Why Good Habits Should Start Young!

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference – Aristotle

Having problems getting children into essential healthy habits like cleaning teeth, hand-washing, being respectful, a positive mindset or making healthy choices? Tina from Life’s Little Bugs has some help.

There are many fundamental habits in health, hygiene and social behavior that benefit our children. To achieve their daily practice without tears and tantrums can sometimes be quite challenging! 

Different circumstances can make it difficult to practice healthy habits as part of a daily routine. Unfortunately, this leads typically to direct health problems.

As a result, statistics showing several children missing days from education linked to children not regularly carrying out these healthy practices, and it’s on the increase.
First, we need to understand how to form habits to help you successfully build them. 

A repetitive action and practice of something will build new, active neural pathways in our brains that go to form our behaviors. These can be triggered through recognition and familiarity!
No one is born knowing when to say, ‘please and thank you’, hold cutlery or use a toothbrush.

These are all learned and built through trial, error, perseverance, imitation, and practice until they finally become automatic behavior.

We can help children build good habits firstly through explanation and education, so a child understands why this daily practice is so vital for them to do.
Here are a few bullet points to help.

• Make learning fun! Children respond better and digest information, quicker!
• Keep to a routine with times and structure. Routines accelerate, forming a habit.
• Introduce the help of reward charts and fun, related activities, and they will soon be more willing to put the work into mastering the techniques and understanding when it is essential to use it.

I believe relatable children’s books are excellent support when encouraging these habits. It opens discussion and can be referred to if the daily practice is dwindling and needs a nudge. 
Children imitate, and if the more they see others practicing these healthy habits, it will inspire and help to strengthen these practices to be used more in a home or school environment.
So the younger they start, the more beneficial for them.

Before long, the healthy habit is built and practiced as a subconscious action like tying shoelaces or riding a bike!

Good Habits Start Young!

For more information on Life’s Little Bugs look us up on www.lifeslittlebugs.co.uk 

We have printable activities and charts free to download.

The author

Tina Stubbs

Tina set about with a goal to develop a series of picture books and unique characters to motivate young readers to learn healthy habits in a fun and effective way. The books went on to win Gold from a popular parenting site and Tina was invited to Pinewood Film Studios to collect the prestigious 2017 ‘Sylvia Anderson Children’s Author ‘award. Through her interest in learning methods, Tina understands the importance of repetition in helping children to learn and build habits, so extra activities and workshops alongside the ‘Life’s Little Bugs book collection were developed to keep up the momentum, practice and to further ‘spread the bugs’ A great believer in fun to learn, Tina always includes a sprinkle of humour to her work!