Why I Work With My Kids On Health And Wellness
One of my favorite things about being a father and a superhuman and a doctor the way that I am is working with my kids’ health and wellness.
And same way I work with my patients it’s the same way that I work with my children. And that is the foundation as I want to empower them to understand why they’re making whatever decision they decided to make. My philosophy with my kids, and it’s really kind of the same as my philosophy with my patients, which is I want to teach them how to think about these things. Ultimately, they need to make decisions about their health and wellbeing. So one of the things I started doing early on with my kids, for example, when it comes to food is I would just anchor to them how they feel, not while they’re eating certain foods.
Like we all know we have certain foods that we like to eat. We’re drawn to sugars and sweets, and a lot of these things that taste good to us aren’t necessarily the best foods for us. Certainly, you see this with children, but when they would eat some sugar or cake or something, I’m like, hey, five minutes later when they’re like having a nervous breakdown, because they just ate a cupcake for the first time when they were one year old, I had this experience with my daughter. It’s like, “Hey, remember what you just ate a minute ago?” This is why you’re feeling the way that you’re feeling right now. Empowering them to understand, to reconnect to their body, or to connect to their body and stay connected to their body.
It’s surprising how unaware we are of just particularly with what we put into our bodies of how it makes us feel, not just at that moment, but how it’s making you feel five, 10 minutes down the road.
With my kids, I love the aspect of just really teaching them, turning them into their body, and that allows them, and it’s amazing, they’re 10 and nine years old and they make really good choices when it comes to food. They make bad choices at times too, but we all are empowered to make good choices that sometimes and bad choices that sometimes. I mean, there’s times like I want to eat something and it’s just for entertainment value, so I’m not always eating the like, this is strictly the most healthy thing that you need to eat. So with my kids, it’s really teaching them how to think about their health and wellbeing with that. Children, more than anything are going to role model behavior. So you can tell your kids all day long like this is the right thing to do, this is what you should be doing.
At the end of the day, we know if we look at the science and the studies, what kids tend to do is they do the same behaviors that their parents do. So one of the things, again, the kind of person that I am and I know what I want for my children, I know what my clients want for their children, is they’re going to role model your behavior more than anything else. So the choices you make and the decisions that you make and the reasons you make those decisions when it comes to your health and wellbeing are the things that are going to most impact your children. I know those are the things that are going to most impact my children with their health and wellbeing.
