Healthy Families and Kids

Resources to help keep your family healthy

Find information about important health issues and explore the tools and support services that can help you and your family make smart lifestyle choices.

• Nutrition, exercise, and weight
• Drugs, alcohol, and tobacco
• Confronting the opioid epidemic
• Bullying, peer pressure, stress, and depression
• Asthma
• Immunizations

Nutrition, exercise, and weight

Healthy weight: Achieving and maintaining a healthy weight, starts with understanding your current body mass index (BMI). To find out where you and your family stand, visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC’s) BMI calculator for children and teens or Adult BMI calculator.

Healthy diet: Choosing and preparing healthy food for you and your family is a whole lot easier when you have access to the right information, tools, and resources. Visit the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Choose MyPlate for healthy recipes, menu builders, food and fitness trackers, and comprehensive information for parents and teachers of children of all ages.

Active lifestyle: Whether you’re 6 or 64, regular physical activity is the key to good health. Make sure you're getting enough — find out how much physical activity you need each day.

Drugs, alcohol, and tobacco

Support for Families

Parents and families play a crucial role in helping kids grow up drug-, alcohol-, and tobacco-free — and fortunately, there are a number of resources and tools that can help.

• The Partnership for Drug-Free Teens
• The National Institute on Drug Abuse

Help quitting

Tobacco: Smokefree.gov provides free, accurate, evidence-based information and professional assistance to help support the immediate and long-term needs of people trying to quit smoking.

Alcohol: Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is open to anyone who wants to do something about his or her drinking problem. There are no age or education requirements.

Drugs: The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence offers a confidential, online, self-test quiz that can help determine if you or someone you know is at-risk for addiction — and offers a range of services including help for individuals and family members.

Confronting the opioid epidemic

Opioid abuse is a major public health crisis in America and is only growing in our state.

In New Jersey 2,056 people died from a drug overdose in 2016, an increase of 42 percent from 2015. Nationally, more than 42,000 people died from an opioid overdose in 2016 — the highest total of any year on record. About 40 percent of those deaths involved a prescription opioid.

Working with our members, providers and pharmacists AmeriHealth New Jersey has taken several steps to help confront the opioid epidemic.

Learn more

Bullying, peer pressure, stress, and depression

More than just a school-yard problem, bullying and peer pressure can affect a child’s self-esteem, personality, and outlook on life. Learn how you can help detect it and take action to stop it.

• Stopbullying.gov

Stress: Some stress is healthy, but too much can have negative health consequences. Learn to recognize the symptoms of stress, and discover ways you and your family can let go of the stress in your lives.

• Stress basics, relief, and relaxation
• Identifying signs of stress in children and teens

Depression: Depression affects people of all ages, genders, and races. It doesn’t exclusively affect women or adolescents or seniors. But it can be treated, and successful treatment begins with understanding its symptoms.

• Teen depression: Symptoms, treatment, and management
• Depression in Adults

Asthma

Support for Families

If you or a family member has asthma, learning how to manage and control it is the key to maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle. Find out what asthma is all about, get advice on using asthma medicines, learn about asthma triggers, and what to do in an emergency.

• The American Lung Association: For parents of children with asthma
• American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology: Just for kids: Allergy and asthma games, puzzles, and more
• Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America: What causes or triggers asthma?

Immunization

For children, adolescents, and adults alike, immunizations are the best way to protect against infectious diseases. It’s thanks to vaccines that many infectious diseases that were once common in this country are now under control.

Holding off on immunizations because you’re worried about side effects? Don’t. In most cases, vaccines cause no side effects or only mild reactions such as fever or soreness at the injection site. Very rarely, people experience more serious side effects, like allergic reactions. And severe reactions to vaccines occur so rarely that the risk is usually difficult to calculate.

Immunization schedules

Keep track of which immunizations you and your family members should receive and when with these immunization schedules.

• Immunization Schedules from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — for children, adolescents, and adults.