Easy New Year’s Resolutions for Families

Without fail, every year on January 1, multiple celebrities and normal people alike post on social media about the diets they are starting to drop the holiday weight. People who haven’t touched a vegetable in months are suddenly posting righteous selfies with salads. The local gyms boast much higher attendance rates, frustrating the regulars who can’t gain access to their usual treadmill for a few weeks. Other health-related self-improvement projects also commence on like clockwork. No question about it: We love the idea of starting fresh, and doing something that would be good for us. But these kinds of New Year’s resolutions, while good for many people, still smack too often of modern American individualism. Perhaps this individualistic nature of most New Year’s resolutions also has to do with their low success rate. By February, as the jokes go, the January gym warriors have turned back into couch potatoes. 

So I am here to suggest another sort of New Year’s resolution. This one involves ideas for new and fun routines and activities for families to agree to do together this year. For these resolutions, the key to success is to start small and to focus on having fun together, not individually. Pursued over the course of a year, new habits that a family starts in January can transform the culture of a home into one that is more connected and joyful. 

But it is important to be realistic and select goals that are genuinely doable for the entire family. If you have never been a family that bikes 10 miles together, do not make weekly, long-distance bike rides your new resolution—you would only be setting the entire family up for failure and guilt!  If, on the other hand, you are a sporty family, perhaps choosing a time each week for a family sports outing is a good idea.

Togetherness is the Goal

For most families, in this age of overscheduled kids and overworked parents, the most doable resolutions involve routines that promote joy and rest together.

Family Fun Nights. Consider starting a weekly family fun night. Perhaps you designate Friday or Saturday night as the night you make pizza for dinner and play board games, or watch a family movie together. Children love routines, and once you do something for a couple of weeks in a row, they begin looking forward to it. I am not a fan of screens, and we do not own a television in our home. Still, even passive entertainment done together, such as watching a movie, is an experience shared by the entire family. It is, therefore, subject for natural conversations that will flow from it, and fodder for inside jokes that build up a family’s unique lore and language. Whatever shape your family fun night takes, consistency and a commitment to each other should be the goal.

Regular Family Dinners. Another idea is to commit to family dinner most nights of the week and to home-cooked meals every night of the week. Family dinner has gotten a bad rep of late as much too stressful for the overscheduled modern family. Yet it is very well worth preserving, as Ivana Greco argued recently. However, if family dinner has been so difficult for your family that you are not sure that this potential resolution fits the criteria of realistic, easy, and fun, I have a suggestion for you. If you struggle especially with the meal preparation aspect of family dinner, consider simplifying your dinner routine to create a very basic, utterly non-gourmet meal plan. Posting a basic dinner meal plan on the wall, akin to your college cafeteria, will go a long way in reducing kid questions and complaints about dinner. You can commit to easy meals that can be customized or changed slightly from week to week, like pasta Mondays, taco Tuesdays, soup Wednesdays, breakfast-for-dinner Thursdays, and pizza Fridays. Leftovers, should you have any (and I know this depends on family size), are great for lunches throughout the week, solving another problem. In my case, many of the meals I cook for my family involve throwing something in the slow cooker in the morning and letting it cook all day. 

How our kids define family—and what they expect families to do—will be forever shaped by how they experience family as children.

My mother-in-law had a standard family meal plan for years, when she and her husband were raising their four sons. To this day, the (now long grown) sons remember the meal plan, which persists in modified form. Indeed, even while my mother-in-law no longer follows it when cooking only for herself and my father-in-law, whenever the kids visit, the meal plan returns. Everyone knows that Thursday night is taco night (no Taco Tuesday in their home!), Friday is soup night, and Saturday is forever going to be hamburgers. The meal plan continues to be a subject of conversations and fun memories for the “kids,” who have now spent more years of their lives away from their childhood home than in it.

Be More Hospitable. The most fun family resolutions involve other people as well. When my family and I moved from Georgia to Ohio two and a half years ago, we resolved as a family to be more hospitable. We had fallen out of practice of hosting others during the pandemic, but it was not until we got back into it that we realized how much we had missed it. It has been a delight for us to invite friends to our home for playdates, weeknight dinners, or lunch after church on Sunday. We also invite others to attend events together—such as local concerts, museums, or historic tours.

A resolution to grow as a family in the practice of hospitality is good for several reasons:

• First, it allows us to cultivate relationships with others, fostering that proverbial village that individuals and families alike need to flourish.
• Second, we enjoy time with our friends—and our kids enjoy this time, too, especially since most of our friends are other families with kids.
• Third, there is an additional aspect to consider here that is a bit more serious: most of what we as parents teach our kids about life is caught, not taught. We can tell our kids repeatedly for years that hospitality is good, but unless we consciously practice it, and they see it and actively participate in it, the lesson will mean nothing to them. 

The Family Haven

Ultimately, this point applies to everything in our lives and is important to consider when forming any family resolutions and new practices. How our kids define family—and what they expect families to do—will be forever shaped by how they experience family as children. I want my kids to think of family as a true “haven in a heartless world,” as historian Christopher Lasch once dubbed it. Our society is unwell in many ways, so it is up to our families to seek joy and show our kids and others around us what a delight family life can be. And if the practices we form together as a family in the new year can achieve that, the effect will extend far beyond this year alone.

Nadya Williams is a homeschooling mother, Books Editor for Mere Orthodoxy, and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church, and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock