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It’s the new year and one of the activities people who hope to get better in various aspects of their lives do is to set goals. Business goals, personal development goals, marriage goals, spiritual goals and the list is endless. Setting a goal is now a common thing to do especially as several people have recorded success after setting a goal for those things they wish to achieve. This further shows that wishing alone can’t help us achieve what we want, we have to change our wishes into goals, which makes them more concrete.

Goal Setting and Nurturing

Nurturing children is a very tasking job, as tasking as it is, a lot of parents only have a list of things they wish for their children to become or imbibe, they, however, do not set goals to make their wishes concrete and this ignorant act is a recipe for their wishes not becoming a reality. 

Having wishes without setting goals is a parent assuming the child will know what to do and with this kind of thought, parents wouldn’t take necessary actions to help their child achieve what they are expected to,  they expect the child to figure it all out. 

I am an individual who is invested in helping parents raise a generation of health and safety-conscious individuals and from my observation I rarely see parents set goals for the healthy habits they want their children to adopt. What I mostly see is parents assuming the child should know what to do without the behaviour being taught or modelled to them. I consider this unfair to our young children, as they need our guidance to lead a healthy life, especially in their early stages of life. 

So what’s your healthy habit wish for your child(ren)? Write them out as goals and watch yourself consciously doing things that will help your child achieve them.

So how do you set healthy habit goals?

What are your wishes?

Every parent has healthy habits they wish for their child to adopt. It could be drinking more water or eating more fruits, or doing more exercises, the list is endless. 

Write them down.

Since you can state what your wishes are, then write them down. Write out what you aim to see your child do within a specific period. You could start with setting 3-month or 6-month goals, this gives you time to check up on your goals and see if you are on track. Also, try not to outdo yourself with a long list of healthy habits you want your child to adopt, keep the list short and simple, this will save you and your child from getting overwhelmed which could lead to abandoning the goal. We don’t want that to happen right? So, a list of 3-5 goals is enough.

Have a plan.

Now that you have set healthy habit goals for your child, what are your plans to help you achieve them and ease the journey? These plans are activities that will help you achieve your set goals. For instance, one of the healthy habit goals for my child is to increase his consumption of green vegetables. So my plan to help me achieve that is to first write out specific vegetables available in my environments that I can introduce, then, write out the foods we eat and look at ways I can incorporate these vegetables in them, and then write out a food timetable.

Get necessary resources 

For every healthy habit goal you set for your child, there are things you will need to help your plan for the goals work out. Just like the example of my goal I sighted earlier, some of the resources I need is to get the vegetables I intend to include in my child’s meal. If I set the goals and plan and I don’t get the resources needed, the chances of achieving my goal will be thrown out the window. So, getting the resources needed for the plan to work is just as important as setting the goal and planning.

Take action!

This is where the real work lies. It is not enough to set goals, plan and get resources. Do the work! Act according to the plan to help make the healthy habit dream for your child a reality.

Conclusion 

Setting goals and working to achieve them is the guide we need to raise health-informed children. It makes the nurturing journey less stressful and helps us remain focused even on our down days. Even if our set goals were not achieved, we must have learned new things about ourselves or our children during the process and that itself is GROWTH!

I hope with these few points, I have been able to convince you that you need to set a healthy habit goal for your child. 

Now get right on and start!

Have a prosperous year ahead, readers.

Yours in Health and Knowledge.

BS Akinlabi, founder, THELC