Healthy Living’s Not Just for Kids!

Guest Blog: Jamie Bachmann

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move anti-obesity initiative is out to get kids and families to make healthy eating a priority. And it’s really a big issue: A recent study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that obese children are more than twice as likely to die prematurely than their thinner peers.

But healthy living isn’t just for young kids. Fast forward through childhood to college life, where on my college campus, Spring Break is around the corner. I can tell you, along with intense studying for midterms, there has been plenty of intense dieting, as girls and guys alike strive to reach the Spring Break perfect body.

Girls restrict their food intake with the strategy: eat less, workout more. Facebook albums titled "Spring Break Diets = Empty Beds" suggest that if you sleep out at night, you’ll be less likely to succumb to nighttime munchies. So, we have girls starving themselves and increasing their promiscuity in preparation for spring break — not exactly healthy life choices.

But not everyone has approached the Spring Break diet negatively. A friend has used her Spring Break motivation to whip herself into shape using the P90X program. She’s drenched in sweat every morning and has seen some pretty amazing results. Yet, the very same girl who has dedicated herself to 90 days of pre-Spring-Break P90X declared, "Once I’m there, the diet’s over."

When we were younger, most of our food choices depended on our parents: meal preparation, activities and even transportation to sports practices and lessons. But in college, Mom’s not shoving a well-balanced breakfast down your throat or at the dinner table making sure you eat your vegetables, or even putting them on your plate.

Now with our college independence, it’s time for even older teens to step up to the healthy living plate. We can choose to eat junk food, consume mass quantities of alcohol, indulge in the late night munchies, and sit in the dorm room all day, racking up the "freshman fifteen" (which can continue well past freshman year). Or, we can get involved, become active, schedule time for working-out, and buy healthy snacks.

Really, healthy eating is not just about Spring Break and the crash course diets, obsessive-compulsive exercising, or starving yourself. However, Spring Break can serve as great motivation to jumpstart the healthy lifestyle, if done properly. Changes involve becoming educated consumers; we must know what we are putting into our body. Learning to make healthy choices will make you feel great and look great, not just for spring break, but for everyday. I’ve learned to push myself harder to meet my personal best when it comes to my workout goals. We could use each other as motivation, not competition. In the long run it doesn’t matter who looked better in their swimsuit; what matters is that we are healthy.

Plus, part of a healthy lifestyle just might be a healthy acceptance. While we would all like to have Fergie’s abs, Sarah Jessica Parker’s legs, and Beyonce’s entire body, realistically, no matter what we do, that’s probably not going to happen. It’s not about achieving a celebrity body or even about looking good in a bikini. Though Spring Break can be great motivation, healthy exercises and food choices need to become a life-long routine. Our health is in our hands, and as a college student, it’s time to start taking control.

Like many families today, games, practices and complicated sports schedules seem to dictate a good part of everyday. I’m not only the soccer mom, but the basketball, baseball and tennis mom, as well. Known to cheer loudly from the sidelines, perhaps I focus too often on winning. Just what does “do your best” and “play your hardest” mean to an 11-year-old who just wants to be out there with his friends, or a daughter who just liked best the days she was allowed to wear her uniform to school?

But today, aside from our middle school basketball finals, the greatest competition in the world is playing out right before our eyes: The 2010 Olympics. Whether or not your family’s schedule revolves around sports, you have to admit the Olympics offer a ring-side seat to watch thrilling sports competition – and to discuss and explore with your kids some truly character-defining moments.

More than the character words on our school marquee, the next few weeks provide an Olympic opportunity for families everywhere to bring character education home. Like the chapters featured in Inside Out, real stories make ideas about building character come to life.

What kind of courage does it take for those luge competitors to race down the track, knowing that one of their fellow competitors lost his life doing the same just days before? What kind of perseverance does it take to get back up on your skates after a fall and complete an ice dance? What kind of self-control does it take to go through the hours of training and conditioning to make the team? How do the losers demonstrate civility in the face of defeat? And imagine the peace in a world in which the biggest competition between countries takes place on a ski slope or ice rink?

For the next two weeks, I say to families: Turn on the TV and watch the Olympics! Enjoy the competition, while sharpening your parenting skills. There’s a character-building moment around just about every turn – for the Olympian athletes and viewers alike.

Letting our kids become independent from us is a great gift to them but that doesn’t mean it is easy; in fact it comes with a cost.

As the parent of a college freshman, I can tell you it’s been difficult, as it is for so many parents, watching my child walk out the door and move to a campus far away from me. It is the end of an era, the end of a stage of life and a huge change in child rearing. She’s on her own, now literally for months at a time. But I also have to ask, what is our need as parents if our college kids are constantly calling or texting us four or five times a day, still needing our help with their laundry or homework or a problem with a professor or roommate? I think one answer is we want to feel that we are still needed, still central to our children’s lives and that they still want to spend lots of time with us. Becoming less important, after almost two decades of daily, even hourly parenting is hard to take. But it is exactly what they need.

If we have done our job well… protecting and nurturing them but also letting them go, they will be able to handle the challenges and solve the inevitable problems that arise. It is what they will need to know how to do for the rest of their lives. Of course, the irony is that they pretty much have to solve the issues in their college life… even with phone calls, email, and text messages because there’s little we can do from so far away, except create a very dependent student-child who, in the end, turns out to be a dependent 35-year-old.

More: http://www.youtube.com/connectwithkids

In the news lately, there have been several examples of inappropriate and rude behavior in a public setting: Kanye West at the MTV awards, Serena Williams at the U.S. Open tennis championship, Representative Joe Wilson at the joint session of the U.S. House and Senate. These are very public figures; for better or for worse, they are important role models in our nation. And many parents are outraged, wondering what can be done about the worsening incivility in our nation.

I think there is much we can do; I think we as parents have more power than we may know. It’s not altogether effective simply to throw up our hands and blame school systems or government or media or the society at large. I think what works is for all of us to actively teach our children how to manage their behavior, teach them how we want them to treat others (and ourselves), and teach them what civility means to us. At the center of this issue is respect… for us, for siblings and other relatives, for teachers and students at their school, and respect for themselves.

We are living in a complicated, difficult time. We have to decide what standards are important to us and overtly go out and talk to our children about those standards. We need to say out loud, reminding them over and over again, this is who we are, this is what we do and what we do not do. And in all of this, we need to look at our own behavior, how we treat our children, our spouses, our neighbors, colleagues and others, so that in time our kids will watch and learn how to manage themselves.

More: http://www.youtube.com/connectwithkids

Technology in the hands of our children has never been a greater challenge. The internet, Facebook, iPods, pictures and texting on cell phones, these are the ways kids communicate today. They have become a central and, arguably, indispensible part of their lives. It allows them a private life that most of us know very little about.

The key to how they manage this privacy is our “connection” to them. How closely do we stay in touch with our kids and pay attention to what they’re doing and when and with whom? And how often do we talk to our children…and really listen to them? If they trust us and know that we will be there for them, they’re more likely to adhere to the ethics of our family, the standards that are never more important than when parents are not around. If we talk openly about what we believe in, what we stand for, before long those values will become their own.

The challenge for parents is that our kids have a whole new set of communication tools and many of these young people don’t fully understand that the old rules apply, even here, even in the brave new world of social networking and text messaging. We actually need to teach them, literally and plainly explain to them how ethics apply to these tools. “If you wouldn’t wear it in front of your grandmother, don’t wear it to school or to the dance. If you wouldn’t do it in the middle of a packed football stadium, don’t do it anywhere someone has a camera or a cell phone. If you don’t want that picture on the front page of the newspaper, don’t send it on your cell phone.”

Kids just don’t think through the consequences. They don’t think, “If I send this picture out to Bobby, he might send it to some friends, who might send it to a hundred others and the next thing you know, it’s on a dozen Facebook sites and all over the internet, forever.” This just doesn’t occur to them; they don’t think that way because they don’t have the life experience that we do. We have to help them.

More: http://www.youtube.com/connectwithkids

Cyberbulling is heartbreaking. We have interviewed so many children who talk about being bullied and harassed on the Internet or via text messages. They cry. Their parents cry. They tell stories about being tortured with cruel words and mean-spirited rumors so foul I cannot repeat them here. Many say it may begin with one bully but before long a whole gang of kids join in the cruelty. And often, despite the victim’s efforts to change passwords and screen names, the bullying continues for months or even years.

But it’s also heartbreaking for me to think of the bullies. How can a child, not that many years from the pure innocence of infancy, be that evil? When I hear Read the rest of this entry »

More: http://www.youtube.com/connectwithkids

More: http://www.youtube.com/connectwithkids

Terrell is 17 years old and maybe he said it best.

“I did a lot of stupid things while I was drunk, like about a thousand things, really.”

I think there are two lessons imbedded in his comment. He is not talking about being stupid after having a drink, having one beer or maybe two. He means he got stupid when he drank way too much, when he got drunk. Many will argue that at the age of 18, 19, 20, kids shouldn’t drink at all but the real problem is that so many kids binge drink, they slug down a 12-pack, or six or eight or 10 drinks at one sitting. They haven’t learned to go slow, to pay attention to the signs that they’re approaching the edge of losing control. In fact, that’s their goal, to feel Read the rest of this entry »

One day my daughter came home from school with a story about a kid who had been bullied. She was in middle school and she had witnessed a bully making fun of another child. I asked her how she responded. She said she watched and listened but didn’t do anything because she didn’t know what to do. As she told me, I saw the beginning of tears in her eyes.

I learned a couple of things about bullying that day. One is that, Read the rest of this entry »