Thriving Children: A New Roadmap to the Future

We have two types of lifestyle models, we have a habitual and we have an intentional.

The difference between the two lifestyle models is the difference between having a healthy lifestyle or not. Health is not dependent upon good fortune, age, or genetic predisposition. Regardless of what society leads us to believe.

Your health and the health of your family is dependent upon the lifestyle habits that you choose to implement in your daily lives. The postural design of our bodies is directly related to the function and our biologic sustainability as human beings. All habits lead us down a path; all habits have a consequence. Lifestyle habits either build postural fitness; or they create postural collapse accelerating the rate of postural aging that we experience.

Postural fitness is our ability to hold the body upright against gravity in an efficient way, deceasing compression in the joints so they move freely without pain or degeneration. And the most important aspect of postural fitness is being able to hold the body in a position that does not compress the organs, allowing organs to function to their fullest capacity and perform their vital functions.

How many of you have seen an old person walking down the street completely bent forward, and not surprising, they are actually moving very slowly because they have no range of motion? This is the classic example of postural aging. Now, I purposely said, how many of you have seen an “old” person with this postural presentation. I did that intentionally to bring the image to your mind because I know that our society associates age with health decline. However, the postural presentation actually has nothing to do with the person’s age or genetics, but everything to do with the habits that lead them down the path.

Whenever you see somebody bent over or slumped forward, I want you to associate that posture with being sick. So if you catch yourself slumping, make yourself change your posture and sit up straight. If you aren’t able to sitting up straight for more than 30 minutes without slouching, or feeling uncomfortable, I want you to have me check your posture, you likely have a postural distortion pattern that we need to get corrected.

Now what about your kids? What does all this mean for your children? Did you know… research shows that 65% of children experience back pain from backpacks that are too heavy? And those children with back pain actually perform worse in the classroom than their pain free classmates?

We are talking specifically about thriving children today, a topic for which I am extremely passionate about. Children hold within them the power of becoming anybody that they want to be. When given the proper tools, support and guidance they will thrive in this world and grow up to be healthy, purposeful adults who impact the world with their talents. Developing habits to have thriving children is based on a set of principals that will stay with them the rest of their lives.

I started this article by talking about the two lifestyle design models: habitual vs. intentional.

Habitual is responsive to the circumstances of the environment, in which you lack a plan of how to build strong posture. With the intentional style of living, children learn how to be mindful of their body in space and how to position their bodies in a way that supports thriving function of the body, in alignment with efficient energy utilization, and pain free growth during the stages of development.

If we do not teach our children these principles of mindfulness, or moment-by-moment awareness of how our bodies are interacting within the environment, then they will learn to live habitually. They will learn to live based upon societal cues that create habits. Living by these norms creates habit loops that support postural decline, and thus the development of health issues that inhibit their progress in the classroom.

When given an environment to be healthy, your child will thrive.