They tend to go hand in hand. If you believe it's important to keep your child healthy and fit, you probably also believe it's equally important for your child to do well in school.

That's why I devote a column or two around the start of school each year to show how the former affects the latter.Last week, you read about how the length of the school year virtually insures that your child struggles in some way at some time and what sorts of health-and-fitness strategies can minimize the length of those.This week, I'd like to present a few more studies to help parents help their children meet with success during this school year.Because of the correlation between eating a healthy breakfast and achieving academic success, many parents won't let their child leave for school without eating a proper morning meal. A 2015 study performed at the University of Iowa reinforces the soundness of this strategy.Researchers there compared schools that had just enough students from families below the poverty line to require those schools by government mandate to offer subsidized breakfast to schools that just fell short of having enough to be obligated to do so. The researchers found that not only did the schools offering the free breakfasts perform better academically, but also that the effect was cumulative.In other words, the longer the school was involved in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's School Breakfast Program, the more success that school experienced when compared to schools with not quite enough low-income students to require participation in the program.Math scores in elementary schools, for instance, were about 25 percent higher in the schools studied that offered the school breakfast program as opposed to those that did not. And nearly the same disparity occurred in reading and science scores, too.This University of Iowa study supports the outcome of a 2013 Chinese study of kindergartners that compared IQ scores to breakfast frequency. In this study - even when other factors such as parents' education and occupation were considered as influences - those who regularly ate breakfast were found to have higher IQ scores than those who did not.A Dartmouth College study released in 2014 clearly demonstrates the inexorable link between fitness and academics.Researchers there found that after exercise adolescents demonstrated more visual attentiveness - a significant amount more, in fact - and remained more visually attentive to subject matter up to 45 minutes after exercise than they did without exercise, a result that many enlightened educators find ironic (and somewhat sad) in light of the number of school districts reducing or eliminating recess and gym time in an attempt to improve standardized test scores.Perhaps even more importantly, the improvement in visual attentiveness was greater in the group designated as low-income adolescents, a group that typically suffers academically from an inability to consistently pay attention.Moreover, the study found significant improvement in reading comprehension for this group occurred with as little as 12 minutes of exercise.Other studies have attempted to determine why exercise compliments academics.One, performed at the University of Otago in New Zealand and published in Psychophysiology in January of 2015, found that correlation continues even as students progress to high school and college.That's because even in the physical prime of life, people gain additional mental benefit from an increase in oxygen to the frontal lobe of the brain. Exercise creates such an increase.Additionally, in this study exercise was found to be more important than body shape for cognition. In other words, those subjects with a higher-than-optimal BMI - those considered clinically overweight or obese - still received an increase in oxygen to the vital part of the brain from exercise.And finally, while virtually every parent wants academic success and a moderate degree of physical fitness for every son and daughter, the most astute realize that achieving those becomes a Pyrrhic victory at the cost of peace of mind. In short, that mental health needs to be fostered in children as well.A study published in February of 2014 in the journal World Psychiatry found that a lack of exercise combined with a lack of sleep and a high use of television, video games, and the Internet hampers mental health.In a survey of over 12,000 European adolescents from 11 countries, the aforementioned combination increased the odds of self-destructive behaviors and mental illness.While it's undeniable that the Internet has enhanced the ease and rate at which students access information, it appears as if it has also introduced elements - such as social media and ubiquity to video gaming - into the lives of adolescents that make a normally trying emotional time even more trying.As a result, parents may need to establish limits on an adolescent's access to them simply to keep a son or daughter better emotionally grounded and more well-rounded.