Good Kids, Bad Habits

Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children

When kids start going on TV binges or devouring fistfuls of cookies, it's easy to say, "They'll grow out of it." More likely, they're acquiring bad habits that could lead to childhood obesity and chronic adult diseases, from diabetes and depression to heart trouble and osteoporosis.

But by making simple changes now, you can help your children avoid these problems later. Good Kids, Bad Habits supplies the tools you need, starting with the unique RealAge^® Healthy Kids Test. Based on the proven RealAge Test, which measures biological—not calendar—age, the Healthy Kids Test reveals where children are doing fine and where they're headed for health trouble.

Regardless of the problem—from sleeplessness to video-game addiction—Dr. Jen has seen and solved it all, working with parents and kids together. Her insightful tips, preventive steps, and kid smarts, learned from working with thousands of children, make this book invaluable. It will help your kids grow into the healthiest adults they can be—while still allowing them to be kids.

You've probably seen the RealAge quizzes on the Internet; you take the quiz and it tells you if you're older or younger than your actual age--whether you're aging yourself before your time. So what if you could start your children down the road to adulthood with habits that would make them less likely to age themselves too early? That's the premise of "Good Kids, Bad Habits," a RealAge book from pediatrician Jennifer Trachtenberg.

It starts out with an extensive test to determine what your child's habits currently are, focusing on "only things you and your child can control" like eating habits, TV watching, exercise and the like. Once you've assessed the situation, Trachtenberg then details what habits your child should work on, focusing on eating, activity, hygiene, discipline, self-esteem, self-protection and general health habits.

The rest focuses on how to improve your child's, and by extension your family's, habits. Each chapter is stuffed with information, to the point that it's a little overwhelming. They're all structured similarly, with Identify, Inform, Instruct and Instill as the watchwords, with tips on how to change habits.

For instance, we all know that watching a lot of TV sets children up for a sedentary life. And yet it's so hard to ignore the allure of the set for both parents and children. Example: As I write this, Lou is in the TV room watching Cyberchase; she gets to zone out, I get some peace. But! before I feel too guilty, it's the first time she's turned on the TV all day, and Josie is outside on the swings.

Even so, it's as much a struggle at our house as it is in a lot of houses. We've developed our methods for handling it, which interestingly turn out to be Dr. Jen's methods as well: Planning ahead (we call it "appointment TV"); watching together; hiding the remote (not one we do on purpose); and minimizing the sets. That last one--the girls know that as long as they live in this house they will never have a set in their room. Period. There's the big set in the TV room, a (rarely watched but useful) set in John's and my room and one in the basement that's not hooked up to cable and can be used when there's a big noisy crowd of kids over to watch a movie or something. In the house I grew up in, we had a set in practically every room in the house, and it took away from our family life as I got older--not that I would have ever expressed that at the time!

Much of what Dr. Jen talks about is common sense stuff. Get outside. Flossing is good. Wash your hands a lot. Sneeze in your elbow. Don't go boating without a life jacket. But sometimes it's good to have a check-in. Assessing where your family is in its habits and learning more about where you can improve, well, that's only to the good.

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