NorthBay biz profiles several North Bay organizations that are making healthy children their business.
Another twist to this equation is that our children’s early years represent an opportunity to provide a foundation of health—whether it be physical, mental or emotional—that can last the rest of their life.
Kickin’ it new school
“There’s a need for children to be active, and I think a lot of parents hold off on enrolling their children in, for example, a team sport, because they feel they’re too young or won’t be good enough,” says Renee Ziemer, owner and director of the Rohnert Park-based Kinder Kickz Soccer Program. “If you teach them [healthy habits] when they can first grasp them, they’re going to learn to have them be a part of their daily life, hopefully for their lifetime.”
Ziemer, along with her husband, Chris, started the Kinder Kickz Soccer Program in September 2007 after being involved with numerous children’s programs throughout the North Bay, including the popular Ziemer Brothers soccer camps. Kinder Kickz is a noncompetitive, activity-based program for children ages 18 months to 12 years that uses soccer to develop sportsmanship and educate young children about the benefits of an active and healthy lifestyle. The curriculum focuses on improving motor, social and soccer skills in a fun and positive environment.
“For the past 18 years, I’ve worked with children from as young as 18 months all the way through the collegiate-level. During this time, many Physical Education programs have been cut from schools, leaving parents looking for programs that keep their kids active,” says Ziemer. “My goal is to instill healthy habits and help develop a love for soccer, but I also hope the kids learn to love being active. In addition to getting great exercise, they’re also learning about the game of soccer, how to share and about teamwork…and they’re having a lot of fun!”
The community has responded enthusiastically, with business tripling in about a year and a half. The program was also voted 2008 Sonoma County “Youth Sports Program Favorite” by readers of Sonoma Family-Life magazine. Kinder Kickz now offers classes not only in Rohnert Park but also in Petaluma and Windsor.
“I started out with just doing indoor soccer classes,” says Ziemer. “But now it’s expanded where I also offer birthday parties, a home school physical education program and outdoor classes in Petaluma and Windsor. I also have preschools come and do fieldtrips. However, they all incorporate soccer and physical, active play.”
While the program appears to be most popular with the 2- to 6-year-old age group, all participants learn important lessons about teamwork and exercise.
“Parents like that their children are being active while learning how to follow directions and work with other children at the same time,” says Ziemer. “I think the kids like the variety. It’s different from going to a class where they have to be still. I believe they like that they can express themselves and their bodies through running and enjoy the different games and imaginative play that we put into the games.”
Parents of children involved in the Kinder Kickz program agree. “Mackenzie [my 3-year-old daughter] absolutely loves soccer with Kinder Kickz,” says Misty Black of Sebastopol. She looks forward to it every week. When she’s done, she’s excited and pleasantly tired. She’s getting exercise and doesn’t know it. And her balance and coordination have improved tremendously. Her coach does an excellent job of getting the kids excited and including everyone—even when one child is feeling shy or hesitant to participate. Her energy is contagious! She does a great job of incorporating soccer skills with lots of fun games.”
Totally grubbin’
Another new business that’s hoping to make a healthy difference in children, inside and out, is The Little Gourmet restaurant in Napa, which calls itself “a kids’ restaurant that’s grown-up friendly, specializing in creatively fun and healthy meals for lunch and dinner.”
The Little Gourmet originated when owners Tom and Judy Blix realized their love for eating out, and life with their toddler, were colliding. They were quickly disheartened by the choices most restaurants offer on children’s menus, with most options being deep fried, smothered in cheese and/or with no vegetable in sight. It became expensive, as well as wasteful, buying adult fare for their child just to get something healthier.
Being residents of Napa for more than 11 years and having extensive experience in the restaurant industry, the couple also realized that, for being one of the culinary centers of the world, Napa had very few venues for children to learn and participate. This realization became a dream to fill a blatantly underserved niche. In November 2008, their dream was realized when The Little Gourmet was born, providing both creatively fun and healthy meals for lunch and dinner, as well as offering kids’ cooking classes.
“Another pet peeve of mine at restaurants with my daughter was they put bread out,” says Judy Blix. “Bread is fine, but when you’re a kid and you’re hungry, you just eat the bread. My daughter would eat all the bread no matter how much I pulled it away and then wouldn’t eat her meal. So we put out a little plate of cut veggies with some ranch dip instead. You can still get bread if you like, but we find parents are thrilled with the veggies.”
Not only has there been an enthusiastic thumbs-up from both parents and children (a common parental comment upon leaving the restaurant is, “My kid never eats that much!”), but the restaurant has also received a surprising amount of just-adult business since opening its doors. This is a testament to the restaurant’s delicious food, because, as Blix says, “We’ve even had a couple meal services where we didn’t have a single child in here! I told my husband, ‘That really speaks to your food!’ [Tom Blix co-created the menu with Judy and acts as executive chef], because otherwise what grown-up wants to come to a kids’ restaurant?”
The restaurant has even hosted a few birthday parties that were actually booked for adults (parties for people turning 40 and 50).
The bottom-line, however, is that the restaurant’s youngest patrons enjoy the food and atmosphere and, so far, they seem to be eating it up. Not only does this make for a pleasurable dining experience for all involved, but it also can be an inspiration to parents to try healthier options at home.
“Our kid’s menus are creative,” says Blix. “We have dishes like ‘snakes and worms’ which is a fresh chicken tender on a skewer, squished down to make it look like a snake and it’s sitting on a bed of soba noodles, which are the worms. There’s a little bit of ‘sneaky chef’ in there, where my husband dices veggies really, really fine and adds them in with the whole thing. Kids are just chomping away and don’t know they’re getting the veggies! But I also don’t think veggies should just be snuck in. Children have to learn they really are good and tasty, so we do things like “trees in snow” which is broccoli florets sitting up in a couple spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. Mothers often leave the restaurant saying, ‘My kids ate vegetables—I can’t believe it!’ Inspiring parents wasn’t one of my original goals, but if that’s a side effect of this venture, I think that’s great.”
Let the music play
Just as important as nutrition and exercise is a child’s mental and emotional health, and Mary Ann Hall’s Music for Children program in Marin aims to “develop musicianship and a lifelong enjoyment of music by connecting the art of the music with the heart of the child.”
Jill Pierce, coordinator and teacher at Mary Ann Hall’s Music for Children, first attended these classes herself as a child, learning from Mary Ann Hall, who developed this curriculum in Connecticut in 1972. After getting a music education degree and realizing she wanted to give other children the same experience she’d had, Pierce started teaching the classes in Palo Alto in 1997. Husband Steve later joined the business in 1999, and they’ve since expanded to a steady student body of about 400 students and classes in Novato, Ross, Mill Valley, Terra Linda, San Francisco and Palo Alto.
“Some of the families who took classes with us during our first years of teaching are still with us, 11 years later, with their third or fourth child,” says Pierce. “These people are a huge part of our lives, and it’s amazing to teach these children from babyhood [10 months or even younger] to big kid [classes go through age 7]. Plus, we stay in touch with many families after their children graduate. We’ve had families who’ve enrolled four children at once! These parents value the quality of the curriculum, our talents and work, the nurturing, safe, relaxed environment and all the instruments we use in class.”
Studies have shown that music, especially when taught with multi-sensory methods (such as connecting songs to books, using rhythms, playing dramatic games and using various body parts to interact with the music), develops musical, linguistic, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal and naturalistic intelligences at the same time. Obviously, Music for Children classes are about much more than just singing and playing music.
“We’ve had many children come to our classes, and their parents have told us, ‘She’s extremely shy; she’s never left my side at a class before,’” explains Pierce. “A few weeks—sometimes two, sometimes 10—later, that child is singing and dancing and feeling confident—feeling like, ‘I am the music! I can do this!’ And they bring that music home with them in their play, and it helps them through their days. As a parent, I know music has saved me many times—singing to my children has calmed them and me. Studies have shown that the stress hormone found in saliva actually decreases when a baby hears his or her mother sing. We know intuitively that singing helps things, but we forget.”
The great outdoors
Combining young children’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being while attempting to combat “nature deficit disorder,” Sonoma County-based Nature Tots—“nature discovery classes for preschoolers”—was started in 2008. The idea sprang from the realization that, although there are many programs, activities and events available for this age group, none was nature-based. Likewise, although quite a few environmental education programs exist in schools as well as private, they all tend to start at the earliest elementary school level. This seemed ironic given that most young children seem to be born with an innate curiosity and wonder for the natural world.
“Nature deficit disorder” is a phrase first coined by author Richard Louv in his book, Last Child in the Woods, which describes the social, psychological and even spiritual ramifications of what an absence of outdoors experiences has caused for a generation raised on electronic, rather than natural, stimulation and entertainment. Not only can it be harmful for our children, but it can also wreak havoc on conservation attempts. For example, according to the National Parks Service, camping and back country stays in national parks dropped 24 percent between 1995 and 2005; the statistic has alarmed environmentalists because of what it means for future conservation efforts.
“Our technological advances in the last 20 years, although wonderful and amazing in many ways, have definitely taken the outdoors out of our kids,” says Sally Baldwin, whose 4-year-old daughter Caitlin attended the “What Animal Did That?” Nature Tots session this spring, where the children learned to identify various signs of animal activity. “Computers are addictive, and almost everyone has one. Cable television is commonplace in most homes and, with 500 channels and a remote to flip through them, kids are sure to find something to catch their attention,” Baldwin continues. “Playstation and Wii, to name a couple, have become kids’ after school activities. Television, computers and video games not only seem to be entertainment for kids today but what life is about to them, and I feel their generation is suffering because of it. It’s like we’ve forgotten there’s a whole world out there waiting to be explored and discovered.”
With these ideas in mind, Nature Tots was born with the goal of providing preschoolers with a fun, creative and educational experience in the world around them. The organization received 501(c)(3) nonprofit tax status in January 2009 and hopes to secure funding so it can offer the classes for free to children. Its two-part mission is: “Cultivating a love of nature in our youngest citizens through direct exposure to the outdoors and by encouraging and facilitating their innate curiosity of the natural world” and to “educate parents of young children on the benefits of regular exposure to nature—both for their own personal well-being as well as for the importance of our nation’s future conservation efforts.”
“Environmental challenges are all around us. There’s increasing recognition of the importance of establishing a childhood connection with nature and the negative impacts of nature deficit disorder. Yet, there are very few opportunities for preschool-age children to engage positively with the natural world,” says Jenny Blaker, outreach coordinator for Cotati Creek Critters, which aims to restore the native plants of the Laguna de Santa Rosa in Cotati and parts of Rohnert Park and collaborated with Nature Tots on a class in 2008. “Nature Tots has been created to fill this crucial gap.”
Today, Nature Tots offers a variety of classes on topics such as “Our Feathered Friends,” “Green Giants” and “Creepy Crawlies.”
“When I heard of Nature Tots, I knew it was a class I wanted to enroll my kids in,” says Baldwin. “Nature Tots does an amazing job of teaching kids all about the wonderful and natural world around them. It reminds us that our kids are little explorers and takes them on tot-sized adventures that might include finding insects under rocks and logs, listening and looking for birds in the trees and even looking for tadpoles in the water. The kids learn that nature is all around them—even as close as their own backyard.”
Whether related to diet and exercise, mental and cognitive development or environmental awareness, parents in the North Bay are blessed with a multitude of options that can foster their children’s overall health and well-being. Most important, the children taking part in these programs and activities are having fun and learning critical skills and habits they’ll take with them on their life-long journey.
Can Do
By Matt Solis
