Your bad habits can adversely affect you and your entire family. This is especially true when you have kids. Kids learn most of their bad habits from their parents. If you’re a parent or you influence kids, you may want to do all you can to eliminate your bad habits by replacing them with good habits.
What Is Meant By a Bad Habit?
A bad habit is something that you do repetitively, that you can stop doing when you really decide to, and that society has deemed to be bad. Often it breaks laws, customs or some moral code for the society. Most people think that bad habits are something to be avoided because they can often affect your health and wellness.
There are different categories of bad habits. Let’s look at the most common ones.
Categories of Bad Habits
* Time-Wasting Habits – Not putting things where they go, not creating a home for everything you own, and not keeping your stuff organized can make you waste time. Wasting time can end up affecting your down time because you still have to make time for work.
* Unhealthy Habits – If you have some unhealthy habits like eating unhealthy snacks every night, watching lots of TV instead of doing physical things, and avoiding going to the doctor on a regular basis, you can truly affect your health negatively.
* Lost Productivity Habits – If you don’t have a morning routine and you don’t have some sort of schedule for being productive, you will lose opportunities. These types of bad habits are really lack of good habits.
* Habits That Harm Your Financial Health – If you’ve developed habits like gambling, these can ruin your financial health today and in the future. Overspending is often started by a bad habit of not minding your finances.
* Habits That Impede Your Social Life – For some people, their bad habits can hurt their social life. If you have a bad habit of being late, not caring about others much, or doing behaviors that repel others, you may end up with no social life.
* Habits That Harm Others – Some people develop habits that don’t just harm themselves but others too. For example, if you have a smoking habit and you smoke around other people (especially kids), this is a very harmful habit.
* Habits That Ruin Relationships – Some people allow their habits to even ruin their relationships. Habits like being sloppy, unclean, and not thinking of others can ruin many relationships, especially if you’re late a lot or gossip too much.
* Gross Habits – Smoking and nail biting come to mind when it comes to gross habits that people do. So does nose picking, picking your toes with your fingers, and other rude behavior that you should not do in public (and some not even in private). If you do have these habits, you can stop them with a plan.
The Impact of Bad Habits on Your Family
Like it or not, the person you are today has a lot to do with the environment you grew up in as a kid. Your family likely played a role in cultivating all your glowing qualities. But if you’ve experienced problems as an adult, or struggle with a few issues — like worrying, impulsivity, or poor communication skills — it may due to bad habits you picked up from your parents.
Here are 10 bad habits you may have picked up from your parents, which you must break or learn how to change.
Poor Methods for Handling Stressful Events
Usually, how you respond to stress in your life is usually a habit by the time you’re an adult. If you were not taught good ways of dealing with stress during childhood, you probably repeat whatever you learned from the adults around you. If you know you deal with stress poorly, study good ways to deal with it so you don’t pass it on to your kids.
Spending Money Impulsively
If you observed your father or mother spending money on unneeded purchases on impulse, it’s more than likely you do it too unless you’ve realized it and stopped it. You can cause a lot of financial issues just by spending money without thought.
Bad Ideas about Money
Adding to the above, bad ideas about money in general can be passed on to the kids. Do you fear money due to not having enough or fear not having enough? If so, you may make some very bad choices that will negatively impact you and your family.
Worrying Obsessively
Demonstrating constant worrying about things you cannot change will also rub off on kids. They see their parent, the person they most trust in the world to keep them safe, being worried about everything. It makes them feel unsure and sometimes act out badly. If you want to stop worrying, you may have to get professional help – especially if it also comes with inherited anxiety.
Being a Picky Eater
Some picky eaters have a reason they are the way they are, such as being on the autistic spectrum and having texture issues. But others are only that way due to copying their parents. If you are a picky eater, you can be picky without demonstrating it to the kids. Plus, don’t force your family to do without meals they love due to your problem.
Not Expressing Yourself
You teach people how to treat you and if you never express your thoughts, ideas, and feelings about any situation, no one will know how you feel. Then you may feel as if you’re being mistreated and act out on that too, causing a rift in relationships.
Poor Communication Skills
Part of not expressing yourself may have to do with poor communication skills. Some people get very nervous talking to people (even their family) about any issues they’re having. So, they keep it to themselves. This is not a good idea. Instead, learn to be open and positive with your family.
Inability to Maintain Good Relationships
If you cannot communicate, you’re over-worrying, and you don’t like confrontation, it can be hard to maintain good relationships with your family. Building and maintaining good relationships can be learned by example. When you show your kids that you’re spending time with your best friend alone at lunch once a month, they learn something from that.
Not Saying “I’m Sorry”
You’ve heard people joke about not being able to say they’re sorry, but this is not a good quality for someone to have. If you are one of those people, learn how to do it now. It’s easy. Just state what you did wrong and then say, “I am very sorry.” No, if’s and’s or but’s.
Eating a Poor Diet
Definitely, diet is passed on to kids. Think about how children from all over the world eat interesting food based on what their parents eat. This proves that taste is a matter of what you are used to. If your parents demonstrated and fed you a bad diet, unless you work toward change, you’re going to do the same with your kids.
Conclusion
Hopefully this information increases your understanding of what is meant by a bad habit. Bad habits are simply habits that are not good for you or anyone else around you – whether human, animal, or the environment.
What’s worse is that you are at risk of passing these types of bad habits on to your kids. Even spouses can catch bad habits from each other.
Yet, many of us long for the freedom of breaking an unhealthy coping mechanism or secret pattern of sin. When we’re honest about it, most of our “bad habits” are more than quirky idiosyncrasies. They’re sins like gluttony, gossip, covetousness, and greed.
So, how do we break free?
- Begin with Prayer
- Consider Tomorrow
- Ask for Help in The Moment
- Replace It with A Deeper Joy
- Tell A Friend
God’s desire is to see his children living in abundance and freedom from sin – John 10:10. Christ died to set us free from sin — once and for all. While sinful habits may not die easily, we begin by standing in agreement that the victory is already ours, and we step into that victory one step at a time.
