Kids Eating Healthy

Fast food is a big part of modern life these days, making it very hard to teach a child how he or she should eat healthy.  The cheapest and easiest foods are those that are normally the least healthy.  If you give your child the choice between healthy food and junk food, you normally won’t like the results.

Even though it isn’t possible to get a child to like all healthy foods, there are some ways to get your child to try and hopefully like at least a few of them.  You can be as creative as you like, as getting kids to eat healthy foods can be a little harder than you may think.

–  Sneak the healthy food in.  Even though it would be great if your kid understood the importance of fruits and vegetables, this isn’t always possible.  If you can’t get them to eat good food willingly, there are ways to sneak them in, such as making muffins out of bananas or apples, or pizza with spinach on it.

–  Call fruits and vegetables by funny names.  You can refer to broccoli as “trees”, making them more fun to eat.  There are many different names you can call fruits and vegetables, even making up your own if you prefer.  Most kids prefer to eat foods that sound fun.

–  Make the foods taste better. Ranch dressing is great for broccoli, while peanut butter is a great topping for celery.  There are several combinations for vegetables that can make them taste much better.  You can let your child pick a topping for a vegetable, even if it’s something you wouldn’t normally like yourself.

–  Dress the vegetables up.  Just as much as calling them names help kids eat healthy foods, making them look funny also helps.  You can do this by making funny designs on the plate, or setting them up to look like people.  Although some parents don’t like their kids playing with their food, sometimes it helps to get them to eat healthier.

There are several ways to make your kids eat healthier, but to make them enjoy it also has to be fun as well.  This isn’t always an easy task, because kids normally don’t like foods that are good for them.  It can however, be done with a bit of creativity.  Hopefully, doing this will help your child develop a love of healthy foods for the rest of their lives.

3 Tips to Teach Your child How to Read

By: ChildrenLearningReading.com

Learning to read at a young age is important for the development of the child. It helps them develop a better understand of their surroundings, allows them to gather information from printed materials, and provides them with a wonderful source of entertainment when they read stories and rhymes. Children develop at different rates, and some children will develop reading skills quicker than other children; however, what’s important is that as the parent, you are keenly aware of your child’s maturity and reading level to provide them with appropriate books and activities to help them improve.

As parents, you are the most important teacher for your children. You will introduce your child to books and reading. Below we have some tips to help you teach your child to read.

Teach Your Child How to Read Tip #1

Teach your child alphabet letters and sounds at the same time. Studies have shown that children learn best when they are taught the letter names and letter sounds at the same time. In one study, 58 preschool children were randomly assigned to receive instructions in letter names and sounds, letter sound only, or numbers (control group). The results of this study are consistent with past research results in that it found children receiving letter name and sound instruction were most likely to learn the sounds of letters whose names included cues to their sounds. [1]

When teaching your child the letter sounds, have them slowly trace the letter, while saying the sound of the letter at the same time. For example, if you were teaching your child the letter “A”, you would say:

“The letter A makes the /A/ (ah) sound.”

Then have your child say the /A/ sound while tracing the letter with his or her index finger.

Teaching a Child How to Read Tip #2

When teaching your child to read, always emphasize with them that the proper reading order should be from left to right, and top to bottom. To adults, this may seem so basic that anyone should know it. However, our children are not born with the knowledge that printed text should be read from left to right and top to bottom, and this is why you’ll sometimes see children reading from right to left instead – because they were never explicitly taught to read from left to right. When teaching your child how to read, always emphasize this point with them.

Teach Your Child How to Read Tip #3

Teach final consonant blends first. Teaching words such “at” and “and” can lead your child directly to learning words that rhyme with these. For example, for “at”, you can have:

Lat

Pat

Mat

Cat

Sat

Bat

Spat

Chat

For “and”, you can have these rhyming words:

Sand

Band

Land

Hand

Stand

Bland

Brand

Grand

and so on…

You can start teaching blends once your child has learned the sounds of some consonants and short vowel sounds. You don’t need to wait until your child has mastered the sounds of all the letters before teaching blends.

Learning to read is a long process, but it doesn’t have to be a difficult process. Broken down into intuitive and logical steps, a child as young as two years old can learn to read, and older children can accomplish even more.

>> Click here to for a simple, step-by-step program that can help your child learn to read, and watch a video of a 2 year old child reading

Notes:

1. J Exp Child Psychol. 2010 Apr;105(4):324-44. Epub 2010 Jan 25.

Learning letter names and sounds: effects of instruction, letter type, and phonological processing skill.

Piasta SB, Wagner RK.

Preschool Language and Literacy Lab, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.

Obesity and Diabetes

There is an epidemic that the U.S., in fact the whole world is facing.  This epidemic is obesity and diabetes.  A report done by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) back in January 2012 stated that the U.S. had more than one-third of adults and almost 17 percent of children of which were considered to be overweight or obese.  In 2010, the CDC also reported that over 11 percent of adults (aged 20 years or older) currently have been diagnosed or undiagnosed with diabetes and over one-third of the adult U.S. population has pre-diabetic symptoms.

Poor diets and lack of exercise or activity are mainly parts of the reasoning behind the rising rates of obesity, leading many of us to become less and less sensitive to our own insulin, the hormone secreted by the pancreas to regulate blood glucose levels. This insensitivity to insulin is a major factor in the rising rates of diabetes.

Nearly 90 percent of the carbohydrates consumed by both adults and children in the U.S. and Canada today are high glycemic. These foods include bread, flour, rice, cereals and potatoes and actually spike our blood sugar faster than if we were spooning sugar on to our tongue. This rapid rise in blood sugar causes tremendous inflammation and spasm of our arteries. Over time, it causes our arterial walls to thicken, making it very difficult for insulin to pass from the blood stream into the cell to transport glucose. The body compensates for this situation by making more insulin in order to push it across this thickened arterial wall.

As blood insulin levels rise, your blood pressure, cholesterol, triglyceride and blood sugar levels all begin to increase, while the good HDL cholesterol drops, eventually leading to diabetes. What most individuals don’t realize is that when you tip over into this abnormal metabolic state, the body is not able to utilize calories normally and, instead of utilizing the calories from any meal or snack as energy, many of the calories are now diverted to be stored in fat cells of the body. As long as you are in this abnormal metabolic state, referred to as the metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes, it’s much harder to lose weight.

The American Medical Association recently classified obesity as a disease, making the term “epidemic” all the more relevant. In order to improve the quality of life for our children and ourselves, we must begin making drastic life-style choices when it comes to the food we eat and our recreational habits. Eating healthy foods, participating in even mild aerobic activity and consuming quality nutritional supplements can significantly improve our insulin sensitivity and retrain our bodies to a normal metabolic state.

 

The ugly cost of obesity…

According to a recent an article released by the CNN Health. The direct and indirect cost of obesity “is as high as $147 billion – YES BILLION a year to deal with obesity, suggesting that obesity has become an epidemic affecting not only the adult population, but about 1/3 of the children in the nation.According to an article that was written by the Associate Press, the New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli says that expenditures, for their state, are caused by 1.4 million overweight and obese children which account for $327 million spent in 2011. The costs rise significantly as they get older.  Dinapoli said the responsibility of combating obesity falls on the parents, schools, and community groups. Government officials agree that they must help to address this rather costly problem to avoid future costs. BUT HOW ?

According to the 2011 estimate over $4.3 billion has been spent on obesity related treatment that include conditions such as diabetes, and heart disease according to the data private health insurers and Medicare paid an estimated $7.5 billion.