Routine and healthy habits are a crucial and potentially dull part of raising a child. But do they really have to be boring?

Absolutely not, says parenting influencer and author Anna Whitehouse, aka Mother Pukka, who has two daughters, aged nine and five, and is on a mission to introduce a generous dollop of happiness into routine family habits.

Whitehouse, who has 359k Instagram followers as mother_pukka,  is working with Haliborange on its #HappyHabits campaign, which celebrates all the family habits that make us happy. She explains: “When you think of parenting, you think of strict routines and habits, but that takes all the fun and joy out of it.

“When my kids and I were talking about what makes them happy, we realised it was having structured moments in our day, but without me dictating to them – empowering them to be a bit more in control.

“Remove the words ‘strict’ and ‘routine’, and know habits can be fun. For me they’re the punctuation points in a parental day – they make your kids happier, and you know where you’re going as a parent.

“Believe me, I’ve had a world without any structure or routine, and everyone was crying all the time.”

Here’s how Whitehouse makes her own family habits as happy as possible…

Breakfast time

Instead of simply tucking into their cereal, Whitehouse and her two daughters start their day with a kitchen disco. “You know how adults might do a bit of yoga or stretching in the morning, as parents that’s not going to happen,” she stresses.

“You’ll have your moments of madness, and with us it’s a kitchen disco, dancing to Taylor Swift. Start your day in a really fun way!”

After-school conversations

Most parents can relate to kids’ monosyllabic replies when asked how their day’s been, and Whitehouse says: “With kids, when parents ask how their day was they just say ‘fine’ – there’s not much communication sometimes. So when they come home from school, we make communication fun by having a game of peaks and troughs, ins and outs, ups and downs.

“So I might say I’ve had a difficult time because I got told off by my boss or whatever – the lowest point in my day, and then I tell them the other side of that, the contrasting happiness, which may be that I got to cuddle them when I picked them up from school.

“That prompts them to have a conversation with you – they might say, ‘Well I had a jam doughnut for lunch’, or, ‘I’m a bit sad because someone got picked on at school’. It’s about how are we happier in the family unit, and how do we open up conversations?”

Dinner time

Whitehouse says the way to turn mealtimes into happy times is simply by getting children involved in the preparation. “My eldest has learned to use a knife safely, and she’s invested in the food she’s eating,” she says. “It’s not just put in front of her and she’s told to eat her greens – she knows how it’s prepared.

“It’s about involving them. Happiness and healthiness within a family is inclusion of them and not underestimating them – whether that’s turning round a conversation so you can include them or cooking dinner together.”

Bedtime

Whitehouse says her children’s bedtime now involves a soothing routine of classical music and showers in the dark with a bit of a spa feel. “We’ve made the bedtime routine fun,” she says. “I create quite a calming space, so I put classical music on, and I’ve started making it into a little bit of a spa for them. Kids just fight all the time, so we separate them and give them their own space.

“I’ve even started to repackage bedtime stories which, historically for me, were just a point of stress, another thing to do at the end of a really long day.”

Treasure ‘dull’ moments

Whitehouse lost both her grandparents during the pandemic, but she fondly recalls an important life lesson she learned from her grandfather: “He said the one thing he wished he’d done more of was cuddle up with us and hold on to those moments we perceive as quite boring and routine perhaps, because they are the moments, the tapestry of your life. You won’t look back and wish you’d worked a lot harder – it’s the moments that are perceived as dull that are the moments to be celebrated.

“It’s about seeing your kids as little humans instead of cogs that you have to move from A to B and it’s all a hassle.

“Don’t get me wrong, I lose it, like anyone, every single day, but I’m also learning from my grandfather and the really heavy time that we’ve all had as parents over the last three years of the pandemic, to lean into moments that were written out as the dull bits of parenting, when actually they are THE bits.”

Prioritise family, not work

Whitehouse admits that, like most parents, she’s had moments when her kids wanted her attention, and she’s responded with ‘Just a minute’, sometimes when on her phone. “That pressure is happening in every household across the UK right now,” she stresses. “I realised I was so absorbed in this pixilated world that one of my unhealthy habits was ignoring them in favour of what seemed to be more important, which was work.

“They taught me to put healthy boundaries around my working life so I can have those moments of joy and put my phone down. It’s about what we need to do as a family, and for me it was switching off when they are right there in front of me.”

She says the turning point for her was when her daughter said that sometimes she didn’t think her mum liked her very much when she was on her phone.

“I just thought. ‘That’s it – no one thing is more important than them,” she says. “We’re in a pixilated world that’s absorbing us all the time, and as parents we need to have our own healthy habits and boundaries for protecting those moments of joy that are there in the banal, slightly boring times.”

“We say healthy habits, but it’s actually happy habits.”

Anna Whitehouse is working with the Haliborange #HappyHabits campaign, which celebrates all the family habits that make us happy.