Children’s health

Why is children’s health separated from that of adults? Why are boys and girls not simply treated as miniature men and women? The simple answer is that they are boys and girls and not men and women. Adults have all their systems up and running and their male or female hormones, which inform much of the chemical activities in their bodies, in place.

But there is a more important reason why we should pay special attention to the health and well-being of our children, particularly to their nutrition, exercise, and education. For adults, all those considerations apply only to our maintenance. For children, the quality of their nutrition is paramount because, not only do they need to maintain, they need to grow. Imagine trying to grow a healthy nervous system and healthy organs on a diet of sodas and snacks! Their exercise is important for neural development. They not only need to learn to use and control their muscles, they need to learn to balance upright and walk. A newborn does not have a complete nervous system and the bones are still in progress. If the fetus were to develop more completely in utero, it would grow too big for safe birth. So it continues development after birth, first in quick, and then slower stages. This is why the nutrition of a pregnant woman is so important to the developing child, and why a young child’s nutrition is vital. Not only does the baby need to grow its body, it also needs to be well-nourished to learn. By the end of the second year, a baby knows an amazing amount, almost all of it learned, by experience and observation, not taught.

Education is part of one’s health. Everything we know and do, our attitudes and our beliefs which inform our practices, are a result of some kind of education, formal or informal, conscious or not. We learn primarily from experience and observation. Formal, conscious education is a very small proportion of what we learn. And it is our attitudes that can make or break us far more than our earned degrees. The attitudes we learn as children can either help launch us or hold us back. If we have stable, emotionally mature adults as role models, chances are good we will have the emotional resilience to weather whatever we need to. If not, we may have to figure out on our own how to be happy. An unhappy child, for whatever reason, is more susceptible to illness than a happy one. It works that way for adults, too. But in a child, chronic or serious illness can interfere with growth and development. All the more reason to do everything we can to ensure the health of our children with proper nutrition, exercise, and education.

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