Role played by a family in creating healthy lifestyle and eliminating risk factors that cause threats to children’s and teenagers’ health

• Main Author: E.N. Novoselova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: FBSI “Federal Scientific Center for Medical and Preventive Health Risk Management Technologies” 2019-12-01
• Series: Analiz Riska Zdorovʹû
• Subjects: health; health risk; healthy lifestyle; family; children; teenagers; tobacco smoking; alcohol intake; overweight and obesity; injuries; addictive behavior
• Online Access: https://journal.fcrisk.ru/eng/2019/4/19
• ISSN: 2308-1155; 2308-1163

The paper focuses on socializing potential than belongs to a family in creating attitudes towards health and healthy lifestyle among children and teenagers. The author describes basic behavioral risks for young people’s health and a role played by the closest social environment in minimizing or aggravating them. The author also provides an insight into concepts of health and healthy lifestyle and dwells on how important it is to perform constant monitoring over children’s and teenagers’ health as they represent quite a specific social and demographic group. The author analyzes data on morbidity growth among children and teenagers in Russia, how susceptible they are to addic-tive behavior and other risk factors, and also compares these parameters with world trends. The latest statistical data and analysis of data available from literature allowed showing that, in spite of huge socializing potential that a family has as a social institution, at present parents are rather limited in terms of activities that can help them improve and preserve their children’s health. It is caused by both transformations of a family as a social institution and weaker family relations in the contemporary world as well as by insufficient competences that parents have as regards health and overall decrease in living standards, poorer availability of medical services, unfavorable changes in the ecological situation etc. The author concludes that it is necessary to provide support to a family as a social institution. It should be done by a state and society in general as they are to establish qualitative information channels that will allow providing parents with the latest scientific data on the most common risk factors for children’s health and on ways how to minimize such risks. Any family, regardless of its social status, wealth, or any other characteristics, should be granted an opportunity to provide safety for their children.