It is perhaps every parent’s dream to raise kids who are beaming with intelligence and having a healthy mind and body. While this is a great idea to have, achieving it requires hard work on the part of parents and the kids.
If you want your children to grow up strong and healthy and with a level of intelligence that would allow them to live their lives productively, here are seven ways you should follow:
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Take Care of Their Dental Health.
Many parents do not realize that regularly taking their children to a dentist for kids is not just about ensuring that they’ll have intact and healthy pearly whites. In fact, making sure that your kids’ have excellent dental health is key to preventing different diseases linked to poor oral hygiene, such as pneumonia, endocarditis, and cardiovascular diseases.
As such, you should teach your kids how to practice good oral hygiene and entrust them to a reliable pediatric dentist. Such a health professional knows the unique dental needs of kids, so you can be sure that your children’s teeth and mouth will be properly taken care of.
Let them Make Mistakes and Learn from Those.
It’s so easy for parents to give their kids a sheltered existence in the belief that it’s the right way to raise them. While parents’ instinct is to protect their children from all forms of harm and negative influence, overdoing it in such protective pursuit can only backfire later on. Kids could either have difficulty solving problems independently, or they could miss the opportunity to learn valuable lessons by making mistakes and learning from them.
Knowing these, be sure to give your kids some free rein to decide on their own. You could give them guidance about life but be sure to let your kids experience failures and get meaningful lessons out of their mistakes.
Develop their Emotional Intelligence.
No matter how intellectually intelligent your kids may be, it won’t be as impressive and meaningful without pairing such a gift with emotional intelligence. This type of intelligence refers to one’s capacity to identify and manage different emotions and not be heavily influenced by negative feelings, particularly in decision-making.
You can develop your kids’ emotional intelligence (also called EQ) by teaching them not to let their negative emotions such as anger and fear be the main determining factor for their life decisions. You should also teach them to be sensitive to other peoples’ emotions and needs the same way they expect others to be towards them.
Give Them the Best Education and Learning Opportunities Possible.
No attempt to raise intelligent kids would be complete without taking care of the obvious: getting them the best possible education. This would involve enrolling them in reputable educational institutions from pre-school towards high school and college. You should also expose your kids to different learning opportunities to help them become well-rounded learners.
Among others, expose them to music, the arts, history, mathematics, science, and other subjects. You should also teach them household chores and life skills so that they won’t be just academically-intelligent but life-smart.
Get Them to Engage in Sports and Physical Activities.
Your kids should have strong bodies, so they can easily handle manual chores at home and in school. You should encourage them to run, walk, jog, and play sports that would get their muscles a great workout. You can enroll them in a summer sports clinic and teach them to do simple exercises even at home. With these physical activities, your kids’ physical health will be kept in excellent shape as they grow up.
Have Them eat Nutritious Food?
Getting your kids used to a healthy diet is one way of raising them to become healthy individuals. You should consider consulting a registered nutritionist-dietitian to create a custom meal plan for your children. Individual persons do not have similar dietary and nutrition needs, so your kids need to eat healthy food that supplies their peculiar dietary requirements.
Limit their Screen Time.
Today’s children have better access to technology than their parents, which is why it’s not uncommon to see even toddlers tinkering with smartphones and tablets even before they can speak well. While exposing your kids to technology is not a bad idea in itself, it can be counter-productive if they end up spending too much time looking at screens.
As such, be sure to regulate the amount of time your kids can use their gadgets. You can motivate them by establishing a rule that they can only use their devices if they have finished their homework, and even so, still set limitations on the length of their access to gadgets.
Just follow these tips, and you should find it relatively easy to raise your kids to be smart and healthy.