Parents & Families
You care deeply about your children. And their health & wellness worries you… What can you do?
We all want what is best for our families.
1 in 3 of our children with prediabetes is the unprecedented “new teen normal”—and unacceptable to parents.
Warning: prediabetes has been increasing invisibly—because people with prediabetes do not have obvious symptoms…and who ever heard of doing diabetes-related blood tests on teenagers anyway—until now!
What about mental health?
Yes, it seems like almost all teens have “angst” at some point. But 4 in 10 teens with significant bouts of anxiety and depression each year, like we have now, is way beyond what it used to be.
Government Tried to Improve Achievement—instead, Kids got Sick
What has the government been doing about this?
In fact, both federal and state governments caused a lot of the problems. They pressured schools to focus on standardized test scores for reading, writing and math—at the cost of many other important areas of education, including physical & health education, arts ed—plus they slashed recess breaks.
Guess what? Health issues skyrocketed—while academic results barely budged.
Are we really that surprised? Making children sit for hours on end with no real breaks is a recipe for antsy, inattentive, demotivated kids who do not do very well in school—as well as a recipe for false ADHD diagnoses and epidemic teen prediabetes.
Screen-time at Home Got Out of Hand
As for parents and home life: It’s not like parents don’t try to help their kids develop healthy habits at home. But in today’s world, it is so hard…
Screen time has often replaced physical activity, at home as well as at school.
And social media usage is a very tricky issue to deal with…tweens & teens want to stay in touch with their friends, but then they get dragged down by the negativity.
With seat-time at school and screen-time at home, kids are getting less than half the physical activity they need to be healthy.
But schools can help parents with this—as long as we provide the funds for schools to do so, then make sure that schools follow through. That’s what Healthy Students Healthy State does.
Another Result? Health Care Costs Keep Getting Worse
Unhealthy habits and early chronic conditions put our children on a dismal lifelong trajectory: a future of chronic diseases from lifelong inactivity and excess anxiety.
And as adults, our kids will in many cases not be able to pay the full cost of their treatment.
Health care is getting incredibly expensive. And people have to pay ever higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs themselves.
This has become a crushing health insurance and care cost financial burden for us all, in addition to being a health crisis.
What Parents Want, What Schools Can Do
Parents want their children to know how to eat and drink nutritiously, and to be physically active. And as kids get older, parents want their kids to be able to handle stress, not smoke or vape, not use illegal drugs or alcohol, deal with a bully, avoid violence and be safe, and deal in a balanced way with social media.
Parents can enlist schools to help with this, by supporting Healthy Students Healthy State.
Healthy Students Healthy State helps develop more active healthier children, which also makes them more focused and motivated for school—with higher academic achievement.
Students eventually graduate better prepared for a healthier and more successful life.
How Can I Help?
We need your help in getting the word out!
One quick easy step that you can take now to help us is to fill out our Contact form.
When you fill out the Contact form, you can specify if & how you want us to follow up with you.
(We only use your email address for our own work. And relax: we do not solicit donations from individuals such as you who are not wealthy.)
Having you in our e-network will help us a great deal in showing state leaders that the public is interested in this issue.
And that creates immense pressure on legislators, health leaders, and others with political influence to act.
Another thing you can do right now is to encourage other parents, including your school’s PTA or PTO organization, and others in your personal network to support Healthy Students Healthy State.
On your mobile device please hold down to copy a link to this webpage to text them;
or click to forward this webpage via email now.
Want more info?
About Healthy Future US – click to Email now
Healthy Students Healthy State – Overview & Details – click to Email now.
[You can also check out our webpage for grandparents for more details than we have here.]
Thank you! Working together, we can make a better world for future generations!