Last Updated on October 21, 2021
Raising children can be challenging. It’s also one of the most rewarding things you can do. Many options are available to raise happy and healthy children. Here are a few suggestions on how to be an incredible parent.
Think Decades Ahead
Although you may not know what career path your child will choose, you can still build a broad plan to help support them and their future. For instance, finances can be an important factor in their future, and two financial instruments you can use to improve their financial prospects are life insurance and a 529 savings plan.
Life Insurance
A life insurance policy is designed to financially protect your family should you die unexpectedly. It’s something you should invest in sooner rather than later. You would feel intense regret if you procrastinated on this critical coverage for your loved ones if you became critically ill or injured.
Think about what would happen if you died prematurely while still raising your children. How would your family survive if you’re the primary breadwinner? How would they pay their monthly expenses? Your life insurance policy would offset primary survival costs.
Getting a policy is a straightforward process, and you can even get life insurance with no medical exam.
A 529 Plan
A good college education will become even more valuable in the future as the world becomes increasingly more reliant on knowledge workers. Automation—AI, IoT, and robots—will replace many jobs that rely on human labor today.
Since college is expensive, setting up a 529 savings plan will free your child from the burden of a student loan that will take many years to pay back. The earlier you set up a 529 savings plan, the more time you will have to contribute to it and for your money to compound.
Feeding Their Bodies
With so much information available on the nutritional profile of various foods, it’s ironic that few people understand how good food choices lead to excellent health. Instead, many people succumb to the temptation of packaged meals designed by flavor engineers.
Few realize that many foods in grocery stores and restaurants taste delicious because of the high concentration of saturated fats, sugars, and salts. Teaching your child how to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy meals will make a huge difference to their health all the years of their life.
Many families don’t adopt healthy meal plans because they’re under the common misconception that healthy foods taste bland while unhealthy foods taste delicious. They believe they must sacrifice delicious meals to stay healthy. For instance, pizza has many ingredients that make it unhealthy, but its delicious taste is incomparable.
The dilemma over whether to opt for taste or nutrient density is a false dichotomy. It’s possible to make a healthy variation of any popular dish. You can even bake a healthy pizza for your kids if you make a pizza casserole and top it with your kid’s favorite pizza toppings.
Nurturing Their Souls
Nurturing your child’s soul may sound like an esoteric idea, but it’s more about encouraging healthy psychological development.
Two ways to nurture your children’s budding interests is through listening to and encouraging them. For instance, listen to their stories about what they did at school or what games they played with their friends. Also, encourage them to try new things, things that push them out of their comfort zones, things that deepen their knowledge or hone their skills.
One Step at a Time
Raising a child is all about balancing long-term planning with living in the moment. Raising a child is one of the most daunting tasks in the world, but if you take things one step at a time, they’ll grow up to be well-adjusted adults.
