Help Children have a Healthy Holiday

Have parents of your pediatric patients (say that three times fast) check out this list, which provides some tips to celebrate a safe and healthy holiday season. By encouraging these guidelines, you’ll help to ensure that children stay active and healthy.

Start new, healthier traditions.

As we all know, the holidays mean food, food, food. It’s a time when family and friends gather and celebrate with big meals, decadent deserts, and plenty of other goodies in between. While it’s nice to indulge in some pumpkin pie and Christmas cookies, make sure to include healthy snacks as well, depending upon what your children like.

Which leads to the next tip…

Make fruit fun.

Cut back a little bit on the high calorie sweets and let your children have fresh fruit as a dessert. There are so many different kinds that it would be hard for your children not to find a fruit that they like — you can even cut the fruits into fun shapes and sizes to make it more appealing.

Spend time working off those calories.

It’s important to maintain a healthy level of exercise during the holidays; after all, child obesity is a fast-growing problem, and you don’t want your children to develop bad habits that put them at risk. Just because it’s cold outside doesn’t mean that children can’t go out and run around — just make sure to bundle them up. On really miserable days, encourage indoor activities like walking around the mall or perhaps trying to find a Nintendo Wii to play fitness games on!

Limit TV time.

Try to establish rules and stick to them — if you decide that an hour or two a day of television is sufficient, be consistent and maintain a routine. It’ll make sure that once their allotment of time is up that they become resourceful and find other things to motivate them.

Read about tips on what hazards children should avoid.

This website offers a list of healthy holiday tips for the whole family.