Strategies for Family Health

Family health is important--and increasingly hard to obtain these days. Recent research shows that dealing with health issues in family members continues to be a top stressor, impacting over half of Americans. Modeling healthy lifestyle habits for your children can lead to healthy habits for them when they reach adulthood. With busy schedules and childhood diseases on the rise, it's important to maintain healthy habits to maintain a healthy family. Here are a few areas of life that can impact health and wellness in many different ways.

Activity Level

With obesity rates for adults and children higher than ever, and with Type 2 Diabetes showing up in children at never-before-seen rates, it's important to be sure that the whole family stays active. Fortunately, there are fun ways to do this, and staying active can also relieve stress for all members of the family, making activity a way to get a double-dose of family health.
_{Here are some strategies for staying active with your family.}

Social Support

There have been many studies on friendship and health, and the overall verdict is that social support helps with stress levels, immunity and even longevity. It's also just fun to hang out with friends and have strong relationships. Does your family spend time with friends? If not, why not organize a barbeque, a game night, or meet up with friends in a park? With our busy lives, we don't always make time for family friends, but it can really be beneficial to keep these relationships strong.
_{Here are some strategies for maintaining a supportive circle of friends.}

Diet

With many dual-income families and after-school activities for kids, families are busier than they have been in the past. This often means eating on the go, picking up convenience foods (read: junk) in lieu of the sit-down, home-cooked meals of decades past. This often means poorer nutrition for everyone. While healthy cooking and healthy eating may be more challenging today than in years past, maintaining a healthy diet may be easier than you think, and it's important for family health.
_{Here are some strategies for healthy cooking for busy people.}

Get Enough Sleep

Do you get a full 8 hours of sleep each night? Do your kids get the recommended 9 to 10? If the answer is 'no', that's not surprising, but you may be surprised by the negative consequences of inadequate sleep. Try to make sleep a top priority--even if that means cutting out some activities from your busy schedule. You'll be glad you did in the long run, and everyone in your family will likely benefit from more sleep, or at least more 'down time'.
_{Here's some more information on the importance of sleep, and strategies for getting quality sleep when stressed.}

Stress Levels

All family members experience stress these days, and can experience negative effects from too much stress. More than just an emotionally uneasy feeling, stress can impact virtually all major systems in your body, notably your immune system, which can leave you more vulnerable to other health issues, from the common cold to more major diseases and conditions, if you experience too much chronic stress. Learning effective stress management techniques, and teaching them to your kids, can keep you healthier, and can set them up for a lifetime of greater health, too.
_{Here's more on stress, how it affects you, and how to manage stress in your life.}

For more on healthy living, subscribe to About.com's Healthy Monday Newsletter, which brings simple and effective tips to make a positive change in your health, one week at a time. You can also subscribe to the About.com Stress Management Newsletter for regular information and resources on stress relief, or take advantage of our other free interactive and ongoing stress management resources. For stress management techniques targeted for your personality and situation, use our free self-assessments.