Making Kids Healthy: Two Reasons To Teach Your Teen How To Mow Lawns This Summer

While it is lovely to see the sunny, summer days again after a cold winter, the change of weather does bring with it a host of outside chores that need attention. One of these is mowing the lawns, but this year it is time to teach your teenager how to mow the law safely and properly. Apart from getting you off the hook for this job, there are a number of health benefits your child will experience. You can use these benefits to counter any arguments your child may have when you broach the subject with them.

Stress Reduction

As the summer days really begin to bite, your child is in their final weeks of school before the holidays. This means they are facing end-of-year exams, and with those exams comes stress. However, help is at hand, because mowing the lawn is a great stress reducer, and there are two main reasons for this:

1. When mowing the lawn, the brain will disengage slightly once the repetitive motion of moving over the lawn begins. This allows your teen to sink into a calm, meditative state while the grass is getting cut. This meditative state removes your child's focus from their upcoming exams and diverts it to the state of simply enjoying time outside.
2. Mowing the lawn is also a good cardio workout for your teen. Just 25 minutes of moving the mower burns over 180 calories. When your teen becomes stressed, the body recognizes that the mind is under pressure. However, when your teen mows the lawn, this cardio exercise releases endorphins into their body. Endorphins are the chemical that makes the brain feel happy, so therefore mowing the lawn will ultimately lead to happiness.

While the lawn is getting mowed, there is another health benefit your teen will experience.

Sun Exposure

The need to wear sunscreen when outside in the Australian sun is widely known, but there are still sunshine benefits to be had when your teen heads outside to mow the lawn. These health benefits include:

• Stronger immune system. Your body needs Vitamin D to help boost its immunity, and one source of Vitamin D is the sun. A strong immune system lessens the chance of your child getting sick and having to miss their final exams.
• Better sleep patterns. Teenagers need between nine and ten hours of sleep per night, and exposure to sunshine will help them achieve this. The body's natural rhythms are kept on track by sunshine exposure, and these rhythms tell your teen when it is time to sleep each night. Disturbed body rhythms lead to not enough sleep, and this will impact on your teen's mental well-being.

Teaching your teen how to mow the lawns this summer is going to enhance both their body and their mind. Of course, if they refuse to listen to reason, the other alternative is to hire somebody else to mow the lawns for you from a mowing service company, like Lloyds Services. Either way you'll be off the hook, and can enjoy doing more pleasant pastimes during the summer days ahead.