The United Nations World Health Organization pointed out: "The focus of health education is the masses and actions." It can be seen that health education is to promote the emergence of healthy behaviors through planned, organized and systematic extensive educational activities. It is necessary to study the health education of preschool children and explore their health behaviors.
First, the explanation of healthy behavior.
Scholars at home and abroad have different interpretations of healthy behavior. At present, there are mainly the following centralized views:
1. Health behavior research has the general law of individual and group behavior to observe human health and disease. Healthy behavior emphasizes understanding people's health and disease behaviors from the psychological and social cultural perspectives, which is beneficial to and motivates the public's healthy behaviors and eliminates or reduces unhealthy behaviors and disease behaviors. In other words, healthy behavior is the science of strengthening people's healthy behavior. This explanation is based on behavioral science in a broad sense.
2. Healthy behavior refers to all behaviors that healthy people think are displayed to prevent diseases or maintain their own health. For example, it is a healthy behavior to receive relevant health check-ups and vaccinations. This explanation is based on behavioral science in a narrow sense.
3. Healthy behavior is the behavior orientation that makes health turn to satisfactory results. This explanation is essentially similar to the second one.
The author thinks that the study of preschool children's health behavior should include two aspects, that is, the general law of the establishment, change and consolidation of preschool children's health behavior, and the types and manifestations of various behaviors that preschool children should adopt to promote their physical and mental health.
Second, the significance of studying healthy behavior
1, healthy behavior is the core of preschool children's health education.
There is a close relationship between preschool children's health education and health education behavior. Preschool children's health education is a bridge connecting health information and health behavior, and it is the core of health education. The relationship between health education and health behavior can be illustrated by the following two modes:
Mode 1 shows that the ultimate goal of health education is to establish and form preschool health behaviors, and mode 2 shows that health behaviors are the core of preschool children's health education.
Only by following the rules of healthy behavior can we effectively promote the health of school children.
Although the formation of preschool children's healthy behavior is influenced by many factors, there are certain rules. For example, whether the healthy behavior we expect can be reflected in children is always related to their cognitive level, attitude and corresponding skills. The study of healthy behavior aims to reveal half the laws of healthy behavior activities. Only by grasping the law of healthy behavior can we effectively promote health.
Based on the above reasons, preschool educators should attach importance to the study of healthy behavior.
Three. Classification and characteristics of health behavior
According to different actors, healthy behaviors are divided into group healthy behaviors. Group health behavior refers to the activities taken by social groups as the main body to protect public health. Individual health behavior refers to the activities that each individual takes as the subject of behavior to ensure his own health.
According to the different nature of behavior, healthy behavior is divided into the following three categories:
1, preventive behavior: refers to all kinds of behaviors taken to promote health, prevent and detect diseases at an early stage on the premise that you think you are healthy (that is, you have no conscious symptoms), such as consciously receiving health education, not being overweight, reasonable nutrition, strengthening physical exercise, receiving vaccination, etc. These can be called healthy behaviors.
2. Sick feeling behavior: refers to the behavior of making necessary diagnosis in order to find out one's own condition after having some abnormal feeling.
3. Patient behavior: refers to the actions taken by people who are ill to treat diseases.
4. Due to the limitation of preschool children's cognitive level, behavioral skills and action consciousness, whether they can adopt various healthy behaviors can not be separated from the education, supervision and help of adults.
Preschool children's health behavior generally has the following characteristics:
1, the scientificity and regularity of children's individual behaviors, such as diet and living habits, establish a dynamic stereotype of behavior.
2. Children's explicit behavior and intrinsic motivation are consistent, and children can consciously and voluntarily show some healthy behavior.
3. Children's individual behavior can show strong adaptability to the surrounding environment.
4. The behavior of individual children or children's groups can benefit others' own health.
Fourthly, establish the healthy behavior of preschool children.
(A) the theory of behavior change
There are many theories about behavior change, but none of them can satisfactorily explain all human behavior problems. Each theory can only represent different behavioral explanation ideas, and health educators should learn from each other's strong points to help individuals change unhealthy behaviors. There are two representative theories here.
1. Attitude change theory: Educational psychologists believe that attitudes are acquired and influenced.
The internal readiness of a specific object as a behavior choice. The components of attitude include cognitive component, emotional component and behavioral tendency component. Attitude change should have certain external and internal conditions. The methods to promote the formation and change of attitude are: 1, and the conditioned response method includes the integration of appropriate manipulation and reinforcement of healthy behavior. 2. Methods of providing role models: The role models' behaviors meet the requirements and are rewarded, and others often imitate their behaviors. The power of role models is closely related to whether they are similar to learners (such as gender and age) or whether they are learners' parents, teachers and peers. 3. Persuasive language communication method: use words to inspire and persuade children to form or change certain attitudes.
2. Behavior change theory: Psychologist Bantula takes children's observable external behavior as the starting point of his research. Through a series of experiments, he observed a large number of children's social behaviors and learning activities and clearly pointed out that people's thoughts, emotions and behaviors are not only influenced by direct experience, but also often learn by observing others' behaviors and their consequences. He believes that the process of observing the behavior representation of role models and then imitating them is influenced by the following factors: the stimulating characteristics and consequences of role models, the motivation of observers and the cognitive level of observers.
According to the theory of appeal, we should get such enlightenment: in the process of preschool children's health education, we should be rational and emotional, set a positive example among children, notice the important influence of teachers and parents' images on children, and actively encourage and affirm children's healthy behavior.
Second, the main reasons that affect behavior change
1, behavioral belief: that is, the sum of human knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and values about the world in which they live. Behavioral beliefs help people make behavioral decisions and choices. Adults' behavioral beliefs often have an indirect impact on children's healthy behavior.
2. Behavior-oriented function of individuals or groups of special classes. For preschool children, the behaviors of teachers, parents and peers have a great influence on them.
3. Healthy behavioral resources. Healthy behavior is always based on certain behavior resources. For example, when a child has symptoms such as cough and runny nose, whether to go to the hospital to see a doctor or take medicine at home by experience is likely to be affected by sanitary environmental conditions such as whether there are more sick children in the hospital, whether it is easy to cross infection, and whether parents have time and time. Health status, health service and time are all healthy behavior resources, which determine certain behavior performance.
4. Customs and cultural background. Long-term lifestyles and customs will have a far-reaching impact on behavior.
Some of the above reasons directly constitute the factors that affect preschool children's behavior change (such as behavior-oriented roles and cultural and traditional backgrounds), and some indirectly become the factors that affect preschool children's behavior change because children's caregivers or teachers play an intermediary role in children's behavior change (such as adult's behavior beliefs and objective and healthy behavior resources). Understanding the causes of behavior changes is conducive to accurately grasping the laws of healthy behavior.
Third, the change of implementation plan behavior.
Health education emphasizes the establishment and formation of children's healthy behavior through making plans. Before preschool children's health education formed an independent system, one of the biggest drawbacks of health education scattered in other disciplines was that it was too casual and the implementation effect was poor. In the practice of health education, such as the dissemination of health and disease information, the teaching of healthy behavior skills, and the gradual change of children's attitude towards health must be carried out in a planned and purposeful way.
In order to further enrich the content of preschool children's health education and improve the preschool children's health education system, the research on preschool children's health behavior still needs to attract the attention of preschool teachers.