Benefits of a Proactive Lifestyle and Parenting

"At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child's success

is the positive involvement of parents."

-Jane D Hull

Our everyday lifestyle habits will reflect our health and wellness over time, leading to optimal quality of life or devastating disease and illness. Being healthy takes on new meaning when you are pregnant, as your choices will have a more significant impact than before. The lifestyle you lead isn't just about you anymore but will also influence your child's health.

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Pregnancy is when many women often begin to make healthier food choices and include exercise in their lives. Most have reported being inspired by these behaviors' benefits for their unborn babies. Although these positive life practices are optimal for mom and baby during pregnancy, you can implement a long-term plan to maintain these practices after pregnancy and continue building better health for your children.

I have found that having a general proactive approach to life breeds more successful outcomes. Just as meal planning prepares you for a week of healthy meals and scheduling time for exercise makes you more likely to do it, having a plan can help simplify the parenting role, keeping you focused on what's most important to you.

Thirty-one years ago, while I was expecting my first child, I received invaluable advice from a pediatrician. He recommended I decide on five things I felt would be most important to teach my child as he grew up. He said that if I could focus on only these five things, I would be more consistent with my message, expectations, and boundaries and less nit-picky about little stuff that didn't matter. His advice was simple yet extraordinarily profound, impacting my parenting journey from that day forward.

While pregnant, I began deciding on my "five most important things" as I laid my parenting roadmap foundations. I focused solely on character values that supported the independent, healthy, well-adjusted person I envisioned my adult child to be one day. One of my five "things" was raising a confident child with healthy self-worth and self-esteem. Although this focus had many moving parts, one of the biggest ones was to teach and role model how to care for our physical, emotional, and mental well-being through the lifestyle choices we made daily. Teaching acceptance for the body we were born with, and caring for it through healthy food choices, balanced meals, and daily exercise, was vital to me as these daily practices were consistent norms in our household.

Whether you are a parent or not, this advice has proven to simplify life for everyone at every stage and phase of life. Predetermining what's most important to you and remaining focused on a few simple things will naturally weed out the unnecessary to make room for the essential.

Today, the staggering statistics of overweight Americans show up in our children at younger ages than ever! Pediatricians are alarmed and worried that the rising childhood obesity rates are shortening their lifespans and diminishing their quality of life. Parents need to make role-modeling healthy lifestyle behaviors a foundational focus in their homes, and the need is urgent!

If you are a parent, grandparent, or caregiver of young children, you are a key figure in helping us change this statistic through learning and role-modeling healthy lifestyle habits in your home.

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