Child Development and Public Health

Public Health continues to be an important subject around the world. When speaking to my friends and parents, they always have strong opinions regarding public health and their children. I have several friends who are against immunizing their children and I have several friends who don't believe in breastfeeding. These are all things that I find very interesting, at least finding out what causes people to choose one side or the other. Since I do not have children of my own, it is difficult to relate to some of the topics within the public health sector. However, I do have opinions and thoughts as to how I would raise my own children and what things I would focus on as being important. Nutrition is something that jumps out at my because I believe it is something that our society struggles with not just with our children, but even with our adults. When I think of nutrition, I don't automatically think of starving children in Africa, I think about America and what our society makes of nutrition. As a child, my parents were always very particular about what my sisters and I ate. Well-rounded meals were always encouraged and we always focused on consuming lean meats and vegetables. These habits have stuck with me through adulthood and I still find myself being very cautious about what I eat, especially since I gain weight extremely fast. It saddens me because at my work, the youth come in with all sorts of sodas and candy bars and they are not limited on their consumption or how frequently it is provided for them. I always try and find out why their parents are so easy to give them junk food but I really think they eat it just because they can. I did an experiment last week and offered free fruit one day and the children who would normally spend 5 or so dollars on candy and sodas at the snack bar opted for the free fruit. While we run a for profit snack bar (full of junk), I would much rather have fruit for the kids rather than giving them the option to buy junk. It was my recommendation to my boss that we get rid of our snack bar and just offer fruit to the kids on a daily basis. As technology improves, people are becoming more likely to eat based on convenience rather than health. There are often days when I work 12 hours or so and then go to the gym after work only to come home to find that I am not motivated to cook. I try and pre plan my meals so I don't make a habit of this because it would be very easy to fall into a bad pattern of take out and microwavable meals. Our children are just picking up our bad habits from watching the convenience of junk food take over our lives.