The new year is a perfect time to reflect and make changes. Every year I spend some time thinking about the person I want to be and how I can resolve to make changes to get closer to my goals. However, as I was making my own goals for 2013 I realized that this would be a good idea to do for the whole family. I really wanted to work with my husband and kids to create resolutions for us all to work together to improve our family life. The last two years were hard for our family and we needed a plan to strengthen the family bond by spending more quality time together, improving our relationships, celebrating our successes, and most importantly, having more fun.
So, to get started, we focused on only a few key areas that we wanted to improve, so it wouldn’t be so daunting to stick to our resolutions. The first thing we did was sit down as a family and ask each other where we wanted to improve or focus our energies. We talked a lot about eating healthier, being more social, giving back more to our community, saving more money, adding more variety to our family time together, and being more physically active. We are still working on our final details, but here are three family New Years resolutions that made the list for 2013. I hope they inspire your family to get talking about making the new year one to remember.
Eat in more often.
We are going to work together as a team to cook more at home. It’s healthier, cheaper, and gives us an opportunity to spend time together in the kitchen talking. So this should help us to be healthier and more social. Now that our kids are a little older and interested in cooking, they can even help more. Here are some tips on Getting Your Family to the Dinner Table for Fun.
Volunteer as a family.
We are in the process of looking for ways that we can give back more but working together as a family. We do a lot of volunteering at school, the Y, and for our son’s scout troop. We also write a lot of checks to various organizations and we’ve raised a lot of money for JDRF to find a cure for my daughter’s diabetes. Here’s an article I wrote on Teaching Your Kids the Importance of Giving Back.
While everything we’ve done so far has been good, we want to give our children a chance to actually SEE how we can make an impact by helping others in need. We want to give more of our time, not just our money, and see the results of our volunteering. Our goal was to find an organization or activity that we can do once a month together to help out those less fortunate. Each family member threw an organization or type of charity work into the ring to be discussed. We talked about helping homeless animals, sick children, cleaning up our community, and assisting less fortunate families. We came to the decision together that we want to help women who are in shelters with their children. We are in the process of contacting organizations to see how we can help as a whole family. We are all looking forward to seeing the impact we can make when we work together.
Unplug.
We want to really engage more with each other when we have our family time. So, instead of just flopping in front of the TV on Friday Night, we’re going to turn off the cell phones, TV, video games, computers and have some old-fashioned fun together like Family Game Night, Family Slumber Parties, Camping Indoors, or Homemade Pizza Parties. Here are some other ideas for easy and inexpensive ideas for Family Night. My family is committed to doing them more often this year and I hope the ideas inspire you to have some fun, too.
Have you ever created New Years Resolutions for the whole family? What were they or what do you wish your family could work on in 2013?
The first two things you mentioned are things we do plenty of here. We live on an island with no fast food restaurants or delivery, so we eat in most of the time. We also do lots of volunteer work as a family.
The one thing we really do need to work on is going unplugged more! Thanks for sharing this post!