Helping Your Child Make Healthful Choices

“Eat your vegetables, or else you won’t become pretty.” That ampalaya dish was wiped out! This was Mama’s way of making me and my sisters eat healthily (didn’t work for my Kuya, though).

As a child, I was exposed to delectable Kapampangan cooking by Mama and my grandmother, “Mommy”, and to the sawsawan galore of Papa’s Nueva Ecijano meals. Though chicharon, kare-kare, tocino and chichirya were usual fare, they exposed me to a lot of vegetables (that’s why becoming vegan wasn’t too hard for me). They never dumped what I didn’t want to eat onto my plate, but Mama mixing ulam and rice (and soup!) for me made the food magically delicious, ala effortless paella and yang chow. The family rule was “Eat what’s on the table,” and Mama made sure we had a meat dish, veggies, seafood, and rice every meal. Often, dessert was fruit. I don’t remember us splurging on expensive nutrition: cheese was sliced thinly, ice cream and cake were only for special occasions, lechon was freshly roasted in the farm only for my birthday, and dining out was rare.

My parents weren’t verbally affirming or demonstrative; I hardly heard praise or affectionate words from them. But I clearly remember Mama telling her guests, with pride, that I was the child who was “masarap kumain”–“ang nagmana sa mga lola niya.”  My three siblings didn’t eat with the same gusto. (Explains why they were slim.) I was involved in sports and dance growing up and perhaps that kept me from getting overweight despite my big appetite. Though I always felt I was chubby, my mom referred to me having a good body. “Maganda ang katawan niyan.”

So why do I talk about my childhood eating habits, body image and self-esteem?  Because a parent or guardian (like a yaya or relative) has a huge influence on a child’s health choices and self-image. Lisa A. Kotler and her colleagues, in their 2011 study, “Longitudinal Relationships Between Childhood, Adolescent, and Adult Eating Disorders”, found that “The presence of eating problems in early childhood or an eating disorder in adolescence confers a strong risk for an eating disorder in young adulthood.”¹

To raise kids who mature into healthy adults, you need to:

Feed on it.  Enrich your knowledge about good health; learn, read, inquire, and research about it! Then define good health with your spouse, considering the uniqueness of your family. Ask: Is it about eating certain kinds of food, or enjoying a well-balanced diet? Is it just about meals, or should include exercise, sleep, mental conditioning, and spiritual nurture to cope with daily stress? Define what is healthy for your family, and what will work given your other priorities: career, education, hobbies, ministry, community, work. Decide to do it as an individual, then as a couple, and as a family.

Sit down and identify your goals. Do you want a certain weight in proportion to your body structure, or are you going for general fitness and a sense of wellness regardless of the kind of regimen you follow? Then take time at least once a year to assess your current physical and mental condition, redefining your goals if needed.

Teach it. Talk about what you learn. Share the excitement in your new discoveries: like a yummy fruit you thought was yucky, or that newly opened restaurant offering a differently-cooked boring vegetable. There’ll be a lot of articles they will Google or encounter through social media, but what they see works for you will have more impact to them than before-and-after pictures of strangers. “Children will simply not know which foods are healthy unless you, as a parent, teach it to them.”²