It’s important, as we’ve said. Self-care isn’t selfish. How can you take care of your kids if you’re not taking care of yourself?

Our kids need energy. They need patience. They need strength (who else is going to throw them in the pool or carry them in from the car?). They need years of your time, too. So you have to think about things that the younger you was content to ignore—recovery, heart health, stretching, diet, hydration, sleep.

In a recent Daily Dad email, we quoted John Leguizamo, who was explaining “having kids makes you really aware of your environment. When you’re young and single, you don’t care. You’re indestructible.” But now we have to be more aware of things if we want to continue to perform at the same level, if we want to be able to make it through this marathon of raising a family.

But the benefits are not just to our own health, of course. Because we’re not the only ones that are affected by our lifestyle anymore.

Our kids will see these better choices, this intentionality as an example. They’ll learn that taking care of yourself—eating well, checking the ingredients in anything you put on or in your body, exercising, staying hydrated—is essential to living a healthy life. They will eat better as a result of the choices you make. They will be more mindful of drinking water if they see you doing it. They will know that health is a priority.

Taking care of yourself is contagious. It will spread throughout your house. And so too will a bad example, if that’s what you choose to set. Forget the excuses and the rationalizations—that how you’ve been doing things your whole life has worked so far, what you were doing has worked before, that you hate making appointments, your parents never cared about organic ingredients, energy drinks taste better than water, it’s easier to microwave frozen dinners than to actually cook something. It doesn’t matter.

You want your kids to be healthy and proactive and discerning. So show them what that looks like.