Infiltrating My Kids' Routines... With Good Habits
A sign on the wall of my childhood dentist office said:
“You don’t have to floss ALL your teeth.”
I was so relieved. Just flossing some of my teeth felt like so much less work for some reason. But then the sign continued:
“Just the ones you want to keep.”
Dang it.
Seeing that sign every six months just wasn’t enough for me to remember that the second line was coming so I kept getting my hopes up only to have them dashed. In reality, maybe it only happened two or three times, but the memory has lasted at least until now.
When I was a kid I had to brush my teeth before going to bed. The flossing that the dentist’s sign said I needed to do to keep my teeth didn’t have a time slot. It got done after corn on the cob or maybe after some particularly chewy meat—once a week at best.
My partner and I were discussing flossing one day when one of us said, “I wish my parents had just made me brush and floss together.” We looked at each other and knew we could pull one over on our kids. At least, it felt that way. We added a requirement to going to bed with just two words. Ok, go brush and floss your teeth. We hope that they are now linked in their minds and remain none-the-wiser.
I started to wonder if there were other things that we could have snuck into their day and if maybe it’s not too late to add some. One thing that came to mind was diet and exercise.
I was extremely fit and athletic until I quit playing soccer at age 17. Then got fat as a late teenager/early adult. I attribute most of it to not understanding the appropriate diet for a human, but I also didn’t think that regular exercise was required because the soccer I had been playing that enabled me to eat full racks of ribs and almost entire large pizzas was just for fun. The gym didn’t sound fun, so I didn’t go. But my diet stayed the same so the math caught up with me.
I’ve since corrected that and gotten better at fitness in general to the point I feel confident in getting my kids started. The amount of cardio they do naturally is excellent. They play a lot of soccer, tag, gaga ball, basketball, and foursquare with their friends as well as jumping for over an hour per day on our trampoline. They also walk a mile home from school each day.
One of the things I’ve learned about fitness is that building up muscle is very simple requiring mostly consistency. The cost of doing it is absolutely worth the payoff. (injury prevention, longevity, self-esteem, enhances other sports)
I’ve made an at home workout program for them that uses only bodyweight exercises. It’s a bite sized version of my workout that’s already pretty minimal. It’s 2-4 exercises three days a week. I think it will take about 20 minutes.
It’s just version one. We’re going to treat it like an experiment to learn from. If we’re lucky, someday they’ll say, “I don’t even remember not exercising. It’s just what we did—like brushing and flossing.”
