Your family is the cornerstone to your life. Every member deserves to be healthy and happy, but this can be difficult to achieve. The best way to achieve this is to sit down as a family and set health goals for each other. Each family’s health goals are different based on everybody’s unique lifestyles and habits, but in general, there are certain things every member of every family should work towards. This can include eating more healthy on a daily basis, exercising consistently, drinking the recommended amount of water and practicing mental health exercises. Here are five ideas on how your family, no matter the specific health goals, can work towards these general and practical achievements.
1. Supplement Nutrients
Try as you might to get all of your nutrients from food, it can be difficult. Living a fast paced life because of work and family obligations makes it difficult to always eat healthy. However, there are ways to make sure you and your kids are still getting vital nutrients. You can invest in something like a What Is Thrive patch to make sure your family gets all of the vitamins and minerals they need no matter where your family’s schedule takes you all.
2. Play Games Outside
One way to get your children interested in spending more time in nature and exercising at the same time is to come up with fun games or get them involved in an outdoor sport. This of course depends on how old your children are. If they are below the age of ten, then you may want to stick to games involving imagination and play. You can band with your young ones to create a make believe kingdom in your backyard using cardboard boxes. This can create time for running around and letting their imaginations grow and expand. If they are older than ten, then you can see how interested they are in different sports. Find your local climbing gym and see if they like hanging off of walls, or take them mountain biking on a smooth trail and see if they enjoy that.
3. Make Healthy Eating Fun
It can be difficult to eat healthy, even as adults. In order to bribe your kids to eat their broccoli and kale, you may have to come up with some creative incentives. For younger ones, this may involve imaginary worlds where eating their broccoli gives them superpowers, which isn’t too far from the truth, if you consider health to be a superpower. If your kids are a little older but still don’t want to eat their greens and other veggies, you can set up an incentive board each meal. For every serving of healthy food eaten at a meal, your kids can rack up points to earn prizes, like more television time.
4. Get Matching Water Bottles
Everybody knows that you have to drink water to survive, but not everyone knows the many health benefits of drinking water at least the recommended amount per day. You can motivate every member of your family to drink more water by buying everyone matching or coordinating reusable water bottles! This can be a fun family tradition where you can save the environment by reusing a bottle and be motivated to drink more and more water. You may all find yourselves
5. Have Family Mental Health Days
Mental health is key to rounding out family health goals. You can teach your kids to take care of this side of their health by having one day a month where you all do a yoga practice together or even try meditating. The more they see you working on your mental health, the more they will want to work on theirs.
The Main Point
Building a foundation of health for you and your kids will be the best gift you can give them. By helping them form habits of health now, you will be instilling values and habitual actions within them that will last them for a lifetime. Your kids watching you invest in your health now will also have them be more prone to value themselves and invest in themselves. This will help keep them making healthy decisions in other areas of their lives. You can not go wrong with setting familial health goals and working towards achieving them.
