SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (KY3) – Summer sports and activities have started for families, and hydration awareness is as important as ever.
During outdoor activities, teaching children how to recognize when they’re dehydrated can help them stay safe and keep playing. Teaching kids how to stay hydrated can be as fun as fruit. Leigha McKinney, the Injury Prevention Coordinator for Mercy Safe Kids, has an easy way to show your kids the difference between hydration and dehydration.
“Especially with your littles, trying to make it fun. Explain it to them as if it were a grape and a raisin. So, your grape is your hydrated, and your raisin is your dehydrated, obviously. But just seeing that difference, seeing the dehydrated versus the hydrated, it can be a really good visual for kids,” McKinney said.
Parents should look for signs that their kids are dehydrated, such as:
- Flushed face
- Uncommon fatigue
- Dry skin/mouth
- Sunken eyes
- Confused speech
One way to encourage continuous hydration is to keep cool water available for kids while they play outdoors.
Jeff Long, the Director of Safety of the Springfield Boys and Girls Club, said that this was a practice that the club uses in its sports.
“We actually just finished up our spring baseball season, and so we always made sure we had a 10-gallon igloo cooler. Like at the actual dugouts and everything, along with the cups. So the coaches who are all volunteers would encourage the kids to drink plenty of wate,r you kno,w between the innings.”
And if your child doesn’t like drinking water, don’t worry – there are more tasty ways to stay hydrated.
“You can do like diluted fruit juices, so just a little splash of a fruit juice with mainly water in it. And then your high water content foods, such as watermelon, cucumber, that kind of thing, even yogurt has a high water content, so all of those would be pretty good things to even supplement for water,” McKinney said.
Experts also recommend electrolyte drinks, as well as approximately 2 cups of water at mealtime.
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