Health: Dealing With Food Cravings in Your Home School
Unlike a traditional school, where there are set times and places for food, home school presents a unique challenge because food is always just a few steps away. This may make it difficult for you and your home school child to deal with food cravings. Childhood obesity is a major health problem that is only getting worse. Children are suffering at ever-younger ages from diseases and afflictions that use to only plague adults who had been overweight or eating an unhealthy diet for years. Giving into your home school child's food cravings may not only throw some major kinks into your home school schedule, it can also cause weight gain, and set the stage for future health problems. There are, however, several things you can do to effectively prevent food cravings. You can keep your home school schedule on track, and make sure your home school child stays healthy.
One strategy for dealing with food cravings in the middle of your home school day is to set up a couple of snack breaks. Research shows that if you deny a food craving, you usually end up just binging in the end. Moderation is the key. Setting up a snack break in the morning and one in the afternoon can provide a much needed break from the home school routine, and ward off any unscheduled snack time. Furthermore, allowing for a small portion of the foods your home school student craves in a controlled environment will help ward off stronger, more uncontrollable cravings. Another benefit of this is that it gives you, as the parent, another opportunity to demonstrate temperance to your child, showing them how to effectively manage cravings by using moderation.
Research suggests using food, especially sweet and fatty foods like cake and ice cream, as a reward for home school work done well or as an incentive to complete home school work, is a bad idea. Sweet and fatty foods are pleasurable, and enjoying these foods stimulates pleasure centers and chemicals in our brains. Using these foods as a reward seems to make the habit of eating sweet and fatty foods even stronger as a person grows and develops, making cravings for these foods as the child reaches adolescence and adulthood even more unmanageable. Using non-food rewards for your home school child will provide fantastic incentives and help protect his or her health now, and for years into the future.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, author, children's rights advocate, and Founder and C.E.O. of Learning by Grace, Inc. She and her husband of almost 3 decades reside with their 8 children in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. because "our current system of education has broken its promise..." Learning By Grace, Inc. delivers Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children in the United States and throughout the world.
Rothschild has authored a number of books about education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Daily Education News Blog contains feature stories on alternatives in education.