Robert Grobe
Blogger at HealthyLivingProducts.com

Teaching your kids to stay active is an important part of instilling healthy habits in them. What can you do during the winter months when low temperatures and nasty weather keep them cooped up indoors? Regular doses of physical activity are essential for your children’s health and keeping them moving every day is also important for their growth. Raising an active child generally creates a healthier adult who is less prone to a number of chronic health risks. Here are a few suggestions for keeping your kids on the move during the winter.

Indoor Obstacle Courses

If your home is stuffed with rare, delicate treasures made of porcelain and other assorted delicates, this probably isn’t the best of ideas. Of course, if you have left all your breakables out on display during the child-rearing process, you are already a braver parent than many! Any decently-sized indoor space that can be cleared out can make a superb obstacle course. Dens, family rooms, and finished basements are great for this.

You can enlist your kids’ blanket fort talents in creating obstacles like tunnels and tubes. Stack up cushions and pillows to make kid-sized hurdles, and sprinkle your obstacle course with activity stations featuring options like ring tosses, jump ropes, and hula hoops. Give your kids an agility challenge by taping construction paper shapes to the floor and challenging them to hop across them while holding one foot behind their back. Getting your children involved in the setup and cleanup phases of the exercise will speed things along and make good use of their time.

Visit A Skating Rink

Whether you prefer skating on ice or on wheels, winter is the perfect season for it. A trip to your favorite local skating venue can be a little costly, but it’s also sure to be a big hit with the kids. They will enjoy themselves so much they won’t even realize that they are blasting through the calories while they skate.

Active Video Gaming

Screen time is the boogeyman of modern-day parenting, but remember that moderation makes a lot of options healthy. If you have a game system that features active full-body controls (e.g. the Nintendo Wii or an Xbox One with a Kinect), you can indulge your kids’ enthusiasm for gaming while also ensuring that they get some of the physical activity they need.

With systems like these, kids need to physically mimic the activities they would perform while bowling, playing tennis, or playing other sports. This ensures they burn off some energy and work on their physical coordination while staying right in the comfort of your family room.

Visit The Bowling Alley

Bowling makes a superb activity for full families or larger groups. You will have fun, encourage a little friendly competition, and give everyone a chance to move around a bit.

Home Mini Golf

Plastic kid-sized golf clubs are surprisingly cheap and you might be amazed at just how much mileage your kids can get out of them. Add a few plastic cups to give your little putters fresh targets to shoot for and you can keep them amused and active for hours.

Scavenger Hunts

This is an excellent indoor activity for larger groups of kids. You will need to split everyone up into at least two teams; give each team a list of objectives to complete or (hopefully non-breakable!) items to collect. Set the kids against each other or see how many items each team can tick off within a given time limit.

Swimming

If your town has an indoor pool available, make full use of it during the cold months. This can be a challenge due to the increased demand for indoor pool facilities in winter, but it’s also worth a little extra hassle. Swimming is one of the very best athletic interests to cultivate in your kids, and you can even take advantage of scheduled activities organized by the pool operators.

Wintertime often comes with the temptation for kids to snuggle up to their gadgets and put in way too much screen time. Take steps to keep your kids moving by building them a winter routine with plenty of physical activity!

About Robert Grobe

Robert Grobe is the president of Healthy Living Products and has been helping people across the globe to enjoy improved health and a higher quality of life for more than 40 years. His blog, HealthyLivingProducts.com, is filled with information about healthy living and its advantages.

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