TIPS FOR PARENTS: CONTROLLING CHILD OBESITY

Being a parent presents one with an opportunity to change the world by nurturing a responsible and aware citizen. How a person will turn out in the future, a major part of it depends on the parents, their nurturing, strategies, and thinking.

While they affect their child's mental growth and social skills, parents also tend to have an impact on the physical state of their child or children as a result of their parenting style, their eating habits and various other traits.

Parents can, however, control the children's obesity which is one of the prime problems faced across the world. While there are various factors crucial leading to obesity in children, the problem needs effective solutions as the children are getting prone to high blood pressure and high cholesterol and other problems related to obesity at a very young age which is alarming.

There can be a number of reasons affecting the child's obesity and parents can change various parts of the upbringing to ensure a healthy child. The factors leading child obesity and precautions parents-to-be o parents can take are:

1. Prenatal Care: Pre-natal is a stage where the child is inside the mother's womb and gets the nutrition from the umbilical cord.

   Researches around the world have showcased that prenatal exposure to substances like cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana or cocaine can subject a fetus to poor nutrition and inadequate blood or oxygen flow that may cause metabolic issues that increase the risk of childhood obesity.

• One should avoid smoking and drinking during pregnancy.

• Staying healthy via physical exercise during pregnancy can ensure a proper nutrition transfer to the fetus.

2. Emotional Connect: Early Life of any child can play a major role in being obese in future. The influences in the early life are essential parents to help shape the trajectory of weight gain and body fatness throughout a person's life course.

As per research, mothers who are not able to connect with their child emotionally while they were an infant, led to the children having excess weight gain as they tend to find pleasure in food alone.

• Spending time with infants when they need emotional support helps children connect with parents.

• Helping them indulge in various activities to ensure they do not focus on eating as a resort to feel happy.

3. Monitor: While every parent tends to follow this step as they ensure that their children do not consume anything that is unhealthy, various people tend not to get strict while controlling their children's diet.

• One can start with monitoring the food the child/children consume and make changes in their diet with home-made meals along with the focus on fruits and veggies.

• Exposing the child to different healthy food items can help them eventually build a taste for it.

4. Physical Activity:  Today, at the technology-driven age and time, it is a difficult task to engage children in activities that leads them to move physically.

Hence, making sure that they move and do not sit at home the whole day looking at their screens can be avoided by making sure that they are active at various games or outdoor activities.

• One can lead their children to join swimming classes or spend time with them to help them learn how to ride bikes. This is essential for both the development of social skills and confidence along with weight loss.

• Reducing and restricting screen time for children while they are young and in a developing stage.

5. Timing and Portion: While one may not be able to regulate the timing and portion of the food that the child may eat outside with friends or in the school canteen, as a parent one can ensure that they're in control of the timings and portion of the food the child/children consume while staying in the house.

• A time-table at home helps the child get used to eating a specific meal at a specific time and ensure that they do not eat too early or late.

• Ensuring that the child consumes a sensible portion of food in a meal acts as a guide for the future.

 Make the Right Choices

The child's health can lead him/her to become healthier individual in the future and they must start making these choices earlier in their life and to avoid suffering from health problems, such as prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, abnormal cholesterol levels, fatty liver disease, and heart disease along with the unnecessary depression, stigma, and bullying they might face due to obesity.