The Best Ways To Look After Your Family in 2021

Looking after your family has taken on a whole new meaning in the modern world. 2020 was the year the pandemic hit. And now we are all holding our family a little bit closer. When it comes to the idea of providing for our family, now we may very well understand what our grandparents or great grandparents experienced. Perhaps you are going through a difficult time because of finances, or work issues, or the fact that going outside can pose a risk to you and your loved ones. And this begs the question, what can we do to look after our families better this year?

Taking Charge of Your Finances Once and for All

Yes, there are many apps to earn money out there, but it may be time to take a holistic view of looking after your finances. There are so many things that you may need to consider. The first question you really need to ask yourself is:

What is my attitude towards money?

For example, are you used to a certain amount of money coming in and going out every single month? Is money a problem because you are in debt? Or are you always trying to get more money because you can keep up with the Joneses? When it comes to taking charge of your finances, you’ve got to ask yourself the difficult questions. When you started to address your actual attitudes towards money you may realize that you won’t necessarily need as much. Yes, there are bills to pay. But when you start to think about what you spend with your remaining money, but also, if you are spending money on the things that are actually essential, addressing these issues can bring up a few home truths. And this is where making some changes can help you and your family. 

Because our children will learn from us, changing our attitudes towards money can give them a better foundation. If you find yourself in depth, setting up a debt reduction plan can help. While there are resources out there that can give you a short sharp cash injection, such as the loan company, Plenti, it’s about making sure that this cash injection is used for the right reasons. Because if you keep using loans to pay off credit cards, you don’t learn the valuable lesson of getting out of debt. It’s about getting out of debt, and then staying there.

Make Happiness a Priority

You’ve had a long time to think about what makes you happy. And now, in light of the pandemic, you may have changed your opinions. When it comes to our children, we need to focus on their happiness. If you’ve been homeschooling them, you may have seen their emotions go up and down. And depending on their age, you may wonder how it’s going to impact their abilities to forge relationships and friendships later on. But now is the best time for you to truly strengthen the bond between you and your family. 

You may feel the pressures of having to stay at home right now but you may also look at it in a different way. When your children go back to school, the amount of time you spend with them will greatly reduce. When life returns back to normal, you may find that you yearn for the days of spending all day with your children. Are you haven’t spent this amount of time with your children since they were born! And when you start to focus on happiness and reiterating the idea that you are supporting them, this will make them feel protected. Looking after your family feels more difficult these days, especially when you consider the ever-changing news. But you can focus on happiness in the household by doing a few simple things:

• Turn the news off
• Incorporate play
• Add more creative activities
• Talk

The last point is the most important. Whenever our children feel stressed out by the things we’re going through in life, we can greatly underestimate how it impacts them. Taking the time to use happiness as a priority in your household and your life is just a little way to reiterate that it’s far more important to be happier than it is to have money or anything else.

Providing for Your Children’s Future

One of the almighty stresses to have when we are considering the ways to look after our family is the P-word: providing. When we are trying to look after our children and make sure that they are ready for the future, we tend to think about a financial foundation. But the thing that you can do right now to help your children is very simple, get an insurance policy. So many families gravely underestimate the importance of an insurance policy. And because so many people believe they are expensive, or there are other priorities in their lives, the insurance aspect tends to go way down the priority list. But you have got to think about providing for your children’s future now, but also when you aren’t around anymore. Ensuring that you are providing in this respect is such a simple thing. 

As you may think about ensuring that your children have adequate finances, this is something that you can gradually fix throughout life. But it’s so important to have a backup plan in place. Firstly, having insurance can help with this but then, thinking about all of those little stresses that you won’t have to deal with later on in life. There can be many heartbreaking decisions. So it’s far better for you to take these out of your children’s hands. By this, we mean things like who would have the power of attorney if you were not able to make decisions for yourself.

Put the Air Mask on…

When you go on an airplane, and the air mask comes down, the instructions are to put it on yourself before you tend to anybody else. This is a very valuable lesson in making sure that you have the tools to look after your family. If you cannot look after yourself, how are you going to be able to look after your family? It is very straightforward, but think about what you can do to be the best version of you possible. And this means not only dialing in your health and your fitness but looking at what example you set for your children every day. Sometimes we can get swept up in the tide of making sure that our children have everything provided for them, but in doing this, we can deprive them of the one thing they truly need: us. It’s so important to put a routine into our children’s lives because this will implement a structure, so they feel secure. But if you do not think about yourself as an important piece of your child’s life, it is crucial to address this. 

You may have already been thinking about the best ways to look after yourself. But it’s about looking at what you can do to be the best version of yourself in your children’s eyes. Sometimes, we can feel guilty that we’re not doing enough for our children, but we also then have to consider that we’re not doing enough for ourselves as well. Incorporating exercise and health, but also looking at improving yourself in other, less obvious ways will help. For example, you may feel the stress of what is going on right now, but how you react to it will send a clear message to your children. It doesn’t just show them how you react to situations, but you are setting the blueprint for how they are going to deal with situations later in life.  When you start to think about being a better version of yourself, ask yourself the following:

• Am I being the best version of myself?
• Am I looking after my health in simple ways?
• Am I taking the opportunities to prioritize myself?

These questions can help you to slowly peel the onion. Because when we start to think about looking after our family, there are so many different things we feel we have to be. And when we feel this pressure to do so much, it’s natural that stress will follow. Being the best version of yourself is not about pushing yourself beyond exhaustion, it is about making sure that you are trying your best. 

We must remember that when it comes to looking after our family, we have to look after ourselves, but there are so many different ways to actually care for our loved ones. People talk about caring for the children in their own unique way, so much so that it doesn’t look like they are giving love in the most obvious of ways. But we can look for these because they are actually throwing themselves into the “emotional mix,” if you will. They view themselves as important as the people they care for. And it is about some sort of self-preservation. There are things that we can all do to look after our family, especially in these changing times. But you have to remember that you are just as important.