With more time spent at home, it can be difficult to stick to routines, and in particular, healthy routines. How can your family continue to stay healthy for the remainder of the winter and into the spring and summer months? Start working healthy routines into your family’s daily life. Here are seven tips to get you started.
Plan Your Grocery Shopping
First and foremost, food intake is a major part of one’s health. To be sure your family is eating the proper amount of fruits and vegetables and that your home is filled with healthy snacks, plan out your grocery shopping trips. Designating one night a week to buying groceries for your family is a good way to budget. Also, create a list before you enter the store. It can be tempting to grab unhealthy foods and snacks, but with a list, it’s easier to find everything on it, check out, and leave.
Cook at Home
Alongside planning out your groceries, seek to cook at home as much as possible. Over one-third of Americans say they cook at home — which is a relatively low number. It’s easy to go out to eat, order take-out, and buy frozen meals and call it a day. However, it’s much more nutritious to eat at home. You can portion your food and get creative with your meals, too.
Meal Prep
If your children are learning from home, you may need to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for everyone each day. Breakfast and lunch meals can be relatively easy to prep. Healthy breakfast options include yogurt, fruit, oatmeal, and eggs. Making these foods is quick in the morning. For lunch, consider making healthy roll-ups and serving raw vegetables. You can cut up veggies at night and utilize storage containers so your kids can grab-and-go when they have their lunch break during the school day. Dinner meals can be more creative and complex if you so choose. Planning out your dinner meals ahead of time will be helpful when it comes to making a grocery list and ensuring your family is eating healthy dinners each night. Consider trying healthier alternatives to relatively unhealthy options, such as swapping regular pasta for chickpea or brown rice-based pasta.
Stick to a Bedtime Routine
More time spent at home can cause bedtime routines to be pushed aside, but this isn’t a good idea. To ensure everyone in your home gets the proper amount of sleep and performs all of their bedtime tasks, keep it consistent. Stick to a certain time each night. Since the American Dental Association recommends brushing your teeth twice a day, bedtime routines should definitely include brushing and flossing your teeth alongside washing your face, changing into pajamas, and perhaps taking a shower. Remind your children of these tasks with a handy chart in the bathroom.
Get Outside Once a Day
Physical activity is important for everyone’s health. You don’t need to go to a gym or go running every day to get it into your routine each day, either. Stick to simple ways of incorporating physical activity into your family’s daily routine so your children are more apt to go along with it. Going for a walk and playing on the playground in your local park, trying snowshoeing, sledding, and simply building a snowman or a snow fort in your backyard are great ways to get fresh air and move around outside in the cold winter months.
Incorporate Family Time
Mental health is also important to manage, especially during the winter months when most people are cooped up inside. Make time each day to sit together as a family and talk. When everyone is home after school and work, go for a walk, eat dinner as a family, and watch a movie together. To make it more routine, perhaps designate one night a week for a family movie night. Your kids can take turns choosing the movies you watch, and it’ll be something they’ll look forward to each week.
Keep Up With Appointments
Today’s world is chaotic, and it can be easy to forget to make and stick to important doctor and dentist appointments. Sit down and plan out all of your family’s appointments for the year now. Write them down on a physical calendar, and program them into your phone, too. You don’t want your kids’ health to be compromised because of forgotten or delayed appointments. In fact, kids that have poor oral health are three times more likely to not be able to go to school because of dental pain. Don’t let this happen to your own children. Checking up on hearing and eyesight is important, too.
It can be easy to fall out of routines — but stick to them. It’s important for the health of everyone in your family to eat healthily, get enough sleep, be physically active, check-in with one another, and visit health professionals regularly. With the new year here, work together as a family to stick to healthy routines!
[…] healthy family routines can help your child adjust to the classroom environment. Mimic teacher and student roles, which is […]