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A Parent’s Guide to…making and sticking to New Year’s Resolutions

Posted by Amy Smith

Family helping a girl jump high

Overindulging on food and drink, spending our hard-earned money on presents and sitting on our couch watching rubbish TV for two weeks AKA – Christmas, has recently finished and now is the perfect time to kickstart your own and your families changes for the decade ahead! 

New healthy habits can be formed all year round but many people believe the beginning of a new year is a great time to start on a new healthy lifestyle journey in the form of New Year’s Resolutions.  

This yearly ritual began almost 4,000 years ago, created by the Babylonians and is still popular throughout the world today, with 45% of people making resolutions every year. Unfortunately, this motivation and will power can quickly fade, resulting in us resorting back to our old ways, so it’s important to capitalise on these feelings while we still feel in the mood to make changes to our lives! 

Most people call them resolutions, but we at BeeZee Bodies call them experiments – and because they are experiments, we know, and expect, that they can often fail. Every time an experiment fails it shows us where the issue is and allows us to improve the experiment before we try again. It is this cycle which we repeat until the experiment finally works and we begin to create a change and soon to be new, healthy habit. 

Here are some tips to help you and your family stick to your New Years Resolutions…

Friends talking and laughing with each other
Share your resolution

Originally, New Year’s Resolutions mainly involved the promise to repay debts and return borrowed objects to their rightful owners. Nowadays they usually involve self-improvement and thus there is less external pressure on us to complete the resolution. By sharing our plans for change with friends and family, as was done in the past, we can create a sense of accountability and improve our chance of sticking to our resolutions. 

Person making a note in a diary
Make a note of it

Research has shown that people who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them. It will also act as a motivator when you look back and see how far you have come from your original challenge. 

A notebook page with a checklist of 4 items to be done today
Limit yourself

Choose only one or a few challenges, trying to create too many at once will appear daunting and unachievable. In addition, if one challenge falls short it is likely that the others will fall too, like a row of dominoes. 

Coffee mug with the word begin on it
Make it specific

A vague New Year Resolution such as ‘We will do more exercise’ or ‘We will eat more fruit and vegetables’ won’t have the specific details needed for us to make the change. Creating more specific resolutions makes it easier to follow, such as ‘I wil lget up 20minutes earlier and walk to work’ or ‘we will eat one piece of fruit every lunch time’. 

New Year’s Resolution Ideas for Parents:
  1. ‘Take better care of myself’ – If you aren’t putting time into yourself it will be very difficult to put time into your family. Make time in your schedule for an activity or hobby that makes you feel refreshed. Both you and your family will benefit. 
  2. ‘Reduce our screen time’ – Reducing your families screen time can improve family communication, activity levels and quality of sleep. Find activities that can be substituted for time spent watching TV, playing video games or mobile phone usage. Examples include: Family board games, neighbourhood walks and reading. 
  3. ‘We will have more family meals’ – Eating meals together as a family, without any distractions, provides an opportunity for family bonding, improves social skills and has even been shown to reduce calorie intake. 

 People who attempt to make resolutions or positive life changes are 10 times more likely to achieve their goals than people who don’t – If you aren’t in, you can’t win.  Good luck! 

Need help making family healthy habits that stick? Join your local BeeZee Families group!

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