Out of the mouth of Babes

My wife calls me into the computer room at our house and says that she wants me to read something my son had just finished writing for school. She seemed really excited about it so I felt as though I needed to read it. The paper he wrote had the title “Childhood Obesity” and as soon as I saw that it caught my attention.

The first sentence jumped out at me. It was really powerful. It said, “Parents are slowly killing their children.” Wow, what a way to hit adults between the eyes. Out of the mouth of Babes comes the truth. I have never had a talk with him about this nor had he ever spoken to me about how he really felt about this subject. In his second paragraph his opening sentence was, “Parents are to blame for childhood obesity because of what they teach their children during the first years of life.” How true is this?

During the first five years of your child’s life is when they learn the most about you. You are around them all day and most of the night. You are telling them what to do and how to do it. They are learning their right and wrong from you. So imagine if you, as the parent, are clueless what you will be bringing up.

I was at a water park a few weeks back and I was sitting by the pool area with my ten year old daughter just people watching and along came this couple and sat right beside us and we drummed up a brief conversation. Well no more than a few seconds into the conversation the guy started using words that I thought were not appropriate for young ears to hear and I asked him to chill-out as well as his wife but he kept on sucking down his beer and thinking it was funny. This guy turns to his wife and says, “He sooner or later they will all hear this stuff anyway so what’s the big deal.” At that his wife got out of the pool and walked away and he followed. While sitting there in this awkward moment I was trying to find some teachable moment and did not want the time to go by. Then she looks at me and asks me, “Is that what alcohol does to a person daddy?” I said, “Absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt. It really messes you up and that is why your mother and I don’t drink.”

In this paper my son wrote it talked about our appearance and how they only see what they see. He says that we can talk to them until we are blue in the face but in the end it is our actions that speak louder than anything else. If we eat bad food and drink bad drinks they will think that it is ok to do the same. Hey what is good enough for mommy and daddy should be good enough for me, right? If we ourselves are obese and in poor condition, well it must be OK because mom and dad are that way, right? If my parents come home and watch television all night, isn’t that Ok then? Our children are only splitting images of who we are threw and threw.

In his paper he quotes Michelle Zive how wrote the book “Parents should play a role in fighting Childhood obesity”. In this his book Zive states, “It is critical that parent’s model and practice those eating habits that they want their juveniles to learn.” Does this need to be explained, I think not. We need to model what our kids should grow up to be period. We need to fight the obesity first with ourselves then even without you trying our kids will join suit.

I am proud of my son and the paper he wrote. It is good to know that all that my wife has been preaching and all we have been actually doing is sticking and not going on deaf ears. My hopes are that your children feel the same way and that my son’s first statement never comes true. Let’s not slowly kill our children but make them stronger and faster than we were and have ever been. First we need to start with us.