First and foremost, take control of what you can control, start with behaviors. Identify good habits and behaviors (physical and nutritional) and eliminate bad ones. People face different situations at different ages and require different frameworks to take control and help themselves.

If you’re an Empty Nester, you have a better opportunity to pass along health and genetic information for your children than any generation before. Not only are genetic tests more available from more sources and improving constantly, software from firms like SelfDecode are in the business of consolidating your genetic information to make it easier for you to access, query, control, and/or share it.

Genetic tests are one part, but there is another important part. Parents can download, print out, and/or or assemble all their own and their child’s records. These are records your child might need 40 +/- years later to inform a diagnosis or make a targeted treatment possible. In the (not distant) past local doctors kept paper records in their offices. That worked then, but not now. However, virtually all doctors and a myriad of specialist’s records are digitized and increasingly transportable. A parent can digitize their paper records and their child’s to complement a child’s electronic health record in the future.

Compiling a multi-generational medical and genetic histories is far more powerful than a birth and death record in a family bible.