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

Good Kids, Bad Habits:  The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children starts with a test.  A loooong test.  A test asking how many times a day you make your child brush your teeth. A test that requires math. 

I took the test, despite my hatred of anything requiring math, because I wanted to see how I stacked up.  Despite working in the usability field for years, I had to redo my score twice because I didn’t understand the scoring methodology (you’ll understand if you see it).  However, after all that work, I did find out that according to author Jennifer Trachtenberg, the little angel’s body will be four years younger than her age if I (and she) keep it up.

No pressure, here, parents. You can only add and subtract years from your child’s life by doing things properly.  And properly, of course, always means “takes longer and probably costs more and leaves no room for viewing of American Idol.”

I don’t generally like preachy books, but this is a pretty well-rounded reminder of all those things we should be doing for our kids, things like feeding them colored vegetables and forcing them outside away from that talky box on a daily basis.  It’s always good to have a reminder.  Ahem.

Here are two particularly disturbing quotes I found in the book – just thought I’d share:

• Nearly 50 percent of 8- to 16-year-olds watch three to five hours of TV each day.
• Girls tend to get UTIs more often because their urethras are shorter and closer to the anus, where troublesome bacteria – usually E. coli – lurk.

After that, you’ll be glad to hear there’s a helpful section outlining how children show stress at different ages.  That is useful, unless your child always shows stress by piercing howls and the throwing of nutritious foods.

Kidding aside, this is a good book for those who did not spend every moment of their pregnancy reading information about how to raise healthy children and wandering the aisle’s of Whole Foods.  I read more than my fair share, so this was mostly review for me. And I’m not quite that militant about it all any more, quite honestly.

Comments

[Danielle]

Thank you for taking the time to check out Good Kids, Bad Habits and even more for the review... its so wonderful for us to see the 'real life' feedback we've been getting from the blog community!

If your readers want to join you in checking out Good Kids, Bad Habits, they can check out the preview (Chapter 2 with Charts and other goodies) at http://utility2.realage.com/media/pdfs/GoodKids_Snippet_linked_locked.pdf or by emailing me at dbaldwin at realageinc dotcom.

(and sorry the test was so looong :)

Thanks!
-Danielle