If You Really Want Your Kids to Be Healthy, You Have to Be Healthy

Modelling unhealthy behaviour because kids do what you do, not what you tell them to do

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Children do what we do, not what we tell them to do. Every day, we are modelling health or we are modelling illness. It’s a harsh truth to understand, perhaps.

This was the quiet truth about parenting that took me years to fully understand: every day, in countless invisible ways, I am my children’s most powerful role model. I heard it a lot around me, it’s plastered in big letters on social media, and it becomes cliché at some point. But trust me, it’s not.

I grew up surrounded by adults who lectured about healthy habits, but rarely lived them. My dad smoked when I was a small kid, but luckily he quit suddenly after a colleague of his got sick and died.

In my childhood, extreme cleaning of the house was done out of duty, exercise was described as a chore, rest was something you had to “earn” but only after you did all your chores and duties. The message I absorbed and integrated slowly, wasn’t so much in what they said, but in how the adults in my life lived. My young eyes noticed everything and took it as normal.