Employee well-being and productivity: Striking a balance
More paid time off, free mental health counseling, and regular check-ins via surveys: The focus on employee well-being has never been better - or more important.
Remember when one of the toughest decisions we faced most days was whether to cook dinner or try a new restaurant? With the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines, it seems a return to those more carefree days is on the horizon.
But before we get too excited about making restaurant reservations, let’s think about some of the benefits we’ve realized from spending several months cooking and eating at home with our kids. Maintaining work-life balance after COVID should include this pandemic-era routine as much as possible.
Of course, it’s worth mixing it up by ordering in a night or two per week and supporting local restaurants when time and budgets allow. But cooking and eating with your kids, at a specific time each night reserved for family time, offers several long-term benefits.
Work-life balance after COVID: 5 reasons to keep cooking and eating together
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that cooking and eating together is even more important than we initially thought. In can even be a lifesaver for parents struggling to balance at-home work with raising, entertaining, and educating their kids.
Here’s why you should continue to cook and eat with your kids, even after life returns to something resembling normal.
Create less picky, more adventurous eaters
It’s important to keep trying new foods with kids. It’s easy to forget that what kids may turn their noses up at one day often becomes a favorite food the next.
Cooking together, tasting ingredients before they’re cooked, and trying foods in new ways all are strategies to inspire kids to be great eaters. And let’s be honest: bribery works. Try striking a bargain of five bites of a new food to bake —and get — a cookie. Eventually your kids will be excited to try new things.
Healthier kids
Kids become better eaters when they cook with their parents since they had a hand in preparing the meal — this is across every culture, everywhere in the world. Kids who learn to cook eat healthier foods in healthy amounts — period.
The more they play a role in the process and in the cooking, the more invested they are in the decisions. Plus, they quickly learn about their likes and dislikes, which will make them healthier eaters over the long term.
Safer and smarter
It may sound like a silly question, but do your kids truly understand that the blue flames on the stove are scorching hot? Do they know how to behave safely around the stovetop and utensils such as knives, or even how heat transforms food?
Odds are, they haven’t given any of these concepts much thought. Divvy up meal-prep duties and you’ll quickly develop safer kids, but also smarter ones. Cooking portions of ingredients and following the recipe, they’ll quickly pick up basic math skills and concepts such as fractions.
Work-life balance after COVID will be stronger
In our house, we have dinner on the table every night at 6:30 p.m. It’s truly the best time, coming together to share our day. Laptops, tablets, and phones are all off. And just as I pick a different spot to work from every day (such as the kitchen table, my office, or even outside) to keep things fresh and inspired, we also try to eat something different every day.
Maintaining variety is as good for your body as it is for your brain; it makes that distinction between work and home stronger at a time when those lines have blurred — to an unhealthy degree for many families.
Since people have proven to be effective workers from home, it’ll be all the more important to maintain this separation of work and home after the pandemic, particularly for parents who choose to continue working remotely.
Family bonding at the table
So much talk during the pandemic has been about “survival” or “staying sane” through each day. But what about thriving in lieu of merely surviving? The kitchen table is where this can and should start.
As important as the food may be, being together at the dinner table is the real gift. It’s how families connect with each other, make memories, or even make decisions together — what Netflix show they’ll watch together after dinner, what books to read before bedtime, or what the first big post-pandemic vacation will be.
We’re able to have these thoughtful, powerful conversations and strengthen family bonds– which are essential in times of crisis, such as COVID-19 — if we do something as simple as cooking and eating together each night.
Healthy habits for long-term work-life balance after COVID
No family or family dynamic is perfect. All of us are works in progress, and that’s part of the fun of raising kids. 2020 was a more challenging year than any other, but it also presented us with the opportunity to explore this idea deeper.
Plenty of habits formed during the past year will probably be with us for a long time to come:
1. Wearing masks when we’re sick
2. Washing our hands more often (as we should have been doing all along)
3. Rethinking how often we truly need to be at the office
But arguably the most important routine we can maintain for our long-term physical, social, and emotional health is to cook and eat together as families, as often as possible.
Your kids will experience the benefits of this well into the years when the pandemic is all but a distant memory. And since maintaining a healthy family is a cornerstone of the Back to Best for Parents program, I’m proud to be a part of it.
