a healthy weight. We can do this by measuring a child’s BMI.

What is BMI?

BMI stands for body mass index, and it assesses your child’s weight to height ratio. It’s not a 100% accurate way to determine body fat, but there is evidence that BMI correlates to direct measurement.

Some of you may already be familiar with BMI calculators, and you may have even used one to see if you’re a healthy weight. But BMI is measured differently in children, so it’s crucial to use the right calculator to get accurate results.

How to Calculate BMI in Children

The easiest way to calculate your child’s BMI is to use an online calculator, like the one offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The calculator will ask you the following questions:

  • Birth date
  • Sex
  • Date of measurement
  • Weight, rounded to the nearest 1/4 pound
  • Height, rounded to the nearest 1/8 inch

Once you’ve entered this information, the calculator will determine your child’s BMI.

  • Underweight: < 5th percentile
  • Close to being overweight: 85th-95th percentile
  • Overweight: > 95th percentile

If you use the CDC’s calculator, the results page will let you know whether your child is a healthy weight, overweight or underweight.

When measuring your child’s height and weight, make sure that you remove shoes, bulky clothing and any other items that may add weight or height.

Helping Your Child Maintain a Healthy Weight

No matter whether your child is overweight or a healthy weight, it’s important to encourage healthy habits. Keeping kids active now when they’re young will help instill good habits that last a lifetime.

How can you help your child maintain a healthy weight?

Get Outdoors and Get Moving

kids footballStaying physically active is the best way to help a child maintain a healthy lifestyle and weight. Help your child find an activity they love, and encourage them to engage in that activity on a regular basis.

Playing at the park, riding a bike, running, playing sports and even dancing can get a child moving and burning calories.

Exercise will help your child maintain a healthy weight and a healthy mental state, too.

For example just 30 minutes of exercise on a rowing machine is shown to raise serotonin levels.

Limit Screen Time

More kids are spending time indoors and on their phones than ever before. Whether they’re playing games or updating their Snapchat, children are glued to their screens.

Parents can encourage kids to stay physically active by limiting screen time to just a few hours a day – unless more time is needed for school work.

Apps are available to help parents log and keep track of their child’s screen time.

Stay Hydrated

Providing healthy food options is an obvious way to keep your child at a healthy weight, but many parents overlook the importance of water.

Sports drinks, sodas and even fruit juice contain high amounts of sugar, which translates to more calories. Encourage your child to drink water instead of sugary drinks.

 

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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.

 

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Getting Your Kids Eat Healthy School Lunches

With regards to nutrition, there might be trouble when your kid goes to school and takes her lunch there. Although they have shown much improvement through the years, most menus for school lunches do not exactly have the most ideal foods for your growing child.

 

There might be a couple of solutions to your problem. One, is packing your child’s school lunch to ensure she gets the right nutritional food combination (Some schools don’t allow this.) or some people choose the food for their kids at the counter (a tricky proposition from your child’s point of view and that of the school).

 

The best solution is getting your kid be thoroughly informed about food and nutrition. They would then know which food is right for them. All of these, of course, starts at home.

healthy school lunch 

 

Food Values

 

Contrary to what most people think, eating is not intuitive. Actually, eating is considered as another learned behavior. What children learned to eat at home will be what they will prefer as adults. Habits stick.

 

However, we are now presently assaulted with so much advertising from corporate food makers. Without developed proper eating habits (which includes the right foods), we succumb to these barrage from all media.

 

These, too, affects our children as well, including the very important decisions in the choice of their food. School lunches are only part of the total media saturation currently in place for sodas, processed food, and many other unhealthy food choices.

 

New Food Habits

 

Starting your kids, the habit of knowing and choosing the right food will take some time. It will also take some work from you. Kids are kids, and they are always inclined to try new things.

 

Working on that premise, you can begin by introducing your growing child to new dishes that are healthy alongside those foods that are familiar to them. You can introduce soups and salads and some fruits they know but are not used to eating.

 

Click Here for Healthy Lunch Ideas for Kids.

 

By Example

 

The best part of the educational process is consuming these foods yourself. Seeing adults do it will not need a big push to get the child to try it themselves. Unconsciously, especially seeing you and other adults enjoying them, your child will do so themselves.

 

Of course, you need to tell them that such and such food is good for getting the energy to play, some foods are for strength and building the muscles and some are fantastic brain food and the like.

 

The emphasis is letting them know those are the reasons why you eat them. Those that you avoid (sugar-laden confectioneries, processed food items, etc) will need the same explanation. Children might need to try the new food several times before they can decide to like them.

 

Negatives And No-No’s

 

Being a food police is not acceptable for kids. Forcing them to eat things they hate will foster rebellion and frustration. With only wholesome food choices stocked in your fridge or pantry, you can ensure good choices from your child.

 

Associating the sugary stuff from a birthday party fare with their stomach ache can be of help. Associating healthy food with being “energized” or “happy” is another. Getting your kid to eat healthy should go beyond school lunches.

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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.

 family meals

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.

 

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Is Your Child Getting Enough Exercise?

As adults we would normally think of exercise as something that we go to the gym to do by running on a treadmill or lifting weights. Most children would find an adult workout regime extremely boring (as well as potentially harmful on their bodies), so making sure that your child gets enough exercise from their everyday activities is very important.

child exercise infographic

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