Making Good Parenting Choices
As parents, our most important responsibility is to make sure our family grows up healthy, happy, and successful. The choices we make as parent’s impact the health of our children and affect the longevity of their lives. The four main controllable factors that impact our children’s health are: proper nutrition, eliminating impurities/losing weight, exercise, and improving body function. By controlling these factors, it is possible to positively affect our children’s future.
To improve the health of your family, you need to control what they eat. Junk foods, sodas, and fried foods are not simply empty calories, but they deplete the body of vitamins and minerals and rob it of what it needs to be healthy. These poor choices can lead to childhood obesity and possible childhood diabetes.
The next area we need to address is exercise or, the lack of it. If you and your family were to take a walk together for 20 minutes each evening, you would do more to enhance each person’s health and prolong your lives, while creating quality family time. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported on a study that found a 10 minute walk is enough to increase energy, alter mood, and affect a positive outlook for up to 2 hours. By addressing these two areas of diet and exercise, proper body weight is achieved.
The final area to address is the ability of your body to properly function.
Nerves control all function and can be damaged by trauma. Here are some facts regarding where traumas can come from:
• From birth, babies are subjected to trauma to their head and neck caused by inducing labor, pain medications, restrictive maternal positions, the use of forceps, vacuum extractions, and caesarian sections.
• According to the National Safety Council, nearly 50 percent of children fall head first from a high place during the first year of their life.
• Tossing your child in the air, pulling a child by the arm, falling, bicycle accidents, school sports, rough-housing, and even carrying a backpack can contribute to spinal trauma.
• A study released by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission stated, almost a quarter of a million children, under the age of 15, are treated for injuries related to playground equipment. The majority of the accidents are falls, and approximately 50 percent of all falls result in head and neck trauma.
These individual and combined traumas result in spinal misalignments, called “subluxations,” which can have far reaching effects on the health of your child.
Health problems such as infantile colic, scoliosis, ear infections, tonsillitis, bedwetting, and adolescent low back pain, just to name a few, can be related to spinal subluxations more commonly referred to as pinched nerves. To understand how this happens, we need to understand how the spine and the nervous system affect the body.
To begin, there are two types of nerves: pain and function. If there is pressure on a nerve of pain from trauma, you feel pain. If there is pressure on a nerve of function, you feel no pain, but your body will not function properly. Thus, when a nerve of function is not working properly, it causes a loss of function to the area of the body that the nerve controls. This could be a muscle, gland, tissue or organ. On the other hand, if a nerve of pain is pinched, you can experience pain in that area of the body where the nerve has pressure. By releasing the pressure off of the nerves, chiropractic has been very successful in treating many common childhood health problems. To find out if you or your family can benefit from chiropractic, please give us a call!
Posted in March Addition of "Elegant Living" Magazine
