Justice Clinton
11/16/14
Research Paper

Guidance for a family with their first child The purpose of this paper is to use current evidence based literature to assist families in making positive lifestyle changes. The nursing student will try to utilize the nursing process to plan and deliver holistic care to a family unit. My family consists of two unmarried parents, (H.V) who is 21 yrs old and (C.M), who is 22 yrs old. They have a newborn child (A.M) who is 3 weeks old. (H.V) is a college graduate who works part time, and C.M is a full-time student and also works part time. (A.M) was not a planned birth, and being young new parents can be very tough. After meeting with the parents, my first intervention would focus on budgeting income and expenditures, due to the low income of the family. Secondly, the parents voiced concerns on wanting a new residence to start their family, and lastly, I assessed that their nutrition and dietary habits were sub-standard to facilitate a healthy family.
First priority need: Budgeting for a newborn
With the addition of a new baby, brings additional costs to the household. This is a very important priority for C.M and H.V. The household income is low, as C.M works part time while attending school full time. H.V is a college graduate, but is still in search of a career job while working as a waitress part time. With H.V still recovering from the pregnancy, money is even tighter as she will not return to work for at least 2 more weeks. First, I showed them a budget calculator at www.epi.org which calculates estimated costs of living for your area in the United States. We determined the monthly costs of a 2 parent family with one child for various expenses such as transportation, food, and miscellaneous items (“Family Budget Calculator,” 2013). This helped us estimate how much extra their newborn would cost them per month compared to a 2 person household with no children. We then added known monthly expenses such as rent, insurance, and utilities. The mother had no idea how much their monthly bills usually ran, as CM paid the bills with his income and the mother’s income was used for food, gas, and other expenditures. We then added these expenditures to the budget, then added back the estimated household income and finalized a monthly budget plan. We discussed the importance of how both parents need to keep up with the costs of their monthly bills.
Another budget issue that I recognized was that both parents had separate banking accounts. This made it even harder for them to keep up with income and expenditures as a household (Schwab-Pomerantz, 2011). CM stated that HV had problems with spending too much money on non-necessary items when she went shopping. HV furiously disagreed and stated that she only bought what was necessary and that CM didn’t know what he was talking about. I recommended to them that they should open up a savings and checking account together, so they could both be aware of what they were spending and come to agreements on what items were “necessary” or not. Also, we agreed that it would be best if both of them were involved in paying the monthly bills. HV and CM had been planning on doing this, but didn’t get around to doing it before the baby was born. During the second visit the father and I sat down at the computer and went to Bank of America’s online site and enrolled CM and HV for a checking account and a regular savings account. Both parents agreed that they would start depositing all of the income into the dual accounts, and eventually transfer all other assets to Bank of America. HV brought up the question on what would be the best way to start saving for their child’s college. Both parents were adamant that their child would go to college and hopefully not have to work as much as both of them did while attending school. According to Schwab-Pomerantz (2011), a tax-advantaged college saving account such as a 529 Plan is probably their best choice. This is a