Cause Essay 1

Six years ago when I started working at head start there was not a lot of talk about healthy eating or staying healthy by exercising. When you look back you can see how high over weight kids were getting.You can also see how much the portions has changed. There is a very good web sit with great graphs on over weight kids it has some good tips on how to avoid portion distortion. It is the National Heart, Lungs and Blood institute at http://hin.nhlbi.nih.gov/portion. It is good to see that Doctors and other people are getting the word about how to stay healthy and what a difference it makes. How much fun eating healthy can be when you turn it into a game like dancing to get them moving and exercising. Have kids helping make the snacks like wash a apple than peel it and cut it.Kids are more likely to eat fruits and veggies if they have helped make it.  Our trainings are fun and come up with good ideas for the kids and there families. We try to come up with different fun exercises for our kids for inside and outside. Even the development needs has changed to more kids from one to three years old are being referred to C.D.S. It is very nice to see the changes so the littler kids are getting the help they need and its not just the school age kids. I like to think if you start them earlier with a referral so they get the help they will not need them latter on in school. The biggest reason I got into child care was for the kids to help them get the help they need and help them learn what they need to get the developmental needs met. To help the parents feel good about leaving there kids with someone they know will take care of there children and love them and that the parents can trust. It is fun to see the kids years latter down the road to see how there are doing in grade school and how they are acting.

A apart of being healthier is being able to pick healthier foods. Like buying  fruits and veggies  instead of chips and candy. If you buy fruits are will snack on that instead of chips. A tip on snacking on fruits is to wash them and cut it up before so you can grab and go when you need to. The same thing with your veggies you can put little sides of dip with it, I love to dip in ranch with my veggies. Kids will eat there fruits and veggies more if there are out for them to eat. Parent needs to be able to let there kids make the choice for what they eat. That is how they learn what is good healthy foods and what is not healthy foods. You need to talk to them about the foods they are eating.

Being able to exercise is a part also. Kids need to learn how to exercise at a young age. If you make it fun they will love it and will not even know they are being healthy. We try to get over kids outside ever day. During the winter we have our kids pull each other in a sled. In the summer we go for walks with them. We just get them up and moving and any moving is good keeps them active. They love to dance and this is great exercises for them. Kids like to move and stay active.

There is the developmental issues, that come form not being healthy. We mostly see developmental issues from not eating healthy, and not being able to exercise. This is sad to me when we see this, because the child didn't ask for the parent to not feed them or to over feed them. If the child is under feed they are not as strong as other children. If they are over feed they are so over weight they can not move around. Than there is the learning part with the developmental issues if there brain is not being nourished it is not going to function  like it should. Than you have the problems and the child falls behind in there learning all because they did not have a good start.

At head start I work for we try to teach kids the difference between a good healthy food choice as to a unhealthy foods. We also get them moving as much as we can and tell them how important it is to move and exercises. We do a lot of things with the kids that they can bring home and do with there parents. The parents enjoy this to it gets them moving too and having fun with there kids. That's why it is very important for children to get a healthy start in life. They also need to learning what is healthy foods and not healthy, and how important exercises is for them.