First and foremost, take control of what you can control, start with the behaviors in the pillars of health and wellness; emotional and behavioral health, exercise, nutrition, relationship health, and self-care. Identify good habits and behaviors and eliminate bad ones. Treat health like the limited commodity it is.

People face different situations at different ages and require different frameworks to take control and help themselves. If your children are on their own and you are in the Pre-retirement years click here for strategies and resources that can help you stay healthy. Also, if you are checking in or providing support for an older parent, you may want to look at strategies and resources that might help them.

If you’re an Empty Nester or in early retirement, you have a better opportunity to pass along health and genetic information for your children than any generation before. Genetic tests are one part, but there is a more important part. Parents of a minor today, can download, print out, and/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 specialists’ records are digitized and increasingly transportable. Parents can meld information that goes through their portals and systems into a file for their children with much less effort than before. Compiling a multi-generational medical and genetic history is far more powerful than a birth and death record in a family bible.