5 Steps To Creating A Happy & Healthy Family In 2019

Have you seen Informed Families’ Lock Your Meds signs at your local Publix Pharmacy store? Through our amazing partnership with Publix Pharmacy, we are reaching roughly 1.2 million people in 720 stores across Florida and 397 in the Southeastern US with the Lock Your Meds message. Wow!

A happy and healthy family starts when you create a safe and healthy environment for children.  This includes securing your medication, taking regular inventory to ensure nothing is missing and safely disposing of unused or expired medication.  

Also, keep tabs on your liquor cabinet - and resist unhealthy social norms that make you feel bad for not “teaching your child to drink” at home. The research shows that children who start drinking before age 15 are 5 times more likely to have alcohol problems at adults.

THANKSGIVING OR EXCESS?

Thanksgiving used to be a time to gather with family and reflect on all of our blessings. We appreciated things, like a roof over our head, food on the table, clothes on our back and a country not at war.

Then, Thanksgiving became a time to eat and drink too much, drive ourselves crazy trying to please our guests or get along with our hosts and prepare for the shopper’s high we get from Black Friday. 

Families of origin aren’t always healthy or easy to spent time with! I saw a comic recently featuring a “Convention of Adult Children of Normal Parents.” There were three people attending. Ha! Many of us have at least one trauma from childhood and complicated relationships with a sibling or another family member. 

A recent New York Times blog post, entitled “How Asking 5 Questions Allowed Me to Eat Dinner With My Kids” by Charles Duhigg, offers a surprisingly simple solution to many of the problems families face in the fast paced world we are living in. Specifically, Duhigg was struggling with the issue of wanting to eat dinner together with his family and finding it very difficult due to his family’s busy schedule.  In the blog, Duhigg offered a solution that helped him resolve this problem, called the “five whys.”

Duhigg, a journalist and author of two books on habits and productivity, suggests that parents examine why they can’t eat dinner with their children by asking “why” five times.

The term “quality time” is often used when talking about the engagement parents have with their children. Today, quality time is more often applied to busy families—ones with crazy schedules that prevent them from much face-to-face, sustainable, screen-free interaction during a typical day.

However, we believe any and all time families spend together is important. In that sense, “family time” is a better term. If one of your top parenting goals is to raise healthy kids who make smart choices and resist risky behaviors, family time is one of your best strategies to achieve that. Here’s how:

Of all the brilliant Dave Barry lines, "You can't make this stuff up" remains high on my list--an extension in a sense of Mark Twain's, "Truth is stranger than fiction. Because fiction has to make sense."

A Florida couple was recently arrested for giving marijuana and cocaine to their middle school children in order to encourage the kids to go to school, do their homework, that sort of thing.

Yes, I wish I were making this up.

BBQs, lemonade stands, pool days, and slip n’ slides…SUMMER IS HERE! But we all know along with all that fun comes lots of free time for your children. Help your children grow into responsible young adults (and make some money) this summer at a lemonade stand. Teach your children RESPONSIBILITY by having them run a lemonade stand...all while they're making money!

A respected colleague makes the case for allowing kids to play video games. Not only do games enhance hand-eye coordination, but gaming is also the new form of reading, he suggests. Decrying video games because some are a waste of time is equivalent to throwing out all novels because Sweet Valley High is badly written. Good games are interactive and endlessly fascinating. Good games are eating the lunch of novels and other forms of fiction. The alternative to a good graphic game isn't The Scarlett Letter or Moby Dick.

Kids read graphic novels on-line rather than reading books. Hours spent gaming may not be hours spent studying or developing a plan to end homelessness in your community, but time spent on programming is not hours spent taking drugs or mugging old ladies either. Gaming allows hard-working, productive students to relax.

Running with half a dozen buddies in the early morning on New Year's Day, I asked a friend what she and her teen-aged children had done the night before. "Just stayed home and played Parcheesi," Danielle said. "Then the kids and I started to watch a movie, but I fell asleep on the couch in the living room."

"My kids and I stayed home too," I replied. "We played Dominoes and then they baked something that was almost edible. But I'm leaving out the word 'just.' I'm happy to hang out with my wife and children. The kids will be grown and gone soon enough."

As we trotted over tree roots on our way down toward Matheson Hammock, another running buddy joined the conversation: "You supercilious prig," Lynn began. "Not only are you living in a cave, you are harming your kids by not letting them go out from the damp, dark confines in the side of a cliff."