Keeping Your Child Healthy

Child Health

Important decisions about your child’s health begin as soon as you decide to have a baby. With children, you need to take steps to facilitate their health, ensuring they have the best chances of living a healthy life. Making food choices for your children can sometimes be challenging, especially nowadays considering the numerous conflicting dietary trends making the rounds online. Filter out the noise by consulting the Conroe family practice to help you focus on the right choices. Find a balance of food groups, and eliminate harmful ingredients, while ensuring your child has an active physical and social life, essential for healthy development.

Establishing Healthy Habits

The first healthy habit to establish is your child’s sleeping schedule. It’s important that children get around 10 hours of sleep every night, although this depends on age. To make this happen, make sure the child goes to sleep at the same time every night. Stick to this routine as much as possible and only push back when it’s absolutely necessary. If they went to bed late, allow the child to sleep in. Sleep is important in many ways. It boosts a child’s metabolism and allows their body to fight off infections as well as recover quickly from health issues.

Encourage a healthy diet by buying fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and whole-grain products, among others. Whenever you can, go for fresh organic produce. To determine portion sizes, read labels and stick to those guidelines. Healthy snacks can include carrots and hummus. Take your child to the grocery or invite them to a meal prep, allowing them to choose a healthy recipe. If the child refuses to eat veggies, try out other vegetable preparations to make the meal more interesting.

Preventing Illness and Injury

Avoid exposing your child to smoke at all costs. If you’re a smoker, keep your children away from areas where you’ve been smoking. Enroll in a program and try to quit for the sake of the child. Second-hand smoking is harmful to the children as they may develop breathing problems and other illnesses such as pneumonia and bronchitis. Smoke can also worsen existing medical problems such as asthma, and increase the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Whenever possible, avoid exposing your child to sick people. Although children encounter lots of germs during the day, direct exposure to infections could severely harm them. Promote germ avoidance by teaching your child to frequently wash their hands, especially after leaving the restroom or before eating or touching their mouths. You can provide them a small bottle of hand sanitizer to walk around with and use. Teach them how to sneeze into their elbows and cover their coughs.

Encourage Physical Activity

Start experimenting at an early age by signing your child up for sports. Enroll them through your local recreational center or school or a local sports facility. Examples of sporting options they can choose include swimming, soccer, and dancing. Sports activities will give the child a good amount of physical activity per day, as recommended. Taking part in sports is also great for mental health.

Play outside with your children if you can. Go for long walks. Also, hiking or cycling with them will give them their daily dose of Vitamin D. Vitamin D boosts immunity and helps prevent infections. Fresh air is also healthy for the child. Going outside frequently is also a good way to limit technology time.