Health Magazine March/April 2016 | Page 58

How To Teach Your Teenager About Grooming Inculcating proper grooming in your children and teenagers can help lead to lifelong good habits. HEALTH meets an expert who explains how this can be done. The Basics The process of teaching your child proper grooming habits starts right after they are born and will endure for many years. The amount of time spent helping to teach your child about proper grooming will depend on several key things that include the child’s age, skill level and interest. According to Aesthetic Specialist Mona Syed Mirza, grooming in children is basically about teaching children good hygiene habits and something very worthwhile. “Aside from keeping up appearances and not offending others, it’s important for children to learn lifelong habits of good hygiene to keep them healthy and prevent the spread of common illnesses,” she explains. “Also teach children to take pride in their appearance by Mar/Apr 2016 56 praising how smart they look, and how fresh they smell after a bath”. Essentially, grooming and hygiene are interlinked; for example, hair should be washed regularly in order to remove a build-up of dirt and germs to maintain cleanliness. Regular brushing and combing, she adds, combats dirt and helps in maintaining a smart appearance. Paving the Way for Good Habits Grooming and personal hygiene are interlinked. Teens of today, tells Syed-Mirza, are more aware of “how they appear” to the outside world and in fact, groomed individuals are more likely to have higher self-esteem and are generally more confident as a result of being more acceptable by societal norms. “A teen is more likely to get a summer job if he or she looks presentable and in fact, turning up to a summer job interview with an unkempt look will not add to your credibility,” she points out. “When grooming habits become a habit at an early age, they generally tend to stay till you are an adult.”