EP23 - Foster These Five Habits in Childhood to Raise a Happier Adult

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Welcome back to another episode of The I Am mom podcast, we are so grateful to be sharing this journey with you. And we hope you are receiving some really great tips and inspiration did Bill and I are having a fantastic time doing this for you and just feel so grateful to have been given this opportunity. Today we're going to discuss how to build and sustain healthy habits for your children. Now all parents want to start their children on the path to well being and by developing these healthy habits early on, your child will be able to bring these habits into adulthood and have lifelong benefits. Yeah, it's

it's a great topic. And it's so important to to have these habits formed at a young age because what we want to do is create these habits, which embody our children's identity. And our identity is shaped by what we believed. So it's really easy to form habits when we're young. But once our habits form, they seem to stick it stick around for a long time, especially the ones we don't want, right? So they're really hard to change in adult life. So when we're adults, what we do is we base changing our habits on what the outcome is that we want to achieve. But what we want to do is build identity based habits for our children, so that it helps them to focus on who they're becoming, and who they want to be. Now, James clear, he's the author of the book, atomic habits, I love that book. And he says that habits are like the atoms of our lives. So each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement. And he defines atomic habits as a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but it has incredible power and leads to compound growth and improvement in your life.

Oh my gosh, isn't that super powerful? Right? Yeah, I love that book to you. I think it's just, it's definitely a must read. Um, but you know, like, it really points to the fact that a habit is a behavior, right? It's a behavior. And what happens is that once you create a habit, you have these little pathways in your brain, right, and we call them neural pathways when we're talking about it with our, with the kids that we work with. And I kind of describe it as like a road map. I even saw like your you know, you're driving on this road, the more that you drive on it, the more that you're going to be familiar with it. And just like habits, these neural pathways are formed. And the more we do it, the more familiar it becomes and it becomes almost while it's not even almost it does become automatic and uncontrolled, and even unintentional, right? So this habit that forms whether they are positive or negative, is going to require little thought or effort to carry out because we have become so accustomed to it. Yes, and,

and our neural pathways represent what we believe. And so research has shown that once a person believes a particular aspect of their identity by reading, reinforcing this continued habit, they are more likely to act in alignment with that belief, and then it just becomes an automatic thing. So while we're doing this, when our kids are young, it's going to really set them up for lifelong success. So for example, if they make their bed each day they are then embodying the identity, of being an organized person, for example, or if they read everyday, they are embodying the identity of being a knowledgeable person. Or if they exercise every day, they're going to embody the identity of being an athletic person.

I love that the way you put that, yes, you're absolutely right. It does embody the person, right? You know, what's coming up in my mind right now is the whole idea around. Like our brake system in the school in school, right? So for example, like right now, as we're recording this, it's September, and were right at the beginning of school time, right. And our kids are getting used to the idea again, of waking up early. So they may not seem as though they are this quote, unquote, morning person and ready to go first thing in the morning, a lot of them, but it's because they have an embodied that perceptual persona, right, because they haven't been most of them haven't been waking up early, during the summer. And so we're recreating this habit again now, right? And now, they will be able to take on this persona of waking up early and being ready to go first thing in the morning.

I love that you brought that up, because my entire life, I've been saying I'm not a morning person. So I've been embodying that identity of not being a morning person. But truthfully, anybody can develop a habit of waking up early and become a morning person.

Yeah, essentially, right? And it's not that you have to be loving it.

ever love it? Yeah, that's exactly right. But

you can do it right? When you think of a lot of a lot of people, I keep hearing people waking up at 430. And they have this practice of doing this meditation and morning papers, and so on, and so on, right. But if it's not like they just have this internal clock, that will wake them up at 430, they have created this habit, right. And the thing is, if you can harness your habits, and focus on doing those things that are going to improve your life, then you are really going to reap these benefits. Right. And speaking of habits, there are different ways of creating habits. And there's different theories as well on how long it takes to form a new habit. Now a lot of the research really focuses on is really dependent on what type of habit we're talking about, right? The person the actual specifics of the goals and circumstances. But most often researchers say that it takes about 21 days. However, it didn't fully know that you also have some more research research suggesting that it takes longer,

I did read somewhere and I cannot remember the source at the moment, I did read the latest number being 66 days, I have always thought it took 21 days to form a new habit. But I do actually believe that I read that it actually does take longer to really embody that habit.

You know, that really does make sense, right? When you think about it, I think, because then we can, if we're really engaged and intentional going back to that episode of setting an intention of changing or having new behavior in our lives, we're going to be focused on doing and if we're doing it every day, we're going to create these neural pathways. And we will be essentially creating this habit, but to embody it into our own persona, I can't take a lot longer because that requires a lot more processes to to happen in our brains and within our physical bodies.

Actually, I like that you brought that up too, because creating a new habit at at any given time and especially in adulthood has to involve a process a change in your process of the way that you're doing things so that you can have an achieve a better outcome. So I do feel that in childhood, we have an opportunity to create identity based habits, but in adulthood really were it's harder to create an identity based habit and we're more likely to create outcome based habits.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Right. And I mean, when you think about it, these habits are who you are, right? It's really something that's become part of your routine, it, it's hard to change some of these habits, right? Especially like you said, as you grow older, because, again, it just embodies you. But I think the biggest thing is having this awareness that you either want to replace a habit that's not working for you, or create a new habit that will help you to live a more positive life, right. And there are so many different things that you can do to help change your habit habits and implement really good one, so that you are able to reach your goals, and have a solid foundation for your life and for your children's lives.

And having children gives us the opportunity to reassess our habits, and motivates us to actually create habits for them that we would not have necessarily created or changed for ourself in adult life. And I think it's an excellent opportunity. So the goal here is to give you some habits and concepts to think about so that we can actually raise kids that are more likely to be happier in adult life, and to have less mental health issues. So that's what we're going to provide you with today.

Yeah, and before we go into those, I think it's really important to remember that it is okay to take baby steps. If you are dreaming of running your first marathon, you are not going to sign up for it, and run the next day, right, you're going to create an embody this persona, as we're talking about of being a runner, and take these small steps so that you are able to reach these big goals and these small steps that can be done every day.

Yes, and we want to have reasonable expectations for our children and age appropriate expectations. But kids who do strive to do hard things, they are likely are to live happier lives. So we do want to challenge our children. And the beauty is when you have a new child that comes into the world, you can help them form habits without them even knowing because we're building those neural pathways from scratch. So it's really

exciting. Isn't that such a nice? I love that, like we have the power to do

this. Exactly, exactly. And it's important not to obviously expect perfection. What I do find as an adult, there are some habits that I've always wanted to change in myself that I didn't change until I had a child. So it gave me that opportunity to create that change for myself, because I wanted it to be better for my child.

And then modeling is one of the strategies that we wanted to share with you, when you are modeling these healthy habits, your children are going to be more likely to pick up from you, right? They're looking at you, oh, mommy's doing this or daddy's doing this or they're they're acting in this manner. They're eating this. And so they're when they see it, they're going to register it and then follow up on that, thereby creating these habits for themselves independently. So I think

yeah, definitely true. And the habits that we're going to suggest here, they're common habits, but they're important to speak about and recognize because there is a lot of science and research behind these habits. Okay, so the first one that we want to bring up is giving our children the opportunity to have healthy nutrition and to drink enough water. It is a habit drinking enough water is a habit. So that's something that we want to teach our children from a young age. So giving them their own water bottle, for example, and monitoring how much water they drink in a day. In fact, everybody should be having half your body weight in ounces of water. So that is a good indication of how much water your child or you should be drinking. So that is a habit that can go a long way it's going to prevent constipation, it's going to increase hydrochloric acid to help your food digest better, it's going to carry nutrients throughout the body. There are so many benefits to drinking water. So that's definitely a very important habit to embody. And the next one is eating healthy, obviously. So having nutritious foods in the house that allow the family to embody the habit of eating healthy.

Yeah, I think, and you know what, I love how you brought up the water concept. And I'll tell you why. Because a lot of the times the kids who begin kindergarten won't bring water and they'll bring juice. And so I have a rule that you can have the juice, juice or juice during snack time or whatever, right? And some I've had parents say that, well, my child was not going to drink anything then. And I'm like, Well, what about a water bottle. And so and this has happened on many occasions. And there's, they say, they, they're not going to drink water. So I'd say, Well, I have this rule you if they really want this juice, they can have it in that lunchtime, but during snack time, and throughout the day, we're going to be having water. So guess what happens? They end up drinking the water. And that becomes it right then they're there more because it's been kind of in somewhat loosely enforced in the classroom, and they're seeing everyone else do it, they end up doing it themselves. And then they don't even go to their juices like by the end of two or three weeks because they're so accustomed to drinking water.

I didn't realize that it was such a common occurrence. But you're right there has been coming home and telling me that a lot of students have juice in the classroom and juice has been shown to be linked to greater incidence of cavities. And obviously, it's more sugar intake and, and so I definitely would encourage the water for sure for the kids. So I'm really glad that you have that rule.