19 Fun Family Challenges That Teach Valuable Life Skills
Participating in fun family challenges is an excellent way to strengthen relationships, and by selecting one of these, you’ll all learn valuable life skills too.
These challenges go beyond simple games you might play in an evening (if you are looking for that, check these out). They are larger challenges that your whole family, not just those within your home, can get involved in. They’re not as challenging as running a marathon but harder than a scavenger hunt or obstacle course. And if done well, they can build excellent habits that last a lifetime.
Read on to explore 19 types of wholesome family activities that are great fun, enrich family relationships, and teach something meaningful.
Jump to section:
- What Life Skills Can Family Challenges Teach?
- Health And Wellbeing Challenges
- Projects & Ventures
- Habits
- Developing Skills
- Choosing Your First Family Challenge
- How Simirity Can Help
- Make Fun Challenges a Family Tradition
What Life Skills Can Family Challenges Teach?
Life is filled with challenges, from school tests to sports and preparing family dinners. Challenges require us to step up, make an effort and learn new things. They improve in these ways and many more:
- Controlling our emotions.
- Strengthening our will and commitment.
- Learning soft skills (e.g. communication).
- Learning hard skills (e.g. a new language).
- Building knowledge.
- Establishing good habits.
- Living in a healthy and balanced way.
Harness the power of the following family challenges to have fun and teach something your children will find really useful. You might even learn something yourself in the process.
Health And Wellbeing Challenges
The greatest wealth is health.
Virgil
Here are some family challenges that strengthen the very foundation of your family – its health.
1 – 1,000 mile walking
This UK initiative can be replicated wherever you live. Can you, as a family, walk 1,000 miles in twelve months? That’s 19 miles or 30km a week. Here’s why it’s such a wonderful challenge for your family’s health.
Use this challenge to encourage family out of the house, and if you can do it for a year, there’s every chance you can make this super-healthy habit stick.
2 – 1,000 hours outside
I’ve always enjoyed being outside, but hadn’t appreciated just how beneficial it can be. Research shows that being outside offers many benefits, such as improved sleep, boosted immunity and protection from shortsightedness (the antidote to screen time…).
Set your family the goal of 1,000 hours outside within a year. Join the official community that believes in the many benefits of this challenge, and download their app to track your time.
If 1,000 hours isn’t manageable, set your family a lower goal. A goal of 500 hours would equate to under 10 hours outside a week, which would still be an outstanding achievement.
3 – 10,000 steps
Armed with your smartwatches, fitness trackers or smartphones, aim for your family to walk 10,000 steps daily. If 10,000 steps are too many, you can still enjoy most health benefits with fewer steps, as discussed here.
Our children were surprisingly keen to reach the 10,000 steps thanks to their fitness tracking watches (designed specifically for children).
4 – Body weight exercises / customised fitness goal
It’s truly amazing how fast our bodies can improve when following some well-established fitness challenges. We undertook the 6 week 100 pushup challenge (at first we could only do 10 pushups, so you don’t need to be a health fanatic to give this a go). There’s also a 30 day planking challenge and a 9 week pull-up plan.
Or maybe your family have a customised fitness goal you want to set?
5 – Tabata / short workout
Tabata is a high-intensity workout that lasts four minutes. You switch between 20-second intervals of maximum effort (i.e., at 100% of your capacity) and 10-second rest intervals for eight rounds. It’s amazing how much benefit you get in such a short space of time.
Search on YouTube for ‘4-minute Tabata’, and you will find many options. Such as:
Instead of following a Tabata routine and timing, why not make up your own family workout that’s just 5 or 10 minutes long?
6 – Weekly run
Why not challenge your family to a weekly run? Around your neighbourhood or local park perhaps. Running has so many proven health benefits, and all you need is a decent pair of shoes. Run as a team – this isn’t about winning the race but supporting each other to achieve their personal bests.
7 – Gardening
While not intensive like running or the pushup challenge, gardening is a great way to spend time outside, walking and lifting moderate weights – you can easily work up a sweat! This might not be a year-round challenge, but what a great way to get some help in your garden while encouraging everyone to do something good for their health.
And there’s much that both children and adults can learn from spending time tending to the garden.
8 – Sport
If your family has a favourite sport, from football to swimming to ice skating, why not challenge your family to make it a weekly event? Or would you like to try something new? Commit to a few months to build up your skills.
Projects & Ventures
As individuals, we all have our own projects. Children have school projects, and adults have home, garden, social, or work projects. However, not many projects (with a clear start and end) or ventures (ongoing) involve the whole family—something that gets children, parents, and even aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents involved.
Projects are a great way to really get to know your teammates, not to mention learning new things and achieving something to be proud of. Here are a few ideas that you can use to involve your family.
9 – Planning a holiday together
Make planning holidays a family activity. Encourage your children (and all those going) to search online for inspiration on what to do when you are there. Make a list or a presentation you can share with extended family.
Planning ahead will help you get the most from your holidays, but it also means you have fun and make good memories before the holiday even begins!
10 – Selected learning
When a subject grabs your family’s attention, why not make it a family project to learn more? Search together online to learn more. Find clubs, people, or places where you can go deeper into the subject.
You’ll learn lots, but more importantly, you’ll be setting a great example of what proactive learning looks like for your children.
11 – Exploring family history
Families are used to talking about recent events or planning for the future. But what about your shared past? Have you or your children asked your parents about their younger years? About the lived or extended family or your ancestors?
Here are some meaningful questions you might want to ask your parents.
12 – Sharing and saving today’s family stories
Why not preserve special moments from life for future enjoyment? Imagine looking back at these times in ten, twenty or thirty years. Here are eight ways to preserve your family stories, so they don’t get forgotten or lost in message feeds.
Habits
Habits make up the majority of our daily lives. We run in cruise control, and sadly, not all our habits are healthy and beneficial. We all know what good habits look like, and we hope that our children can adopt them early on so they can benefit from a lifetime’s usage.
So why not make embracing positive habits a challenge for your family?
13 – Reading
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.
Walt Disney
So many opportunities and discoveries lie within the covers of books. Why not make reading a family habit? Can you carve out reading time each day to read individually or with your young children?
If daily reading is not workable, try setting a weekly goal of 5 or 10 hours.
14 – End of day reflection/journalling
There are so many benefits to keeping a journal – it’s the habit of many highly accomplished people such as Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffen and Richard Branson. Buy journals for your family, or keep a digital journal.
If writing your thoughts down is not appealing, mentally review your answers to end-of-day prompts like these. You can do this with your children, too – ask them the same questions each day to encourage them to review their day and glean valuable insights through retrospection.
15 – Thirty minutes family time
In family relationships, ‘love’ is really spelled ‘t-i-m-e,’ time. Taking time for each other is the key for harmony at home.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Twenty four hours a day rarely feels like enough. We love our family and want to spend time with them, yet there are so many distractions vying for our attention. Why not put family first by challenging your family to spend at least 30 minutes doing something together each day?It could be a walk, a family dinner, a game or whatever you all enjoy that involves people’s participation (watching TV doesn’t count).
Spending 30 minutes a day with your family might be the most valuable and impactful of all these challenges.
16 – Family outings
Broaden your family’s horizons by challenging yourselves to have a family outing every fortnight or month.
Involve your children in researching ideas and discovering what places you could visit in your neighbourhood. A trip to the theatre, the zoo, or even just the shopping centre! But do it together and make the most of your time.
Developing Skills
Here’s a selection of skills you can work on together as a family.
17 – Creativity weekly
Challenge your family to set time aside for creative projects each week.
You could all do your own creative projects like painting or drawing, or collaborate on something as a family. Here are 21 ideas that your family could try out.
18 – Language learning
Why not learn a new language together? This could be a great way to prepare for a family holiday abroad. You could also incentivise learning a language with the promise of a trip if you reach the required level.
There are many ways to learn a language online, with Duolingo being one popular option with free courses.
19 – Cooking
If your children are old enough to get involved in the kitchen, why not set up a culinary challenge? A new recipe tired out every week. A family cooking evening every week/fortnight/month where everyone is involved. Or perhaps as a family, you’d like to master cooking something specific – the perfect apple pie or pizza.
Here are hundreds of easy family recipes to explore.
Choosing Your First Family Challenge
It’s tempting to pick a challenge and get stuck in, but there might be a better way…
Don’t focus on the challenge yet; think first about the end goal of what you would like your kids to learn.
For example, if you would like them to exercise more or get to know their grandparents better, you can pick a challenge accordingly. Or make up one of your own, customised to your family’s needs.
How Simirity Can Help
For some challenges, the Simirity app can be a great companion. It’s perfect for:
- Exploring and preserving family history as media-rich stories for future family.
- Sharing and saving today’s family stories.
- Tracking your challenges and sharing how you are getting on with your extended family.
If you would like to learn more about the Simirity app, you can visit our home page.
Make Fun Challenges a Family Tradition
We are what we do repeatedly.
Get into the habit of setting family challenges; over time, they will spread out to extended family and may even be passed down to future generations.
