Although the title may suggest that I know how to motivate kids to eat right and exercise…I don’t really!  But, I will blog about it anyway…

While I don’t have any kids yet, we do work with some kids in the documentary (the youngest being 13 at the moment), and there are some distinct differences we’ve seen between kids and adults…I’ll try to suggest what we have found.

Kids have a short attention span for the most part.  This means that they have a harder time seeing what hard work every day will ultimately lead to, because they tend to be more impatient than us adults (and we are impatient for sure!).  So this means right away, that if a young person is initially motivated to exercise (for example), if the exercise activity is not any fun (a treadmill for example), then these kids have a hard time connecting the dots.  They do not see how walking or running on a treadmill has anything to do with what they will ultimately become sometime in the future (I generalize a bit here).

So the challenge with kids, as with anybody, is to find the strongest motivators in their lives…and channel these “things” into positive behavior that will help them get what they want.  Clearly, an overweight child might desire to look really great, look like the other kids, and be popular in school…but often this idea isn’t tangible enough for them to exercise and eat right every day…just like it often isn’t tangible enough for adults.

The first thing we must pay attention to is what our kids enjoy doing.  Do they enjoy kicking a soccer ball around?  Do they enjoy games like laser tag or playing basketball?  We cannot learn how to motivate anyone without first understanding what makes them tick, what makes them excited, and what we can use to get someone to do something they might not otherwise do.  As parents or teachers, the challenge is not how to get a child to exercise, but more to enable them better access to activities they enjoy that will not seem like exercise.  Kickball never seemed like exercise to me!

Does this mean that we need to play these games with our kids?  Of course it does!  Or at least help organize them with other neighborhood kids.  If there are too many “tasks” that are left on a child’s plate in order to get them moving more, we leave things up to chance.  As adults who are concerned with the activity level of our kids, since we know how to create environments to facilitate change, we must act.  This activity of seeking out good activities for our kids to participate in IS part of being a responsible parent or teacher…because left to their own devices, kids will not always choose the right paths in life…so outcomes are random.

Perhaps we think our kids only like to sit around and watch TV or play video games.  Perhaps we need to pay attention a little more!  This may be the most accessible activity for them, so we believe this is all we can get them to do.  No one said this was an easy task!  Who do you think brought the video games and TV into the home?  If we have enabled sedentary activities to be the easiest to access, the most convenient, we are conditioning kids to do this every day.  As parents, we are in control, or at least we need to gain control before it becomes a bad habit for our kids!

Wanting our kids to exercise or be more active and telling them so is not enough.  If we sit on our own couch and tell our kids to go outside and run around, we can expect that not much will change. 

Often the obvious answer, the answer we don’t want to hear, is the answer!

If we think it’s too late, that our kids are already too addicted to TV and video games, then we must be more creative, and sometimes find reward systems that can “motivate” a child to do something they don’t want to do as much as sit and watch cartoons.  Again we must pay attention to what might motivate our kids to turn the TV off.

So, does this mean we need to bribe our children to eat right and exercise?  Well, in theory, perhaps…but not all the time!

In INSPIRED: The Movie, we’ve tried finding video games that use a video camera to make you move around a lot more than just using a standard controller.  Unfortunately, games that do this often are not as fun as the most popular games you can find.  Although I do have high hopes for the Nintendo Wii’s boxing game (I haven’t played it yet).

We’ve tried building in reward systems that motivate kids to eat better, or exercise more consistently.  I think there has to be some balance here (these are just theories mind you).  If we create a situation where our kids expect to get rewarded by something each time they reach a goal, do we create self-motivated kids?  Or do we just create kids that expect something for anything they do?

I believe how we craft these scenarios has a lot to do with the outcome and interpretation.  Ultimately, we must remember what we are trying to instill in our kids…

Hard work, done consistently, is the key to achieving anything in life.

So if we merely give our kids 5 bucks every time they lose a few pounds, what are we teaching them?  That we want them to be skinny?

A reward system needs to be carefully structured so that kids are rewarded for the consistent behavior, not reaching a goal — the goal is a natural reward of the consistent behavior.  And, as parents or teachers, we much reenforce the idea that hard work over time always pays off…literally we must put this into our kids’ heads each time they are rewarded…so they have a better chance of connecting the dots.  Otherwise we can only hope for the best…that our kids figure it out for themselves.  I’d prefer to reduce the random nature of this process

Does all this apply to eating healthy too?  I believe so.  We control the food that our kids eat, so we must pay attention to the healthy options they enjoy and enable them to eat these things.  If we bring junk food home, what should we expect to happen?  Obviously if we eat the junk food ourselves we cannot hope to teach our kids much about eating healthy…so it becomes a bit of a dilemma…can we change in order to teach our kids to change?  We have to ask ourselves how valuable it is to us…

Motivate, teach, enable, and lead (by example).  A little bit of nagging doesn’t hurt once in a while either!  (There is a difference between scolding and reenforcing why)

Nobody said it would be easy.  Is it worth it?