10 simple daily practices to teach your kids healthy habits

By Caitlyn Mackenzie, Psychologist at The Live Life Whole Project

Wondering how you can best help nurture the physical, mental and emotional wellbeing of your child as they move through those critical primary school years? Caitlyn Mackenzie, Psychologist at The Live Life Whole Project, shares 10 simple daily strategies that can help foster your child’s growth and development as they learn to navigate the world around them.

10 healthy habits for growing kids

1. Eat whole foods & lots of colours

One of the simplest things we can do to nourish our body is by eating the rainbow. No, not the colourful lollies you pull out of a packet, but whole foods and veggies that grow in the ground and help our bodies to stay happy and strong. What we put into our bodies affects all aspects of our wellbeing, so it’s important to support our amazing bodies with a wide variety of colourful food.

2. Develop healthy sleep habits

Just like food and water, we need sleep to survive. But sleep does so much more for us than keep us alive, it helps us thrive in almost every aspect of our health. That’s why it is so important to create healthy sleep habits from a young age. If sleep is a concern, try encouraging wind down or relaxation routines before bed like having a screentime cut-off time, a warm bath, reading or petting your dog.

3. Move your body

The benefits of physical activity are endless – and for children who are going through many different hormonal shifts, movement is a great way to relieve stress, boost endorphins and stay healthy. Encourage your child to find ways to move their body in a fun way and encourage them to listen to their body and observe how movement makes them feel inside and out.

4. Talk about the human body

Ah yes, the wonders of the human body. Body image, reproductive and sexual health, and for girls, menstrual cycles, are all topics that your children will encounter at some stage of their development, yet we are so often avoidant of speaking about them. Be aware of your own biases here. If you can make space for the potential embarrassment and awkwardness by addressing these topics in a developmentally appropriate way, your child will only reap the benefits in the long run.

Encourage your children to ask lots of questions and if you can’t answer them yourself, direct them to health professionals that you trust. Not only will you be supporting them to better understand and develop a positive relationship with their own body, you will also be modelling the importance of addressing, rather than avoiding, the sometimes uncomfortable parts of life.

5. Understand stress

Being able to recognise stress as a normal human experience is important! Stress is neither good nor bad, it’s just that sometimes it’s helpful and other times not so much. Understanding our stress patterns, including how it feels in our mind and body and any triggers or early warning signs, can help us to better respond to stress if and when it shows up. Encouraging your child to talk about their stress, and to even speak to them about yours where appropriate, can be helpful in modelling a safe and more effective relationship with it.

6. Practice breathwork, mindfulness & gratitude

Some of the things we do know that help to regulate our emotions and support wellbeing include breathwork, mindfulness and gratitude practices. There are many apps and online resources to give you ideas on how you might introduce and establish healthy habits around these practices, just like you might for getting them to brush their teeth! Importantly however, feel free to be creative. There is no right or wrong way to practice once you understand the core concepts.

For example, colouring in a colouring book is a mindfulness practice, swimming is great for breathwork and simply sharing three things that you are grateful for around the dinner table each night can be an easy gratitude practice for the entire family. Having an array of strategies in your toolkit will help keep your child engaged and encourage them to develop a solid foundation of skills that will be invaluable throughout their entire lives.

7. Build supportive relationships

As human beings, we have a psychological need for connection and belonging. Relationships not only help us to meet other physical needs for survival, but they also help us to live longer! Developing and maintaining healthy relationships with people can be tricky throughout all stages of life and sometimes we can find ourselves stuck in unhealthy relationships if we’re not paying attention.

Encourage your child to reflect on all the relationships in their life; those they wish to build, those they wish to put more effort into, and those that may no longer be serving them. Teaching communication skills and emotional regulation can also support them to better navigate this essential facet of life.

8. Set healthy boundaries

Boundaries help us to protect our wellbeing by preventing us from getting lost in life’s expectations. If we want to thrive and not just survive in life, then we need to know how to protect and meet our own needs, and how to communicate these boundaries to others. This could mean learning how to say ‘no,’ prioritising time for personal self-care or not falling to peer pressure.

Setting boundaries can help children to foster independence and develop a sense of confidence and resilience in making choices. It can also support awareness of respecting other people’s boundaries, their parents included

9. Encourage compassion

Compassion is responding with kindness and understanding, and self-compassion is doing the same for ourselves. Compassion is essential in building and maintaining healthy relationships with both the self and others and is vital to our ongoing wellbeing. Unfortunately, compassion is also often stigmatised as weakness in a stoic ‘she’ll be right’, ‘just get on with it’ society.

Encourage your child to be kind and gentle toward themselves as they would do for their friends. This could mean responding with kindness and understanding after a bad test result at school, or after losing a race. It could also be not jumping in to try and ‘fix’ when things don’t go to plan and considering alternative perspectives as equal, not necessarily better. We know that acts of kindness for others can bring us a pleasant feeling, imagine what doing the same for ourselves could be like.

10. Play, play play!

Play promotes new cognitive, emotional, physical and sensory experiences. It builds imagination and creativity, teaches problem-solving and it can help us to make sense of the world. During play we can build relationships, learn resilience, and generally learn more effectively than we do when something is boring. Even for adults, play is an easy way to release endorphins, reduce stress and maintain brain function. And yet, it’s so easy to lose the time and place to play the older we get.

High schools don’t usually have playgrounds as primary schools do (let alone workplaces!), girls tend to be less active than boys in their recreation time and social sport opportunities tend to reduce with age, especially for women.

Promoting playfulness in your kids can have so many benefits, not to mention the actual enjoyment experienced. And play can come in so many different shapes and sizes – the options are endless and so accessible. If you’re not willing for social pressures to influence you and your child’s wellbeing then I would encourage you to go out and simply play.

To learn more about how you can support the physical and mental wellbeing of your daughter, visit https://thelivelifewholeproject.com.au – each module is curated by experts in the field to help foster growth and development and equip both children and parents with the tools needed to raise healthy, happy individuals.