When you’re raising a family, it’s important that you are cultivating the best environment to do so. As a parent, your job is to help your kids grow from year to year through a positive and encouraging emotional and mental environment. However, you should also focus on a healthy physical environment too. This is just as important to your kids’ overall wellbeing. Here are a few easy tips for promoting a healthy atmosphere in your home that your whole family can benefit from.
Focus on Food
First, you can start by growing a garden. By choosing a few fruits, vegetables, or herbs to grow at home, even inside, you can add a level of the natural world to your daily life. By using organic or eco-friendly products instead of pesticides, your food intake will be purer and healthier, even with a small yield. Not to mention, your kids will be able to see how plants grow over time from small seeds to food for our bellies!
Secondly, make sure to compost all kitchen scraps rather than just trash them. By compiling eggshells, tea leaves, coffee grounds, fruit, and vegetable peelings, you’ll have first-rate organic matter that you can then use for your garden, meaning there will be less waste and more homegrown, delicious produce.
Conserve Water
It’s also really important to conserve water, a vital but limited resource. There are a ton of easy ways to do this, however. For instance, your family can take showers instead of baths or only do the dishes or laundry when you have a full load. You can make water conservation fun by encouraging your kids to sing their favorite song while brushing their teeth, while the faucet is turned off. These are just a few ways you can help preserve this precious resource.
Clean Better
Next, there are healthier ways to clean your home as well! For instance, trade in popular chemical cleaning products for natural, less toxic variants that are just as effective and can be found around the home. For instance, use oil to polish wood, white vinegar to disinfect, and lemon juice to clean the grit off your stove and oven. In addition, baking soda is an easy all-purpose cleaner. Furthermore, these products are cheaper and work just as well as traditional ones.
Purify the Air
It’s also important to focus on cleaning the air inside your home. One easy way to do this is by opening a window. By letting in fresh air for a few hours, toxic or stale air from your home will be replaced with nature’s finest — and it’s free! Second, you can buy air filters or air purifiers. Air filters are used throughout your home in the air conditioning and central heating systems. You should particularly look into reusable and washable, eco-friendly air filters that can help you clean your home’s air in an environmentally conscious way.
Air purifiers, on the other hand, will intake dirty or polluted air and expel pure air. They remove dangerous chemicals, odors, and allergens like dust from the air in your home. Yuck! Though air filters and air purifiers may cost a little more than just opening a window, combining these ideas in your home environment strategy will reap long-term benefits with the health of your family.
Save Energy
Saving energy is also a vital part of having a healthy home. First, make sure to turn off all the lights in your home that aren’t absolutely necessary; instead, let in natural light! You can also switch from incandescent light bulbs to fluorescent, which use only a quarter of the electricity the regular ones do. Unplug electronics (even the TV!) when you’re not using them. Even more radical, use electronics less; for instance, encourage your kids to play outside or without electronics for some days of the week. Finally, stop leaks when they happen, rather than letting them go weeks or months unfixed.
All of these tips — focusing on food, conserving water, cleaning better, purifying the air, and saving energy — can help you provide the optimal physical environment for your family’s health and wellbeing. These small changes can make a tangible difference in your family’s livelihood. Feel free to mix, match, and adapt in ways that work best for you!
