Prioritising Home Life With The Family For The New Year

With the new year fast approaching, a lot of us will be reflecting on the year. Through the highs and the lows, it’s useful to reflect on both because every experience in life is a lesson you can learn from. If you find that this year, you may have neglected home life a little with the family, here are a few ways of prioritizing it for the new year.

Learn To Say No

There might be a number of things that have stopped you from spending more time at home, but for some, the main reason can be to do with stretching yourself thin, especially at work. It’s important to learn when to say no to things. Sometimes we take on too much work, that it starts to affect our mental health and physical health. With no time to relax or see friends, it can get pretty lonely and isolating. Work shouldn’t be all that is to life so make the conscious decisions to say no when you feel like it’s going to be too much pressure.

No job is ever worth your health, and we should all be striving for a balanced work and life ratio.

Find A Family Orientated Hobby

It’s hard nowadays to get everyone together, doing something everyone enjoys. Board games were the traditional family orientated activity, but since technology and the digital world came into play, it’s even to get everyone in the same room. If you find that as a whole, the family doesn’t spend enough time together, why not find a family based hobby, that everyone will be on board with? Go on a walk to your local park for a picnic or if you’re an adventurous type, find an outdoor tree top climbing venue.

If you’re more for staying at home, get a movie that’s suitable for everyone and order a take out. Or maybe you can encourage the kids to help out with preparing a meal.

Improve The Home

We can all put off certain household maintenance, particularly when it comes to leaving that pile of ironing to do for another day. However, having a home that is functional and allows the household to go about its daily routine, it’s important to keep an eye on improving the home when needed. Things like inspecting both interiors and exteriors for damage. Looking for holes or cracks to seal so that vermin don’t get in. It may be worth calling a pest control in your area just to do a check over in case there’s anything suspicious.

Switch up the home every now and again with some new decor or if you don’t have the budget to do that, just rearranging the furniture can have a big impact.

Eat Together

Not enough families find the time they sit down together and have an evening meal. Often enough it’s the kids who eat separately and then the parents later. Make time to eat together at least once a week. A family meal together is an important time to bond and to ask questions or chat about what’s going on in their life. These moments are often fleeting, so it’s crucial that this happens as often as possible.

Set a time and try to stick to it and if it’s only once a week, make sure anything else that you organize never falls on that evening.

Have Traditions

There’s nothing more humbling than having family traditions. Whether that’s in the form of a secret recipe that’s been passed down or creating a new one each year, they make family life a lot more meaningful. A couple of examples may be, putting up Christmas decorations while playing music and making a signature hot chocolate to guzzle down or a glass of sherry for the adults.

Traditions are great for families because it’s something very personal and can bring loved ones together. So have a tradition that you can keep going for years to come.

Give The Family A Digital Detox

Now and then, it’s healthy to put the mobile phones or laptops away so that you can get outdoors or even just lounge on the couch and have a good chat. A digital detox is certainly every family member can benefit from so that we don’t allow it to have a hold over us and so that we can enjoy life in reality. We can miss out on special moments when our heads are stuck in the screens.

You always prioritize home life with the family above everything else. It’s important to keep relationships strong.   

Joel Manzer

Husband to an Amazing Wife, and Father of a Child with Autism. Founding Lead Editor of this site called Autisable. Click here to join Autisable!