Jon Herbener is a pediatrician at the Hillsdale Health center. He has 40 years of experience working with children.
From your experience, what are some of the things children need in their lives to be healthy?
“They need to eat properly. They need adequate, restful sleep. They need a warm, caring, loving, whole environment. They need avoidance of cigarette smoke. I have a bias that children need to have appropriate immunizations and especially influenza vaccine each year to prevent them having influenza. They need an hour of vigorous physical exercise every day, whether it’s indoors, outdoors, the season doesn’t matter.
“The schools no longer provide adequate physical education for children and time to do that in school, so again, that is a parental responsibility, as is their appropriate diet…until children are mature, and that means late teens, early twenties, they can’t internalize and self-direct those behaviors. They have to be directed and overseen by parents.”
How do children differ from adults?
“Children are different from adults in that they are growing and changing all the time. That’s why they need adequate health supervision as they grow and change, and they need immunizations much more frequently than adults do, although adults do need appropriate immunization, it’s just a more intense process in childhood because there are many more immunizations that have to be provided. In infancy, we see infants frequently as they become children at age two, and they need a yearly health assessment and physical examination, and that includes: having your blood pressure monitored, height, weight, BMI determination, and a comprehensive physical examination and interval history.
What are some things that are destructive to a child’s health?
“In childhood, things that are destructive… family disruption is a problem in childhood, and it affects children’s physical and mental health. So, separation, divorce, lack of a stable home environment, that affects both physical and mental health in childhood. Inappropriate diet affects their health. Lack of sleep.
“Lots of kids today are very tired, because they don’t get to bed and get an adequate amount of sleep, and that’s a very important thing for their health.
“The most common cause of death and serious health problems in childhood are accidents. So, since that’s the most common problem, it’s important that children are appropriately restrained in vehicles. They also need to wear bicycle helmets when they ride a bicycle, ride a skateboard, ride a horse, and appropriate gear if they’re allowed to ride motor vehicles, such as three-wheelers and motorcycles.
When you were a kid, did you pay attention to being healthy?
“It was right after the Civil War,” he joked, “we were still dodging bullets.”
“Yes, I was aware that I needed to be healthy. My parents were very careful and reasonable about diet.
“I lived back in the olden days. We got up in the morning and went out-of-doors and didn’t come in until it was dark in the summer time. In the winter time, we got up and went outdoors and walked to school. It doesn’t happen anymore because of the changes in our society. So, even into high school, most of us, anyone who lived in town walked to school. People don’t do that anymore because of the fear of abduction and also the change in the way the schools are operated. Since the best exercise in childhood and adulthood is walking, that’s a missed opportunity. So anything that can get them moving is important. But it has to be directed by the parents. It’s not a self-directed behavior to exercise and eat properly whey you’re a child.
Are kids who participate in athletics or dance healthier?
“As a whole, that group of kids who participate in sports on a regular basis or other kind of routine exercise – riding motorcycles isn’t exercise, and neither is jumping on a trampoline, by the way – those kids who have those kind of opportunities tend to have normal or close to normal BMIs than those who don’t do those things.”
“But engaging in formal sport activities is not a necessity. Everyone can find a piece of rope and jump rope in place on the coldest winter day. And if you can jump rope continuously for 15 minutes, you are in pretty good cardiovascular shape, so it’s not weightlifting that’s important for these folks. It’s cardiovascular exercise. And of those, walking is the least traumatic. It doesn’t hurt your bones and joints like running does – I mean, there’s nothing wrong with running if you’re able to do it and interested in doing it – but an hour long walk every day is probably the best prescription for health I can give for any child from mid-childhood, 8,9,10 through adulthood. You can do it in a treadmill, you can do it out-of-doors, you can do it at Wallmart. But brisk, continuous walking is probably the safest, least traumatic and most beneficial exercise that we all can do.”
