With the school year coming up, there is a time for preparation to make sure that your child is ready to have the best education possible. It is easy enough to remember the material supplies. Binders, paper, and pencils will need to be acquired to make sure your child gets the most out of the semester. But one thing that can sometimes slip through is making sure your child’s health is well prepared for the rigors ahead. While some of our best memories can be made during our formative school years, it can also be very taxing to the mind and body of anyone who goes through it. In some cases, the environment can produce aches and illnesses that are not only painful but can also severely impede the learning process for that year. Consider some of the following tips to get the best start possible.

Proper Nutrition

Not being hungry is one of the most essential factors in enjoying your basic day in school. You know when you’re hungry you could be doing your favorite activity and still be fairly miserable. School requires concentration, and the strength to navigate the environment for at least several hours a day. While most school districts have a lunch on offer, it may be worth looking into what the menu is. Funding and resources can significantly vary from place to place, and what they may have available might not be the healthiest or most nutritious. Even if the food is reasonably palatable if it is not honestly fulfilling the needs of your child or if it is high in fat and preservatives, you might want to consider preparing your own lunches for the school day. It does not have to be anything fancy, but it is recommended that it incorporates some fresh fruit and vegetables since these can be hard to come by on many school menus. It is also essential to teach the value of water. At a young age, it can be natural to seek out sodas and other sweet drinks to get through a day. But water will almost certainly be healthier and less expensive by any metric.

Weekly Prep

This is closely tied to the previous section about nutrition. If you have resolved to make daily school lunches, one of the best ways to make sure this gets done is to make all lunches for a week on a designated day, usually Saturday or Sunday. While it may be easy enough to make a lunch every day the night before, some schedules are just packed so tight it can be a challenge to fit this in. Preparing a week’s worth of lunches can not only be more efficient since you have all the ingredients out anyway, but it can also alert you if you have run out of something. Lunches are a fine objective for weekly prep, but making sure your child has their schoolwork and any necessary equipment ready for the upcoming week is also highly important. Even if your student is keeping pace with all the work sometimes being able to manage what happens when is a learned skill in of itself. When things get out of hand, this can produce uncertainty and stress. Taking some time to discuss the schedule for the upcoming week can make sure things run more smoothly.

Packing Backpacks for a Better Spine

One of the biggest concerns to come up in recent years is the increasingly heavier loads we are asking school children to shoulder for most days out of the week. While your child’s mind is currently developing, so are their bodies and particularly their spines. Having them haul a hefty stack of books on their back every day can have an impact on how the vertebrae develop and in extreme cases can cause undue pain and strain that will follow them into adulthood. When it comes time to fill the backpack every evening, consider the following:

As a rule, experts recommend a backpack’s total weight not exceed 10 to 20 percent of the wearer’s body weight. Depending on the demands of your child’s classes and schedule, this can be difficult to adhere to, but keeping the load as light as necessary should be the primary objective. To this end, if your child has equipment or materials that only apply to specific days, make sure they are only bringing what is needed for that particular day.
When you are packing the bag, itself take stock of all the materials that need to go in and categorize them by weight. When you start packing, you will want to distribute the items with the highest weight closer to the side with the straps and then get progressively lighter the further from the straps you go. This is to make sure that when the backpack is being worn, the heaviest books and materials are as close to the body as possible. As mentioned before this lets your child’s body use its core more efficiently and minimizes any undue stress to the spine.

Get a Checkup

When it comes to the health of your child, it may be advisable to consult a doctor before the year begins. If you can establish a baseline reading of the student’s health beforehand, it may be easier to determine countermeasures should an illness suddenly pop up during the semester. Additionally, if your child needs to be mindful of a medical condition or individual health choices, a doctor’s appointment would be an opportune time to review that information.
One other thing to consider would be a chiropractic consultation. As mentioned before, school is a time where almost more growing is done than any other part of a person’s life. This holds particularly true for someone’s spine. If there is any irregularity in its development, this is something that needs to be detected as soon as possible. A chiropractic therapist would be able to advise on the current health of the spine, daily routines on keeping it healthy, and if necessary would be able to perform an adjustment to get things back on track.

Schooling is one of the most critical institutions we can offer our children in this country. Successfully navigating it can have an immense bearing on the quality of life our next generation will have. Take care to not only prepare the minds but also the health and bodies of your children, and they will be well equipped to make the most out of their education.