Parenting your children is about more than keeping items off the floor for their safety and teaching your kids to follow directions. You have to consider a range of health, physical safety, and emotional support mechanisms to ensure your children remain in and enjoy a safe environment at home. Keep reading so you can find out how to build a supportive, healthy, and safe environment for your children.

Health and Wellness

There are plenty of ways you can boost your child’s health, from adding vitamins and supplements to their diet to incorporating small lifestyle changes such as an earlier bedtime or no screentime before bed. Even switching your child’s toothbrush once every three months can have a major impact on your child’s health. With health and wellness, you have to consider sleep, diet and exercise, and activities that make life for your children more enjoyable and purposeful.

In addition, practicing stress-relief exercises, communicating non-aggressively, and showing your children affection when they’re in trouble improves wellbeing and mood while reducing the stress kids face nowadays. Keep up your great parenting by making sure health and wellness are one of the top priorities for your children. You’ll see that improved health leads to other positive changes for your children that make the effort worthwhile.

Diet and Exercise

If you’re not getting your kids to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, you’re doing them a great disservice. Furthermore, healthy eating prepares your child to also feel comfortable eating well in social settings, which is particularly helpful during childhood. Help your children improve their mood and sense of wellbeing by adding enough nutrients in their diet to help them function better in school. When kids are eating better, they think smarter and behave better, thus creating a positive cycle that you can continue to support.

Additionally, you might want to create specific physical activities, like races and obstacle courses at home to get your kids’ heart rate up. This kind of parenting supports calmness and stability, as your child will get all of their energy out during exercise time. Exercise should be playful and fun, but you should take time to consider what kinds of exercises build muscles and strength, increase endurance, and promote friendship development. Make sure your child is never bored and physically active by putting aside specific parts of the day to exercise.

Mental Health

Mental health may be treated with medication, but a healthy lifestyle and regular communication can keep help maintain your child’s mental health as well. You’ll want to address conflicts as they arise rather than force your children to keep stress bottled up inside. Talking every day with your child about events at school, new friends, and everyday activities can help them feel loved rather than alienated and confused.

Physical Safety

Keeping your child safe means you have to address problems in the environment first. That might mean keeping choking hazards away from your youngest children or installing a home security system to protect your family from burglars. Your parenting experience has taught you that there are threats both inside your home and out that have to be taken into account.

Over 95% of home invasions involve forcible entry, meaning that without safeguards in place around your home, you’re opening yourself up to threats from the outside. But you also have to prevent injuries and accidents, protect your children from dangerous people, and ensure they receive the appropriate care if an injury occurs. Physical safety begins with understanding what could jeopardize your children’s safety. From there, you can focus on how to eliminate these threats so your family can enjoy a safe environment.

Proper Emotional Support

Your parenting skills might be great, but a lack of emotional support in the household can have devastating effects on your children, from creating a desire for them to run away to increasing the chances they get into trouble at school. In fact, nearly 90% of missing children misunderstood directions, miscommunicated details about their own plans, are lost, or have run away.

One of your main priorities as a parent is making sure your children don’t feel alone and alienated, and communicating with your kids regularly is the key to making sure they feel supported when something is wrong. Be on the lookout for signs that your child is struggling emotionally. Look for isolating behaviors, a sudden increase in aggressiveness, or a loss of interest in the activities they usually enjoy. Emotional support is essential to a healthy, supportive environment.

Now that you know how to keep your child’s environment safe and supportive, you can focus on building the family and home you always wanted. Start with making sure your child’s healthy and well, focusing on issues such as mental health and emotional support in the process. So long as you have your child’s wellbeing in mind, you’ll surely make changes to your environment and child’s lifestyle that work for the long run.