Reshaping American Health for the Next Generation
What adults need to know and how to implement it
A healthier world
We had a general rule in the Marines: “Leave the place cleaner than you found it.” It’s simple, to the point and easy to understand.
Similarly, this article aims to make our country a little healthier than we found it. It’ll focus on three things:
- Four main parts of health
- How each part impacts a child in your life
- How us adults can implement healthier choices in our lives and to positively influence the child’s life
The way we see health — at least in America —isn’t very simple or effective at the moment. We’re wrapped up in complicated health insurance options, half-naked models, and we generally prioritize sales and imagery over broad-scale health. Our views of mental health and physical health are almost completely isolated from one another.
In other words, we’ve made a sh*t show of health, and we need to start cleaning things up for the next round of humans.
This article isn’t intended to be a cynical reproach of things. It’s intended to revise our understanding of truly healthy living (as adults) so we can pass down a healthier social climate and set of individual skills for our kids. And while I believe our health system is fractured, I also believe that we have the ability to stitch things back together better than they were before.
Below are four major health domains. While they don’t constitute all of the nooks and crannies of human health, they offer sufficient, actionable steps for us to embody and then pass down to the next generation.
I believe there are two basic ways we can make for a healthier world: we can create a healthier world and hand it to them (through social revisions, better nutrition in school, and so on) and there is fostering a greater sense of individual knowledge and competence in each youth.
While both are needed, this article will emphasize the second. And while I could take a larger social position on this, I’d rather just say that I have two kids and I’d prefer they have a strong baseline understanding of health rather than relying on them to only pass through healthy environments throughout their lives.
Prepare your child for the road, not the road for the child.
- Unknown
A quick note on how to actually teach these things to kids. In sum: act out the healthy behaviors, don’t just instruct. Not only can kids sniff out bullsh*t and contradictions in adults, but their brains operate predominantly on something called the limbic system, which deals with lower level brain operations such as fear and root-level emotions. If you say to do something but don’t entice them by modeling the positive benefits that can be reaped by them, the lesson will fall flat over time.
Because of this approach, each section below outlines the importance of the respective domain and how to implement the lesson.
And real quick…
While I’ve worked in both a jail setting and a clinical capacity specifically with kids, I’ve also been humbled by the rigors of military service and over a decade of hard physical training as well, which has diversely shaped my view on how to become healthy. But if you walk away with nothing else, take this: health is usually simple, but rarely easy. Play the long game and avoid shortcuts.
And, for what it’s worth, my toddler threw milk at me this morning when trying to model the first domain. Let’s just agree things won’t go smoothly.
Enrich connections
If there were a staple to health, this is it.
The ability for a child to connect to family is profound, and recent data suggests that these connections are so subtle that even extreme emotional conditions, such as trauma, may be passed down multiple generations through cellular alterations.
In other words, we’re a hell of a lot more sensitive than we think, it starts before we’re aware of it.
UCLA Professor of Psychology Matthew Lieberman made this case in his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. The data presented suggests that we’ve evolved around the social principle of reciprocity, and not only is this principle engrained in our brain wiring but it’s also leveraged in modern salesmanship, politics, and virtually every level of interaction to navigate the human condition.
When it comes to improving the relationships of kids, we largely teach this through modeling what our relationships look like. We all know this — if we want them to foster healthy friends, we have healthy friends ourselves. But what we oftentimes forget is how we subtly impose our judgment on other things — television characters, ex-spouses, waitresses, anyone. Every word that we say fuels their worldview and how they’ll orient themselves towards others in their own lives.
The implications for missing this one are pretty big. Not only do healthy relationships stave off symptoms of depression, but they also serve as conduits for motivated and inspiring behavior. There’s also a case to be made that in the absence of healthy relationships, people (especially kids) will unhealthily fill the void with bad habits and destructive behaviors. Kids, who aren’t cognitively developed yet to understand us complicated adults, won’t even know why they’re angry or throwing tantrums when there’s a real probability that it stems from a foggy, general anger due to feeling unheard.
How to model it
In my clinical work, a rich connection with a supportive adult is informally called a home. It’s a place that child can fall back on when things get hard, and that basic kind of security is fundamental to good health.
How can you be a home they want to return to?
While there are plenty of tactics that you (or me) will readily forget, remember just this one: listen, and genuinely care about what they’re saying. Formally, this is called reflective listening. They speak, you reflect back what they said in an adequate manner.
Sounds simple, but there’s an alarming absence of this basic skill in most relationships. A lot of our conversations are considered means to ends. Us adults love to speak functional — what needs to happen and by when. Kids speak a different language. While you’re trying to throw fast balls to get something done they just want to play catch.
Modern take on nutrition
The past few years have been fruitful in terms of our eating behaviors. The trend that’s coming from these new data imply that there’s more to the story than willpower and there’s certainly more to the story than making consecutive rational decisions about food.
In fact, recent studies suggest that, like economics, our food choices are not rational at all. Studies like this one are beginning to inform us that our food choices are subject to context (such as who we are eating with, when and why, etc.), our emotional states, and our neuro-cognitive systems (such as the reward circuitry in our brain).
Here’s a snippet from the abstract:
…there are physical and social contexts that fuel compulsive eating by exploiting reward mechanisms and their interaction with emotions.
Daniel Ho and Antonio Verdejo-Garcia
Long story short, companies are consistently searching for the right proprietary blend that exploits our easily-addicted brains into eating more. This has a large impact on our health and especially on the health of our kids.
While food wasn’t always this complex, this new (and apparently more complicated) view is something called a bio-psychosocial approach. It incorporates information from our biological makeup, our psychological states and traits, and our social contexts. As a clinician, we call these comprehensive perspectives — as a parent, we can call this overwhelming.
While infrequent treats are obviously fun and spontaneous and enrich an experience, the addictive qualities of nutrients such as sugar are absolutely something we need to be mindful of. And it should also be noted that sugar, in tandem with low emotional control, is nearly enough to throw someone’s health straight off the rails. There’s a lot to be said for the preventative steps to ensure we don’t hit that point.
So let’s talk about those.
How to model it
Treat food as energy, and treat treats as…well, treats.
Also be mindful of your eating behaviors. Do you find yourself craving sugar or chocolate when you’re feeling low? While carbohydrates can certainly alleviate the down-in-the-dumps feeling, be mindful of allowing this to turn into a full blown coping mechanism (and an unhealthy one, at that). For a handful of reasons children have a tendency to absorb how we cope with the slings and arrows of daily living, so it’d be wise to make sure nutrition (or just calories, in this case) isn’t perceived as an emotional reaction by the kid.
Make it fun. Cook with them and find awesome recipes that allow them to experience how rewarding the nutritional process can be. For example gardening — if you actually grow the food it changes the entire relationship you have with that meal. Any way you can enrich the interpersonal process with the kid to mold how they see food and minimize the processed foods from a box will be a good long term investment.
Mental training
Tomorrow afternoon I’m virtually-volunteering in my older daughter’s classroom. The teacher gave parents the green-light to teach a 30 minute lesson on pretty much whatever we want.
Yoga + emotional skills = my lesson.
Context: every morning, at 4:15 to be exact, I start my yoga routine. It’s cold, dark and lonely and I generally don’t like being awake at 4:15. But there I am, everyday. In fact, there I am at that time because of those factors. It provides me a psychological training ground to overcome states I don’t like — in other words, mental training. I use an app called RomWod that takes me through a meditative yoga routine that focuses on breath, patience, and tolerance.
Breath, patience, and tolerance.
While I’m obviously not trying to induce such a harsh environment for the kids, breath, patience and tolerance form the nucleus of strong mental health in children.
In fact, breath is at the heart of a calm physiological (and psychological) state called parasympathetic rhythm. It allows us to engage in thinking, connection and generally fosters a needed sense of certainty. It’s opposite, sympathetic arousal, is generally present in people (not just kids) who are emotionally reactive — as in snippy or aggressive — and in people who are chronically stressed.
While both are needed for survival, being in command of which system you’re in is a sign of your overall health. It’s trainable.
How to model it
After the Harvard Graduate School of Education did a review on what makes a child resilient rather than discouraged or traumatized, they key factor was a consistent, supportive adult.
If our goal is to model psychological resilience — which entails both emotional capacity and cognitive development — we need to model what it’s like to be slow when the world moves fast, calm when things seem chaotic, and generally willing to engage in the challenge.
We can do this through passive means, such as modeling how to respond versus react, or through a more active means, such as a challenging yoga routine where the kids learn how to breathe (and therefore control their response to the challenge).
Just remember: they’re always watching. Everything you do waters their perspective on the world. By simply being calm you can make a big impact.
Physical training
How to model it
We don’t really need more data for this one. Moving your body is good; not moving your body is bad.
In fact, there’s such an overwhelming acceptance that physical movement is healthy it almost inevitably implies that lack of physical movement is likely to stem from some underlying physiological or psychological reason rather than lack of information. Studies support this view.
In my experience, it’s common for people to feel rushed in the morning, busy in the afternoon and then exhausted in the evening, and before you know it the hours have been juiced out of the day and there’s no time left for even a short walk.
If you’re struggling to generate the energy to get going, try setting goals that are bigger than yourself — you’ll not only model what it’s like to physically move for the kid but you’ll also model what it’s like to overcome hardship. You’ll be killing a whole lot of birds with a single stone on this one.
The University of Minnesota suggests you set authentic goals that are inherently rewarding, goals that will likely deliver “powerful emotional benefits” after the challenging act is completed.
Science says that when we work toward something (like creating better relationships with others), we have a much better chance of sticking with it then when we work against it (like avoiding conflict with others).
University of Minnesota
On a practical note, just do what you can.
In my experience I know people get motivated by quotes and snapshots of inspiring science, but I also know life gets in the way. My most successful training clients set small, attainable goals and then made radical individual efforts to stay positive and consistent. Eventually it’ll evolve into a very, very healthy habit, it just takes time.
Kids need us to put in the work
And that starts with you, and with me.
If you’re a parent, aunt, uncle — some significant adult to some significant child — they’re looking to you to pave the way. They don’t have the language for it, but they’re looking at you. And whether us clever adults know it or not, they will be, to some degree, a reflection of us.
The upside to this is that we don’t need to change the entire world to change a kid’s entire world — we just need to be a positive force in their eyes.
Cheers to the hard, quiet work of being a responsible adult.
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