Are you raising a healthy child? 

Are you raising a healthy child?

We love our children and will do anything for them!

Are we really doing that, or are we ignoring the fact how important daily physical activities. Are our children spending more time playing a sport on your phone or are they outdoors playing the sport for real? Take stock what physical activities your child does during the week and the question will answer itself.

Our children’s bodies grow quickly in the early and middle childhood years and during this period their gross motor skills begin to develop and progress. Children’s natural enjoyment of active play and their longing to interact with others and the environment create great opportunities to support children’s gross motor development.

Positive experiences, in a child’s early years with physical activity gives them a chance to enjoy being active later in life, which will contribute to the lifelong social, psychological and physical well-being. Non-competitive and fun oriented activities that get children to enjoy themselves are more likely to have the child take part with more enthusiasm than competitive sports only.

Physical activity during the early years and childhood are strong indicators of future behaviours and can increase educational accomplishments, build and keep up social skills, deter the onset of mental health conditions and associated with lower incidence of health-risk behaviours, such as smoking. Introduction of simple game type activities will help improve your child’s confidence, co-ordination and positivity. Sedentary behaviour can lead to an increase in societal and emotional health concerns.

However, many parents are not fully aware of the importance of physical activity for their children in the early years. Our fast paced lifestyles keep us busy and too tired all the time where we tend to ignore our children’s physical health and keep them busy with sedentary activities like playing electronic games or watching television. We do whatever it takes to keep them busy and out of our hair, because we’re exhausted all the time. If we were physically active as children, we would be much healthier today, however since most of us also led sedentary lifestyles we tend to project the same on our children.

Think about it, don’t you find, often enough, children that excel in sports tend to have parents that are fit and who also play sports actively. So what are you waiting for, get your child outdoors, play sports, take part in various physical activities, and give them a chance to a better, healthier future?