A healthy balanced lifestyle is developed in your child a lot sooner than you might expect. When you conceive a child you have to consider what you do every day and how it might impact on the gift inside you. Healthy development starts as soon as the new baby can sense its surroundings.
For example if a mother is in a stressful situation the baby is exposed to the hormones circulating around the mothers body and feels stress themselves. This is not good for an unborn infant and can lead to a distressed baby when born who is often inconsolable.
The mental development of your baby is just as important as the food they consume as they grow up. The majority of us often focus purely on the food we give to children without considering their environment and how it affects their psychosocial development. In order to promote healthy development it is important to spend time with your family to promote your babies healthy living by creating a suitable environment for them to feel safe in.
Consider your own childhood, were you incessantly instructed to eat your vegetables since they are good for you? Parents are insistent that vegetables are an essential part of a child’s healthy development but there is more to being healthy than food. It is common now for both parents to go to work and arrange child care for their children. Parents often insist it’s because they want their offspring to have everything they never had unfortunately all the physical possessions cannot make up for a parents care and attention being absent.
When I was growing up I attended church regularly and it has certainly given me a balanced spiritual grounding, but unfortunately for many now the pressure of life does not lend itself well to regular attendance in church. There is a gap which needs to be filled, but by whom if both parents are away working, is it sufficient to rely on paid help to promote the healthy development of your child? Everyone with children especially when both parents work should consider how they can have good quality time with their children.
Quality time gives your child someone to learn from, to look up to, you must find a way to fit this into your lifestyle for your children to develop a healthy balanced outlook on life. Are you really too busy to take half an hour out of your day to sit and cuddle your child while reading a story? Is that last report so essential that you have to finish it tonight or could you take it with you for when they are asleep. There is always another way to do what you are doing. Find the win win option where both your company and your family get what they need from you.
Ask yourself this simple question, and be honest with yourself about your true motivation.
Do you work to live or live to work? I myself have always and will always work to live, after all you can’t wait until you retire to start living the life you dreamed of, it could be too late.
It was my 3 year old son who taught me to change my attitude to life when he saw one of his friends Dad’s playing with a friend of his. He said my Daddy doesn’t do that. I realized when my wife told me that I had been so focused on work that I had neglected him. I haven’t ever done so since nor will I ever again.
Neither should you.
Now I spend quality time with my children every day, I’m not perfect, but then no one is, life would be boring if there were nothing to work towards.
Paul Palmer – Born In Swindon in Wiltshire, grew up in Cottingham in East Yorkshire, lived through change to Humberside and reverting to Yorkshire, left after 14 years …