Many parents are overly concerned about the food that their children eat, and rightly so, because proper nutrition cannot be overemphasized. But few of them are aware that the words they speak and the way they say them actually has tremendous impact on a child’s overall health. Sure, most people would agree that words can have an impact on a child’s emotional heath, but how can it affect the physical health? It may be indirect, but the effects have repercussions that you certainly would not want your child to suffer from.
Some ways in which words can affect a child’s health are the following:
1. Negative comments about his physical appearance may be factors behind future eating disorders. Many children in the US today are suffering from eating disorders, and most of their parents are not even aware of it. An indirect link has been observed between the last few years of the high incidence of obesity among children. Is it possible that the parents became too conscious and kept scolding their kids’ eating habits? This kind of behavior can trigger a sense of loss of self-esteem on the child, and later on manifest as a dislike of eating or wanting to be slim so that he will be considered handsome or for a little girl to feel pretty.
2. A constant barrage of angry words tends to eat away at a child’s confidence, and some children find comfort in food. Nobody can really explain how emotional eating develops, but a link may be found in a baby’s attachment to his feeding bottle prior to being weaned or to a security blanket. The attachment, for some reason, gets transferred to food, perhaps because food does give us a sense of comfort. Once this dependence is formed, it is very difficult to change or remove.
3. A harsh encounter with a child right before bedtime can trigger nightmares and result in poor rest for the child. If the stressful situations continue, he may even have trouble falling asleep, causing a possible variety of sicknesses due to the lowered immunity from lack of rest and sleep.
4. An overall ugly environment in the home would sometimes trigger a child to want to spend time away from mommy or daddy and instead enjoy the company of his friends. Once that happens, you no longer have any influence on his choice of food. More often than not, a child younger than a teenager would gravitate towards junk food in the absence of a responsible adult. An even if you are around, once you have come across as somebody they do not want to listen to, you will no longer have influence in developing healthy eating habits.
5. A child who always hears his parents tell him he is useless will eventually believe it. And once anyone believes there is no use to his life, he would also tend to be lax with taking care of his body. Could there be a link between the many kids experimenting with drugs and cigarettes at a very early age, to the way that the parents built up their self-image to be? After all, when a child feels he is not worth much, he would not be conscious anymore about taking good care of his body.
These are but a few examples of how negative words can have a strong effect on a child’s overall health. The reason why they were highlighted here is that they are very often the natural inclination of human parents, while positive words sometimes have to be forced out of us. As such, we need to understand that part of the problem of kids’ health these days may perhaps be because of the words coming out of our mouths that speak volumes into the hearts of our children.
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