Traditionally, children’s health has not been given much thought separate from adult health. Views on adult health have changed from focusing on illness and death to looking at more general parts of health, but child-specific issues have mostly been left out. This part gives us a new way to think about and define children’s health. It goes over the ideas that helped the group come up with its meaning and shows how children’s health changes over time. It gives a brief outline of the model’s ideas and how the different factors work. Lastly, the chapter talks about the areas of kids’ health that can be used to measure it.
Many of the ideas in this chapter are also useful for adults, but they are especially important for kids. The charge to the committee says to focus on children. The committee thinks this is important because children’s health has not gotten as much attention as adult health in the past. But people who work on population health problems in a broader sense might want to think about whether the definition and conceptual model in this study could be used for adults.
VIEWS ON CHILDREN AND THEIR HEALTH
Since the beginning of time, children have had different roles in different society groups. In agricultural and early industrial countries, kids were expected to help out around the house and care for each other from a very young age. A lot of them died when they were very young, and the ones that lived were supposed to help the family financially and then help their parents as they got older. People didn’t care much about getting health-improving schooling or services, and they didn’t know much about the environmental factors that affect healthy growth. In today’s world, there isn’t as much of a pressing need for kids to start working, and the technological age requires workers to have more skills and more learning.
In the last few decades, people have become more aware of and committed to protecting children’s health and caring for them (see Zelier, 1994). During the 20th century, researchers like John Watson (behaviorism), Arnold Gesell (maturational stage theory), Sigmund Freud (psychoanalytic theory), Jean Piaget (cognitive development theory), Erik Erickson (psychosocial theory), John Bowlby (attachment theory), Urie Bronfenbrenner (ecological theory), and Arnold Sameroff (transactional theory) did a lot of observational and empirical work that helped us understand how childhood is important from a cognitive, emotional, and social points of view, as well as the roles that family and society play.
Modern societies are moving away from the idea that parents have full control over their kids. Instead, the welfare of kids is seen more and more as a shared social responsibility that needs money to be spent on schools, hospitals, and other facilities. On the other hand, there is more and more proof that children’s growth is affected by both their families and the social forces and cultural norms that shape society. Families and society need to care about, guide, and protect children’s health, growth, successes, and social skills, not just because children are valuable in and of themselves, but also because of what they will become as a society. This view of childhood is built into social institutions like schools and the health care system. These institutions play big roles in preparing children for the challenges of modern times and making sure that, as they grow up, they are ready for life in a world that is getting more complicated.
From a public policy point of view, this new way of thinking was solidified by the big social changes of the 19th and 20th centuries. These changes included national policies for providing health care to poor people, free and mandatory public education, mandatory immunizations that protect both individual children and groups against widespread epidemics of infectious diseases, policies for protecting children’s welfare, and the creation of the juvenile justice and child welfare systems (Katz, 1997; Cravens, 1993; Levine and Levine, 1992).
It was these policies that led to the creation of the Children’s Bureau in 1913, which later changed its name to the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (Hutchins, 1997), a federal agency to oversee education, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and health care benefits for children who really needed them. In recent years, people’s worry for the health and well-being of children has made them more determined to improve children’s health services. This is shown by the creation of the State Child Health Insurance Program, the expansion of Medicaid, and the passing of Medicaid. There is still some doubt about how long some of these programs will last, and the public’s interest in children hasn’t been steadily growing over the past three hundred years. However, there has been a lot of progress in making society more committed to children.
A Statement of What Child Health Means
For this study, “health” refers to a child or group of children, whether they are alive now, have been alive in the past, or will be alive in the future. This is how the committee described “health”:
Individual children or groups of children’s health depends on how well they can (a) grow and reach their full potential, (b) meet their own needs, and (c) learn the skills they need to interact well with their biological, physical, and social environments.
The proposed definition is similar to the ideas put forward at the Ottawa Charter in 1986. These principles focused on the good things about health and said that to achieve “complete physical, mental, and social well-being,” a person or group must be able to define and achieve their goals, meet their needs, and change or adapt to their surroundings. So, health is seen as something that can help with daily life, not as the reason for living. The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1986) says that health is a good idea that includes physical and social tools. In its description of children’s health, the committee made this point of view more specific to show how important a developmental view is and how health is the result of many factors working together.
According to the committee’s description, health is a good thing that helps kids connect with their world and deal with the challenges and changes that come with life. It also includes development in the description and spells out one of the most important ideas behind development: function should be optimized and kept up over time. On the other hand, it focuses on what kids are naturally like and how they can connect with their surroundings.
State of children’s health
The committee used their knowledge, current ideas from different internationally recognized classification schemes, and new research to come up with three areas of health that are essential to evaluating a child’s health: health conditions, functioning, and health potential. This part talks about how these areas are thought of. Chapter 4 talks about how the domains are currently measured.
This process of creating a lively, adaptable, and responsive way to measure children’s health in the US depends on not only what health is defined as and the ideas and theories that support it, but also on how the country uses health in evaluating both individual children and groups of children. The hardest part of health measurement is figuring out how to connect and define the different areas of health (Chatterji et al., 2002). This part lists the areas that should be part of a national system for measuring the health of children.
There have been many ideas over the past few decades about how to explain the many factors that affect health (Canadian Government, 1974; Laframboise, 1973; Epstein, 1996; Wilkinson, 1992; Marmot and Syme, 1976; Marmot et al., 1984, 1997; Berkman and Syme, 1979; Evans and Stoddart, 1990; Institute of Medicine, 1997, 1999; Halfon and Hochstein, 2002; Black et al., 1980; Acheson, 1998; Starfield and Shi, 1999). Several past attempts to come up with a way to measure health have been looked at. Most of them were made with adults in mind rather than kids, and they mostly talk about bad things about health. The committee’s ideas cover a wider range of health issues and are in line with those of other recent Institute of Medicine committees as well as the ground-breaking work done in other countries to change how people think about and track children’s health (Institute of Medicine, 1997, 2001b; Eiser, 1997; Eiser and Morse, 2001).
Things to think about and the standards we used
Because health has many aspects, it’s necessary to make differences between health areas in order to measure and keep track of all of them. It is naturally hard to measure health because it is dynamic (that is, it changes and can be changed), always growing, and touched by many things at once. This changes how domains and subdomains are defined and shown in important ways. It’s not easy to put the different parts of health into separate groups that don’t cross.
The group thought that a number of factors were important for figuring out the areas that would be used to measure health. Among these is the need to:
• Use up-to-date scientific data about the health effects and areas, and be open to new information about health effects.
• Take into account all of the different parts of health.
• Allow similarities between different groups of people and stages of growth. In other words, the areas should stay the same as a child grows up, even if different tests are used to check them.
This information will help you figure out what kinds of policies and programs affect kids’ health and how big those benefits are.
• Understand that your present and past health affect your future health.
Because of the long-lasting affects of different experiences and changes in a person’s traits, some parts of health might not be easy to control and hold accountable right away. Because of this, it might not be possible, believable, or useful in some places to figure out how changes in policy, programs, or processes affect illness, death, and the number of people who get health problems. It might be better to use proven intermediate outcomes instead, like measuring known effects on health, as stand-ins for the desired end results. In the end, it should go without saying that measures must properly show all of these model traits.
The committee suggests that health should be broken down into three separate but related areas: health conditions, which are problems or illnesses of body systems; functioning, which is how a person’s health shows up in their daily life; and health potential, which is the growth of health assets that show good things, like competence, capacity, and developmental potential (see Table 2-1). In an ideal world, if science got far enough along, it would be used to figure out how well a person can handle future health threats.
Parts of Health
Conditions of children’s health
As the name suggests, health conditions are changes in a person’s health that show up as illness, injury, or disability, or as the physical signs and symptoms of a disorder. The ICD, which is now in its tenth version (ICD-10), is generally used to group health conditions together. The ICD system was created for epidemiological reasons. It lets you record and analyze health conditions, accidents, and many typical symptoms in a standard and organized way. In the ICD, different groups are used to describe different diseases. They can be short-term and go away on their own, short-term but likely to come back, or long-term. They can be physical, mental, or emotional. They include a lot of different conditions and diseases, some of which are very specific and some of which are not.
How It Works
The functioning area shows the direct and indirect affects on the child’s daily life and activities of one or more health conditions and their treatments, as well as problems that come up because of more than one health condition. Physical, mental, cognitive, and social skills are all looked at in terms of how they show up in kids’ daily actions and behaviors.
Health care workers have used changes in performance casually to figure out how serious injuries are and how long-lasting and short-term health conditions are. Even though changes in the way the body works are considered health conditions, not all changes in the way the body works are health conditions (Ustun et al., 2002). For example, changes in the color of hair are not health conditions. It’s not always the case that a diagnosis directly leads to a certain amount of daily life disability. If two people have the same abnormal lab value or radiological finding, they may have very different life experiences. One person may not be affected or only be slightly affected in their daily life, while the other may be having major disorder.
In addition, the way a condition works is greatly affected by how it is changed by things that are unique to the child (like behavior, other conditions they may have, or their genes) and their surroundings. For instance, a child who lives in a one-story house will have fewer problems with their ability to do things when they have joint or muscle disease than a child who lives in a five-story walk-up flat.
The amount of available treatments and ways to make up for the problem (like long-lasting medical tools, implants, and medicines) will also change how the condition shows up in the child’s performance. Functioning tests are also very important because they show how well someone can care for others, be dependent on others, and play social roles. One more good thing about these measures is that they let us look at the effects of more than one condition, as well as the effects of the conditions and their treatments, such as any side effects. They give us a way to compare kids’ health in different situations (Stein et al., 1987; Stein and Jessop, 1990).
Physical ability includes things like being able to move around, do normal things, and fully participate in school. There are a lot of different cognitive and mental functions that make up psychological function. Some examples are awareness, confusion, problem-solving skills, and the ability to understand language. These subdomains are always changing because a child’s development changes so quickly over the course of their life. This makes it hard to get a true picture of psychological problems. A child may lose social or mental skills, for instance, if they have a certain disease. However, it would be hard to tell if there had been a decline without measuring that child’s ability more than once.
In terms of social functioning, limits that are put on kids’ normal actions and relationships are called social functioning. As a young kid, being able to play normally and go to school and take part in all school-related activities are examples of subdomains of social role function. A person’s social functioning also includes their ability to fit in with others and connect with them, like making and keeping friends and being a helpful or important part of other people’s lives. Because culture plays a big role in figuring out how to behave in social situations, this area may mean different things to different people.
Changes in function include mental, physical, emotional, and social problems; counts of functional disability (like disability days, bed days, and limited activity days); and fewer chances to grow because of health problems, social stigma, and low social status. To measure these changes in functioning, we might look at things like fine and gross motor deficits, oral motor skills in young children, changes in physical growth and weight, and limits on activity, mobility, and self-care. We might also look at problems in psychological functioning, like problem-solving and receptive and expressive language, as well as problems in social roles, like attachment, relational capacity, affect, mood, behaviors, and school dropout rates.
Potential for children’s health
Health potential includes both health assets and risk states. Health assets give people the ability to deal with physical, mental, and social problems. Risk states make people more likely to experience other types of bad health. The study literature has shown that certain parts of a child’s health potential are useful for figuring out what they can do and what they can save. This area includes healthy skills and positive developmental assets that help people build good relationships, keep their emotions and thoughts in check, and deal with a wide range of challenges, such as facing illness and mental and physical stress. In some ways, this could be seen as the good thing about functioning—being able to function even when your health is at risk—but we decided to make this area separate because it is too easy to restrict functioning to two categories: normal and deficient. Not many, if any, measures of functioning take into account this more positive part of a person’s strengths and resources, as well as the traits that make them strong.
In this area, other traits that are known as resilience factors are openness to change, creativity, self-efficacy, the ability to solve problems, independence, positivity, and the ability to fight and recover from illness (Starfield et al., 1993). All of these traits make it easier for kids to deal with problems and get back on their feet after they happen.
Well-being and Growth
As a person grows, they go through biological and behavioral changes that affect their health, help them function better, keep them healthy, and decide whether they get sick or not throughout their life. Individual development paths are shaped by a person’s genetic make-up, the amount of experience they have, their natural ability to adapt, and their interactions with their physical, social, and cultural environments (Institute of Medicine, 2001b; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000; Hertzman, 2000; Halfon and Hochstein, 2002). More and more scientific studies describe the biological processes and biochemical routes that affect how health grows (Halfon and Hochstein, 2002; Keating and Hertzman, 1999). Health in the past has an effect on health in the future. During childhood, health and health factors work together. There are many things to think about when it comes to kids’ health that have to do with their development. These include important and sensitive times in their lives, how important timing and multiple time frames are, how kids’ health is affected by their age, how important transitions are, and how long childhood lasts.
Important and Sensitive Times
There are sensitive and important times in a child’s growth. Sensitive periods are times when a child is more open to certain external effects or experiences, whether they are good or bad. This is the best time to give them these things or stay away from them. Critical periods are times when certain events or factors have a fixed effect on health, either in a good or bad way. The health effect would not happen with the same exposures at other times (Ben-Shlomo and Kuh, 2002).
A lot of things that can affect a child’s health have very different effects at different ages and stages of growth. The words “sensitive” and “critical” are used equally in this report, but the committee knows that there aren’t many, if any, critical times outside of biology. For example, being exposed to certain factors during fetal development (for example, rubella, folic acid, and ionizing radiation) or during adolescence (for example, mumps) are examples of key developmental times. The time when babies and young kids need the right kind of input and contact to develop good language, vision, and attachment skills is an example of a sensitive period. When looking at a child’s health, it’s important to think about when they were exposed to and experienced certain health factors. Also, what kids are exposed to and experience during sensitive and important times affects not only their health now, but also their health and ability to function in the future.
Timing and More Than One Time Frame for children’s health
It’s important to think about when certain factors affect the start of health problems and the course of a child’s health when measuring their health (Halfon and Hochstein, 2002). A single assessment of health at a certain point in time only shows a small part of a process that is always changing. It’s also important to think about how a child’s health changes over time, both for each child and for groups of children. At one point, what seems like good or bad health may change over time. Some influences may have effects right away, while others may stay dormant and change your health later on or build up (often with other influences) to have effects much later in life.
How and where health factors affect children’s health
The trends and locations of factors that affect a child’s health change with age. A child’s development speeds up quickly in the first few years of life, then slows down as they get older, and then speeds up again during adolescence. This means that their relative importance changes with age or developmental stage (Bogin, 2001). For example, family influences are very important for the health and growth of young children. As people get older, their neighborhood, schools, and friend group become more important (Nordio, 1978; Rutter et al., 1997; Wadsworth, 1999; Halfon and Hochstein, 2002).
Making changes
There are unique problems and chances that come up during transitions. Kids may experience changes in their health as they move from one stage to the next. At different times, like when they are born, start school, or hit puberty, kids have to deal with new settings that test their ability to change in new ways. On the other hand, transitions are times for success and growth, and they are also important times for actions (Baltes, 1997; Brazelton, 1995; Graber and Brooks-Gunn, 1996).
The Effects of Childhood Last a Long Time
More and more people are becoming aware that what you do as a child can affect your health later on. A number of recent studies (Institute of Medicine, 2001b; National Research Council, 2001) have stressed how important growth before and after birth is for a person’s health and well-being throughout their life. For example, Barker (1998) and Ben-Shlomo and Kuh (2002) found a direct link between birthweight and later heart disease.
Many factors interact with each other and change over time to affect health.
The group thought that another set of changes to the model of children’s health should better show how health is affected by many factors that work together.
Different Effects
At any given time, many things from the past and present affect a child’s health. Genetics and a child’s surroundings work together to affect their health. There are a lot of ways that the environment can affect and change the development of genetic potential, or genetic potential can change the environment. Biological, psychological, behavioral, social, cultural, economic, and physical factors are all important on their own, but they often don’t work alone. Instead, they affect each other over time (Engle, 1977; Sameroff and Fiese, 2000). People’s biological and behavioral health can be affected by their social, physical, and cultural settings. This suggests that biological and behavioral results are not always separate (Institute of Medicine, 2001b). Our model shows the many factors that affect a child’s health. These include the child’s biology and behavior, their family, neighborhood, and cultural surroundings, their physical environment, services, and policy.
Effects Work Together for children’s health
Over time, different factors work together and affect each other. Families, social networks, and groups that people belong to (like child care, schools, and places of worship), as well as the neighborhood and society in which they live, both shape and are shaped people (Institute of Medicine, 2001b). This idea of intertwined effects (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bronfenbrenner and Ceci, 1994; Boyce et al., 1998) also describes how these constantly changing and interacting environments affect each other.
Multiple contexts become more important and wider for people as they get older, according to studies on human development (Boyce et al., 1998; Dawson et al., 1994, 2000; Halfon and Hochstein, 2002). These contexts help to direct and strengthen effects on developmental pathways. Many factors interact with each other. For example, the effects of poverty may be caused by a number of things, including bad nutrition, limited educational opportunities, and violence in the area (Bronfenbrenner and Ceci, 1994). The types of contacts and how strong they are change over the course of a person’s life. Early influences may create a set of weaknesses and strengths that change how later influences work.
A new Model of Concept
The group suggests a new conceptual model that better shows how children’s health changes over time due to many different factors working with each other. The groups in Healthy People 2010 are used in our model, but they are expanded upon and seen as a kaleidoscope. There is a set shape to the colorful glass in a kaleidoscope, but the colors and shapes change when the kaleidoscope is turned because of how the different colors and shapes of glass interact with each other. The effects of different factors on health also change as those factors change and interact with each other over time and during growth.
A new way to look at children’s health and the things that affect it
The different factors that affect policy and services are shown in our model as overlapped rings that affect each other. As kids go through different stages of growth, the relative importance of each impact changes. As a result, the pattern of health that forms also changes. Changes in time and stage of growth will have different effects, as shown by the model. Because development isn’t a smooth process with times of fast growth and times of relative stillness, it’s not the same from child to child or from one time period to the next. The way that different factors affect development changes with both time and stage.
Because kids’ health changes as they get older, the kaleidoscope turns and the patterns change. At some ages, these turns happen very quickly, showing big changes in growth. At other ages, they happen less quickly, but still faster than in adults. Each turn takes things from the previous turn, like the child’s health, and gives them a new look. Everything affects the child’s health now and in the future, when they are adults and old. This idea of health isn’t set, so it needs to be looked at over more than one time frame. The design will change slightly with each turn of the shaft. Some affects may not show up until later in a child’s life. The spheres, which stand for influences, cover each other. This makes the finished pattern not just a list of different health influences, but also a picture of how those influences interact with each other. Different factors are also more or less important at different stages of growth. The picture makes it look like each sphere is the same size, but their sizes change over time.
Criteria for Figuring Out How Healthy Kids Are
Understanding how health is and should be measured can be helped by looking at the standards used in other national, state, and neighborhood health measurement projects. When looking at a number of these other studies, some similar themes become clear. These can help you choose specific categories and indicators, as well as a set of indicators (Institute of Medicine, 1999, 2001b; National Committee for Quality Assurance, and others). The group has agreed on a set of factors that will be used to choose domains and indicators and figure out what information is missing about children’s health right now. So, areas and indicators of children’s health should be important, true and reliable, meaningful, culturally appropriate and relevant, adaptable to change, and easy to gather.
• Important: The categories and indicators should take into account all the important parts of health results now and in the future.
• Reliable and valid—measures should be able to be repeated by different people with different tools. Validity means that a measure makes sense in terms of the idea that it’s meant to represent in a way that stands up to different types of scrutiny.
• Meaningful—domains and indicators should take into account the unique health characteristics of children, such as their developmental risk and potential, patterns of illness and death that are different for children compared to adults, and how they are becoming more independent. Also, they should come up with a way to measure and keep track of differences that may begin in childhood and get worse over time.
• Culturally acceptable and relevant—measures should cover all aspects of health as understood by different groups, and they should be able to measure similar things across groups.
• Sensitive to change—measures should be able to pick up on changes that matter. It would be hard to figure out how the health of a child or group of children has changed over time with a measure that could only tell the difference between living and dead.
• Easy to measure—measures should be useful and easy to use for gathering information so that they create a group of people who want the government to use them.
How to Measure the Health of Children
For measuring children’s health to be useful from a policy point of view, it needs to include more factors. The group thought that any way of measuring should:
• Argue about the connections between health at a certain point in time and health prediction in the future.
• Allow for different levels of measurement and limits that can help you decide which people or groups need help. So, it should be useful at different places on the scale, like when health is good and when it’s bad.
• Keep track of how kids’ health changes over time and think about the stages of their growth.
• Be built in a way that keeps privacy and security in mind.
What should you expect from your child’s growth and development?
A healthy child’s growth starts with the health and genes of the parents before the child is even conceived. It lasts until conception and during the time before birth. Obviously, there is a lot of overlap between pediatric worries about the baby and obstetrical concerns about the woman at this time.
After giving birth, there are new and important things to think about, like how to nurse, get newborn screening tests, and make sure the baby is safe while sleeping. Soon enough, you will need to keep your doctor’s appointments for well-baby checks and shots. This is followed by things like when and how to start basic foods, toilet training, and going to the doctor.
Pediatrics knows standard stages of growth and development, but these are not set in stone because a child’s growth and development happen all at once. During the first few months of life, babies grow at an amazing rate. The baby quickly grows into a toddler, then a kid, and finally, after a little more than a decade, an adolescent. Both the child and the adult are having a busy and difficult time.
What are some common illnesses kids get?
It’s true that even the healthiest babies can get sick. It is helpful to know the symptoms and signs of the most common childhood illnesses, as well as how to treat them and keep them from happening. There are some common childhood illnesses that kids can’t help but get, like ear infections and tonsils. To be fair, kids can also get diseases that can be avoided. For example, they can avoid dangerous and even deadly infectious diseases by getting vaccinated, and they can avoid tooth rot by brushing their teeth regularly and getting fluoride treatments.
There are times when babies are born sick. For instance, a split lip or mouth is clear from the start. Some birth abnormalities, like heart problems, may not be obvious at first, even though they are very common. All kinds of birth abnormalities are a worry for both children and their parents.
What kinds of accidents do kids often get?
A certain birth flaw or illness might not be able to be stopped, but a child should be able to be kept safe from accidents and harm, like cuts, burns, and poisoning by mistake. A lot of progress has been made in the area of safety, like quickly recalling toys that are dangerous. Child safety has also improved with the creation of national and regional poison control centers, car seats, safety belts, bicycle helmets, and systems that can’t be opened without a key.
But there are still big safety issues that need to be fixed, like the fact that too many kids drown in swimming pools, swallow home cleaners by accident, get burned on a hot stove or heater, or shoot themselves with a gun by accident. The list goes on and on. We should all always be on the lookout and do everything we can to make sure that a child’s surroundings is as safe as it can be.
What are some bad behavior issues that kids might have?
People worry about more than just a child’s physical health. They also worry about their behavior and mental health. Autism spectrum diseases, such as Asperger syndrome, learning disorders, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), and anxiety and mood disorders are some of the biggest problems.
Kids may also have dreams, trouble sleeping, and feelings that don’t make sense. Quite a few kids have trouble showing their anger in a healthy way. A lot of research has been done on what happens to kids when they watch violent TV shows and play violent computer games.
Younger kids who are more independent are more likely to develop eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. This is especially true for girls who are overweight and worry about their weight. The threat of drug and alcohol abuse shows up. The rise in heavy drinking and long-term pot use is very scary. A lot of people start smoking or vaping because their friends do it. Tattoos and body piercing are topics that parents and kids often talk about.
What is the truth about kids and mental health?
Teen suicide is now the second most common way teens die. The first and third leading reasons of death among teens are car crashes and murder. Major depression and bipolar disorder may be behind suicide attempts and actual suicide.
People used to believe that kids didn’t get these mental diseases because they hadn’t learned how to feel hopeless and powerless about the future yet. That is obviously not true. Children can get major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder. This is now generally agreed upon.
Recent studies have shown that bullying has both short-term and long-term effects on kids. For example, kids who have been bullied are more likely to have depressed signs and even commit suicide. The treatment has to be safe enough to be used on kids in that age group.
Why is it important for kids that their family is healthy?
Family health looks at the health and well-being of kids in the setting of their family. The health of each child in a family is strongly linked to the health of the family as a whole…. This is true not only for kids’ physical health but also for their mental health.
Everyone in our society believes that every child should grow up in a home with two caring people who know how to be good parents. Today, it’s normal for people to get divorced, parent alone, or have stepparents. There are also a lot of adoptions and foster parents. Today’s kids don’t just grow up in the standard biological mother/father home. They also grow up in other types of homes.
It’s time to talk about how to provide good child care and guidance, as well as how to stop child abuse and neglect. A caregiver hitting, shaking, burning, shaking, or sexually assaulting a child is one of the saddest things that can happen. The child could get hurt, hurt emotionally, or even die.
In what ways does community health help children’s health?
When it comes to kids’ health and well-being, the neighborhood is just as important as the family. For kids to grow up, they need a safe and healthy place to live.
Living on a farm, in a small town, in the neighborhoods, or in the middle of a city is very different from each other. A neighborhood with a lot of crime is not a good place for kids to grow up. Another important thing is that kids should grow up in a healthy place with clean water and air to breathe.
Public schools, sports teams, and learning tools like libraries are some other neighborhood ties that can affect kids’ health. Instead of “It takes a village to raise a child,” you could say “It takes the community to raise a healthy child.”
What is the best way to take care of children’s health?
It’s important to stress that kids are not little people and shouldn’t be treated like that. The goal of child health care and the medical field of pediatrics is to give all children the best and most suitable care. Pediatrics has grown to include not only young children and teens, but also young adults, since many 18–21-year-olds still depend on their parents in their 20s.
Brain Foods for Kids: Brain-Healthy Food for Kids
It’s good for kids’ brains as well as their bodies to eat a steady, healthy diet. The right foods can help your brain work better, remember things, and focus. The brain gets nutrients from the food we eat, just like the rest of our bodies. The 10 “superfoods” on the next few slides can help kids think more clearly.
1. Salmon is good for your brain
You can get a lot of omega-3 fatty acids from fatty foods like salmon. These acids are important for brain health and function. For kids, getting enough of these fatty acids can help them think and learn better. To make a healthy sandwich, use whole wheat bread and salmon instead of tuna.
2. Eggs are good for your brain
It’s easy to get a lot of protein from eggs, and the yolks contain choline, which is good for your brain.
For a quick and healthy breakfast before school, make your own breakfast wrap and fill it with lots of vegetables.
3. Peanut butter is good for your brain
This healthy snack is full of vitamin E, an antioxidant that keeps cell membranes healthy. Kids love peanut butter, which is a good thing. Sugar and thiamin are also in it, which is good for the brain and gives you energy.
That’s right, peanut butter is a great dip for both fruits and vegetables.
4. Whole grains are good for your brain
Whole carbs, like cereals and breads, give your brain glucose, which it needs for energy. B vitamins are also found in whole foods and are good for your nervous system.
Switch to whole grain breads, wraps, and snacks for most of your meals to get more whole grains.
5. Oats or oatmeal are good for your brain
Oatmeal and oats are great sources of energy and “brain fuel.” Oats are high in fiber, which keeps kids full so they don’t snack on junk food. Also, they have a lot of zinc, vitamins E, and B complex, which are all good for kids’ brains.
If you want to add apples, bananas, blueberries, or even nuts, you can put them on top of oatmeal.
6. Berries are good for your brain
Berries are full of vitamin C and other antioxidants that can help your memory. Berry seeds also have omega-3 fats that are good for your brain. Pick out blackberries, grapes, strawberries, and cherries. Berries with deeper colors are healthier.
Berries are a healthy snack or treat that can be made into drinks or eaten on their own.
7. Beans are good for your brain
People say that beans are good for your heart. Also, they are good for kids’ brains because they have protein, complex carbs, fiber, vitamins, and minerals that give them energy. They can make you feel full of energy. You can choose kidney or pinto beans because they have more omega-3 fatty acids than other types of beans. These acids are good for brain health and growth.
You can put beans on top of a salad, use them to fill out lettuce wraps, or even put them in spaghetti to make it healthier.
8. Colorful Vegetables for Your Brain
Fruits and vegetables that are dark and rich in color are great sources of vitamins that help brain cells stay healthy. Tomatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, carrots, and spinach are all vegetables that you should feed your child. Plant-based foods are simple to hide in soups and spaghetti sauces.
Your child’s lunch should not have potato or corn chips. Instead, it should have baked sweet potato pieces or easy-to-snack vegetables like baby carrots or sugar snap peas.
9. Brain Food: Yogurt and Milk
Brain cells, hormones, and enzymes all need B vitamins to grow. Dairy products are a good way to get these vitamins. Milk or yogurt with less fat is a great way to get protein and carbs for your brain. Another great source of vitamin D is dairy. Kids and teens need more vitamin D than adults do.
Cheese sticks with less fat are a good source of calcium and make a great snack to take with you.
10. Brain food: lean beef(or something else meat-free)
Iron-rich foods like lean beef and meat substitutes help kids stay energetic and focused at school. Beef also has a lot of iron, which helps your brain work better. Kids who don’t eat meat can get iron from black bean and soy burgers. It’s called nonheme iron, and it needs vitamin C to be taken. Have them eat their veggie burgers or beans with peppers or orange juice, which are both good sources of vitamin C.
Instead of hamburgers and hot dogs at your next barbecue, try grilled lean meat kabobs or black bean burgers. They will taste great and be better for you.
Learn more about children’s health
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