by J.K Citrus

Created on: April 11, 2009

Active children become active adults. Physical activity is not something that a child can be forced into overnight. It is something that has to be introduced to the child in a fun way; something that has to be incorporated into their everyday lifestyle. It takes time and effort on the parents' part to "make" their child physically active.

Parents are busy people- I'm sure that a lot of you can confirm that. Adults have busy lifestyles, and somewhere along the line it just became too much of an effort for some parents to spend time with their children. Some parents plop their kids in front of the television, computer, video game...and expect the child to be fit and get enough exercise. Now, I'm not saying it's wrong to let the child have some fun in the above mentioned ways, but there has to be a limit. If there isn't, pretty soon the child will plop themselves down in front of these things and not listen to the parent's suggestions of busying themselves with other activities.

Repetition is key. You let the child get into a routine of doing something, they think it's alright to do it everyday. The good news however, the same goes for exercising. You can't take a child outside once and expect that they now know that exercise is good. A parent is responsible for building exercise into their child's everyday life. That can become difficult if a parent is not physically active either. Most kids "mimic" their parents even if they don't realize they are doing so. The first step to getting a physically active child is...you guessed it; getting a physically active you. That's great because you are accomplishing two things with one task. You are making yourself healthier, as well as improving your child's life.

Now that we've gotten through the basics, how about we think of some ways to actually achieve the goal? Because it is harder than it looks. Like I said before, being a parent is one of the busiest occupations in the world. But don't lose hope, there are ways to accomplish this!

Repetition is key. I repeat that again, because it is one of the "rules to live by". You know that once you get into a habit, it is really hard to break. So that makes our goal: creating the habit of healthy living. You can't do anything until you do this. Some ways to do this are having schedules for exercise and also making the exercise fun. Although repetition is key, this definitely does not mean repetition of the same activity. It only means incorporating "physical activity" into their

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