PROMOTING GOOD HEALTH HABITS

Promoting Good Health Habits

Promoting Good Health Habits

I.Exploring Children's Understanding Of Health And Illness

The second approach to investigating children's understanding of illness corresponds with the recent growth of research concerning whether children have an intuitive understanding of biology. Kalish provides evidence for an early understanding of the biological processes of illness (Bandura 1999). They believe that children's understanding of illness undergoes a conceptual reorganization in order to become a biological theory although they do not suggest an age at which this may occur. They argue further against a biological understanding of illness. Children aged 5-10 years were asked open-ended questions about how someone got sick and answers were coded according to how 'biological' they were. This led to a very small proportion of children (6%) being credited with a biological understanding of illness. Therefore, Au and Romo conclude that children do not possess the ability to reason biologically about phenomena and cannot talk about biological causal mechanisms (Navarro, Senn, McNicholas, Kaplan, Roppé 1998 ).

A.Ideas about Health Promotion

Schools are considered appropriate settings for health promotion for children, since the school may provide an environment for improving health, self-esteem, behaviours and life skills. For many years, school-based health promoting programmes were implemented as traditional health education, but they had minimal and short-term effects. Activities developed in the formal curriculum should be reinforced by all other elements that involve the school as a health promoting institution. A key element in making a school a positive learning and living environment appears to be developing a setting that explicitly supports students' physical, emotional and social wellbeing in addition to their academic achievement (Piko & Bak 2006).

B.Developmental Changes Based On Their Cognitive Competence

Sophian's article can be divided into three main parts: a description of contributions of competence approaches, a critique of their shortcomings, and recommended alternatives for addressing the shortcomings. First consider some of the contributions of competence approaches. As Sophian notes, approaches emphasizing children's competence have become very influential in current thinking about cognitive development. Part of the popularity of competence approaches derives from maintaining appealing aspects of Piaget's research program while circumventing some clear problems with it (Campbell & Murray 2004). Competence approaches deviate from Piaget's theory in suggesting that the essences are not general across all of children's thinking, instead applying to somewhat more delimited domains of knowledge, such as psychology, biology, and physics. They also differ from Piaget's theory in emphasizing early capabilities rather than early incapabilities (World Health Organization 2005).

C.Criteria of Health Perceptions And Health Beliefs

Lay concepts of health and illness give additional important information to the biomedical models . The literature of lay beliefs suggests that these concepts significantly affect a population's health and illness behaviors, health consciousness and risk perceptions. Lay and biomedical theories often specify different causes for common illnesses. This process has serious implications for illness management as well as for health promotion and disease prevention (Thompson & Kinne 2003). Therefore, a growing emphasis is now being placed on detecting ...