Creating New Years Resolutions for the Whole Family

This year, instead of focusing on New Years Resolution for myself, I wanted to work with my husband and kids to create resolutions to improve our family life. The last two years were hard for our family and we really wanted to work on 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.

We focused on only a few key areas that we wanted to improve, so it wouldn’t be so daunting to stick to them. 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 two family New Years resultions that made the list for 2013.

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. Now that our kids are a little older and interested in cooking they can 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.

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?

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Sue Kirchner is a family fun coach, kids party planner, and weekly contributor to Patch.com. Sue and her family fun ideas have been featured on TV, newspapers, magazines, blogs, as well as her own family fun site ChocolateCakeMoments.com.