What, and who, defines “healthy”?
When we think about healthy living, some of the first things that come to mind are diet and exercise. While these factors are very important (and the focus of future posts), a focus on overall well-being is multifactorial. A recent American Academy of Pediatrics publication broadens the approach to healthy living to focus on things like social media, screen time, sleep and social-emotional wellness. This isn’t to say diet and exercise aren’t important, but we need to be aware of the dangers lurking in the time in between meal-time and physical activity. While it’s easy to see how this can affect adolescents, it has been shown that all of these factors start to take their toll beginning in infancy. Starting at this early age, parental role-modeling is imperative. As parents, we need to be the ones demonstrating healthy lifestyle choices so that as our children grow, they have the foundations of health to allow them to live, grow, and thrive.
Healthy living can be both preventative of future disease and therapeutic in the presence of active disease. Lifestyle factors can help us prevent or identify in their earliest stages things like childhood obesity or disordered eating. Monitoring the amount of screen time as well as the content of those screens can help our infants, toddlers, and certainly our adolescents have a positive and healthy opinion on what is normal. The definition of “healthy” on social media is a skewed one and shouldn’t be the standard by which our children define themselves. We need to make sure, as parents, that we model healthy living and that we are the ones to define that term (“healthy”) for our children.
The bottom line here: our focus should be on overall well-being. While we certainly want to avoid the development of preventable disease, health isn’t just the absence of disease. We want to maximize and optimize every aspect of our childrens’ lives so they can live, grow and thrive. The best way to do this as parents is to model it in all facets of our own lives- diet, exercise, social-emotional wellness, social media, sleep and screen time.
