Being Involved in Wholesome Recreational Activities

Questions:

How and why are strong families built upon wholesome recreational activities?

How can I do better at getting my family involved with wholesome recreational activities?

Quotes:

Create meaningful family bonds that give your children an identity stronger than what they can find with their peer group or at school or anyplace else. This can be done through family traditions for birthdays, for holidays, for dinnertime, and for Sundays. -M. Russell Ballard, What Matters Most is what Lasts Longest

Plan and carry out meaningful vacations together, considering our children’s needs, talents, and abilities. Help them create happy memories, improve their talents, and build their feelings of self-worth. -Robert D. Hales, Strengthening Families Our Sacred Duty

Music, literature, art, dance, drama, athletics—all can provide entertainment to enrich one’s life and further consecrate it. At the same time, it hardly needs to be said that much of what passes for entertainment today is coarse, degrading, violent, mind-numbing, and time wasting. Ironically, it sometimes takes hard work to find wholesome leisure. When entertainment turns from virtue to vice, it becomes a destroyer of the consecrated life. -D. Todd Christofferson, Reflections on a Consecrated Life

Remember that our Savior Jesus Christ always builds us up and never tears us down. We should apply the power of that example in the ways we use our time, including our recreation and our diversions. Consider the themes of the books, magazines, movies, television shows, and music we in the world have made popular by our patronage. Do the things portrayed in our chosen entertainment build up or tear down the children of God? -Dallin H.Oaks

Consider how we use our time in the choices we make in viewing television, playing video games, surfing the Internet, or reading books or magazines. Of course it is good to view wholesome entertainment or to obtain interesting information,” Elder Oaks says. “But not everything of that sort is worth the portion of our life we give to obtain it. Some things are better, and others are best.-Dallin H. Oaks

Parents should act to preserve time for family prayer, family scripture study, family home evening, and the other precious togetherness and individual one-on-one time that binds a family together and fixes children’s values on things of eternal worth. Parents should teach gospel priorities through what they do with their children. -Dallin H. Oaks

Dieter F. Uchdorf, Moments that Matter Most

Scriptures:

And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith. -Doctrine & Covenants 88:118

Definitions:

wholesome - conducive to moral or general well-being; salutary; beneficial: wholesome recreation; wholesome environment; conducive to bodily health; healthful; salubrious: wholesome food; wholesome air; wholesome exercise; suggestive of physical or moral health, especially in appearance; healthy or sound. 

recreational - the act of creating anew; something created anew; a pastime, diversion, exercise, or other resource affording relaxation and enjoyment.

activities - the state or quality of being active; a specific deed, action, function, or sphere of action; work, especially in elementary grades at school, that involves direct experience by the student rather than textbook study; energetic activity; animation; liveliness; a use of energy or force; an active movement or operation. -Dictionary.com