How to Take Care of Your Child’s Heart Health

For a lot of us, we never take a moment to think about heart health until it’s too late. With heart disease affecting almost half of all American adults and heart disease being the leading cause of death, why don’t we take heart health more seriously?

It’s never too early to start talking about it with your child! Teaching your children the importance of prioritizing their heart’s health can help them build lifelong habits that contribute to their health, happiness, and longevity. In this blog, we’ll explain the importance of heart health and go over simple ways your family can integrate heart healthy habits into your routine.

Why Your Child’s Heart Health Matters

The heart is arguably the most important organ in your body. It is responsible for carrying blood to and from every single part of your body. Blood carries oxygen and nutrients throughout your body, and it carries carbon dioxide to your lungs to be expelled.

When thinking about heart health, it’s important to remember that your heart is not just an organ - it’s also a muscle. The heart beats completely on its own, all day, every day, for your entire life. That’s a lot of work!

If you don’t take care of your heart, you make this job even harder for it. If your heart has to work harder than usual over a prolonged period of time, the odds that it will give out sooner increase significantly. That’s why understanding heart healthy habits and attempting to live a heart healthy lifestyle is absolutely crucial for every person of every age!

For a lot of us, though, we don’t think about our heart health until we’re at the doctor’s office and learning that we have high cholesterol or blood pressure issues. At that point, it becomes a game of trying to undo what has already been done through strict and sudden lifestyle changes. What if we could help our children avoid that?

By teaching your children about the importance of their heart’s health, and through showing them how to make lifestyle choices that help them keep their heart healthy, you can help your children avoid this scenario.

Important Heart Health Practices

There are three key components of maintaining heart health: Nutrition, exercise, and stress management. Let’s talk about the importance of each of those components and ways to practice them with your children.

Staying Active

We’ve mentioned that the heart is an organ and a muscle. Like any other muscle, you have to work it out to keep it in tip top shape!

According to the CDC, though, kids are leading more and more sedentary lifestyles, thanks in part to increased screen time. The average school aged child spends six to nine hours a day in front of screens, and research shows that less than 30% of school aged children have healthy hearts. This correlation is hard to ignore!

As a parent, one of the greatest things you can do for your child’s heart health is encourage them to get active and stay active! According to the federal guidelines, children should aim to get at least one hour everyday of moderate physical activity, or one hour of vigorous physical activity three times a week.

Here are some ways to encourage your children to stay physically active:

Join a team sport: Work with your kids to help them discover a sport they want to try! Then, look for opportunities through their school or through your community for them to participate in this sport. If your child plays a sport for a season and does not like it, that’s okay! Encourage them to keep looking until they find an activity they love.
Family trips outside: Plan a camping trip or a visit to a state park with your family. During this trip, look for opportunities to take hikes together. Not only does hiking allow your children to get in some physical activity, but it also gives them an opportunity to slow down and reconnect with nature.
Help your kids love fitness: A lot of us have a negative association with working out and the gym because of societal pressure or our perception of what fitness has to be. However, fitness doesn't have to mean spending hours in the gym lifting heavy weights and exhausting yourself with sprints! If you have older children or teenagers, you can help them find activities that challenge them without contributing to burnout or total exhaustion.

A Heart Healthy Diet

We’ve talked about the importance of childhood nutrition before. Generally, a balanced diet will help your kids maintain a heart healthy lifestyle.

If you want to help your child make lifestyle choices specific to their heart health, though, limit foods high in saturated fat and cholesterol, and try to incorporate healthy fats, fruits, veggies, and grains into their diet. Healthy fats allow your child to get the nutrients their brain needs to function, and fruits, veggies, and grains are all high in fiber, which has been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in adults.

Some easy ways to include heart healthy foods into your child’s diet include:

Homemade “fast food”: While occasional fast food can be a part of a balanced diet, avoiding it as much as you can is a simple way to help your child’s heart health and teach them healthy habits. If your kids constantly crave fast food, try recreating healthier versions of their favorites at home!
Prep veggies in different ways: It is normal for children to have an aversion to vegetables, especially picky eaters. If your child doesn’t seem to want to eat any vegetables, get creative with how you serve them! Blend them into a pasta sauce, roast them with some cheese, or serve them alongside dips you know your kids like.
Make simple substitutions: When cooking, look for places where you can make substitutions that increase fiber and decrease saturated fat in a meal. For example, chickpea pasta tastes extremely similar to normal pasta and has a higher fiber and protein content. You can also swap full-fat dips and sauces for low-fat or fat-free versions, fatty meats for lean alternatives, and swap starchy carbs for complex ones.

Here are some snack ideas that are both healthy and kid-friendly:

Yogurt, berries, and granola
Trail mix
Apples and peanut butter
Veggies and hummus or ranch dressing
Turkey and cheese rollups
Whole grain crackers

Keep in mind that children under the age of 2 need more fat to help their brain development and early growth. It’s important to always consult your pediatric provider before making any major decisions related to your child’s diet.

Stress Management

One of the sneakiest contributors to poor heart health is stress. While some might view stress as a purely mental condition, chronic stress can negatively impact the rest of the body, too.

Stress particularly impacts the heart. When you are stressed, your body releases adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that can cause your heart rate to increase. Over a long period of time, this can cause high blood pressure or lead to a heart attack or stroke. Additionally, stress can have an inadvertent negative health effect by encouraging people to participate in harmful coping mechanisms, such as smoking, overeating, and overconsumption of alcohol.

While these struggles might seem far away from your children right now, teaching them positive coping mechanisms for stress while they are young keeps them from seeking unhealthy coping tools as they grow up and face more challenges in life.

Some healthy coping tools for stress include:

Journaling: Allow your child to pick out a journal they like, and encourage them to write down their feelings in it. This can help children and teens become more comfortable and familiar with their feelings, and therefore more capable of processing them.
Deep breathing: In the middle of a stressful situation, deep breathing exercises can help your kids remain calm and level-headed. One popular breathing technique is called The Box Method, and it encourages one to inhale, hold, exhale, and hold for four seconds each, repeating until the body is relaxed again.
Community: According to the American Psychology Association, people with healthy relationships in their lives tend to live longer, more high quality lives. As a parent, you can be a crucial part of your child’s support system, but you also want to encourage them to spend time talking to other family members and making friends with their peers.
Finding a hobby: Hobbies can be a fantastic outlet for negative emotions. Talk to your children about their interests and passions, and help them find related hobbies.

Other Tips for Building Heart Healthy Habits

Now that you understand the importance of heart health, you’re probably wondering the best ways to start teaching your children the importance of their heart and how they can keep it healthy.

Family habit tracking: To show your kids that healthy habits are important for everyone, you can pick a few habits for the whole family to focus on. Then, create a chart that allows each member of the family to track when they keep up with a particular habit. You can create an incentive at the end of each month for the person who keeps up with their habits the best, or you can just let it be a fun way for your children to see the value in building habits and developing discipline.

Screen time limits: The greatest obstacle to physical activity that children have to overcome is screen time. When it’s so easy to turn on the TV, pick up a mobile device, or grab a tablet for entertainment, why do anything else? While your kids may not understand at first, placing boundaries on their screen time can encourage them to spend more time outside and develop more active hobbies.

Participate in meal time: One of the greatest ways to help your children enjoy and appreciate healthy food is by involving them in the process! Ask for their input when making grocery lists, take them shopping with you, and have them help you prepare family meals. When children reach their teens, you can even have them occasionally make a meal for the whole family!

Check in often: As we mentioned, chronic stress can contribute significantly to a person’s risk of heart disease. Teach your children healthy coping mechanisms while they are young so that, as they get older and face more challenges, they will feel equipped and prepared. As they learn new coping techniques, check in with them frequently to see what works and what doesn’t.

While heart health might seem like a faraway struggle for your children to have to worry about, practicing heart healthy habits now can put them on a trajectory that prioritizes their health, longevity, and quality of life for years to come. For more tips on creating heart healthy habits with your children, talk to your pediatric provider!