Health and safety is an important category of your new home. While many aspects of health and safety are things you’ll do later during ongoing homemaking and protecting of your family, there are things you’ll want to do while initially setting up housekeeping.
Why Brainstorm Health and Safety
Brainstorming is an important part of planning. It helps you come up with new ideas (like solutions to problems, potential roadblocks, and strategies) as well as flesh out ideas you already have.
Health and safety probably isn’t something most brides and grooms give a lot of thought to, beyond the basics of choosing a safe place to live, buying a fire extinguisher, and purchasing essential personal health care items. However, since health and safety are both important aspects of making a home, I think it’s important to start with a good foundation. Brainstorming the category as a whole can help you build a good foundation by helping you understand what is it you actually need to consider, what a healthy home means to you, what safety measures you need to take, and how you want to approach health and safety moving forward.
What to Brainstorm
The first two things to brainstorm are what health and safety are going to mean to you in the future, and what you need to do about health and safety while you are setting up housekeeping.
- What does the homemaking category of health and safety mean to you?
- What is a healthy home?
- What are your beliefs and values concerning health?
- What dangers will threaten your home? What will home safety mean to you?
- What needs to be “set up” while you are setting up housekeeping?
Later, you may want to brainstorm specifics categories, challenges, considerations, needs, etc. For example:
- Healthy home mission statement
- Home remedies to have on hand
- Healthcare and health insurance
- Diet
- Exercise/fitness
- Healthy and safe cleaning
- Health and safety in different rooms of the home
- How you’re going to face a specific challenge
See also Health and Safety: Things to Consider.
The main question is this: what do you want to know? That’s what you brainstorm!
When to Brainstorm Health and Safety
Brainstorm the general category of health and safety fairly early in your engagement so you’ll have a good idea of what health and safety means to you. From there you can plan what you need to DO while setting up housekeeping and will then have time to do what you need to do before you move into your new home. Many specifics can be planned (and therefore brainstormed) later on, even after you’re married. Do get a fire extinguisher though. 😉
How to Brainstorm Health and Safety
First, decide what, specifically, you are going to brainstorm. Do you have only a vague idea of what health and safety means to you? Then start with the category as a whole, with the goal of figuring out what it is and what it covers.
If you already have a general idea of what the category means to you then you might want to be more specific, for example, brainstorming your principles/values/goals or health and safety sub-categories first, then later on brainstorming your setting up housekeeping health and safety goals, then brainstorming specific needs or problems.
Second, based on your brainstorming objective, do a brain dump. That basically just means writing down everything you already know. Quickly take stock of what’s already clear to you. You don’t have to think about this, you just have to write it down.
Third, work on what you don’t know. This is where you both work quickly to generate possible . . . . whatever it is you’re looking for! Solutions? Goals? Principles? Things to buy? Sicknesses to prepare for? Questions to explore further?
Looking for answers to a specific question (like what is health and safety?) or a specific set of questions (what does health and safety mean to us, and what will it consist of in our home?) will keep you focused. You could also work to generate as many ideas related to health and safety that you can in a given time (which would probably give you the same ideas as the last question but perhaps with more details included) but that could result in an overwhelming mess. Proceed with caution. 🙂
Fourth, consider brainstorming in categories. It’s just a way of keeping your brainstorming organized (without having to draw a mind map!). Just divide your brainstorming paper or papers into a few basic categories before you begin brainstorming so that you have less sorting of ideas to do afterwards. For example, if you’re doing a very basic, initial health and safety brainstorming session you might start with categories like:
- What it (health and safety) includes
- What we want/don’t want
- Things to do/buy
- Miscellaneous
I always suggest a miscellaneous section because with brainstorming you never know what you might come up with and you need somewhere to capture every single idea no matter how unexpected it is.
You initial brain dump may suggest categories to you. The beauty of brainstorming in categories is that you can brainstorm an entire subject all at once without having all of your random ideas (like safe toothpaste, fitness goals, hurricane preparedness, and eat more vegetables) all jumbled together in one place. Just sort them out a bit ahead of time. 🙂
Get the Worksheets
Want pre-made health and safety brainstorming worksheets (including one, two, three, four, and six category blank health and safety brainstorming worksheets)? You’ll find them in the subscriber exclusive resource library under Setting Up Housekeeping ~ Health and Safety.
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