| | | | What Is Quality Time With Our Children? |
By Susana Alves
Is it the time we spend watching television with them? Is it the time we spend reading to them, eating with them, putting them to bed, washing them, playing sports with them in the yard, or is it the time we spend with them on our long commute to work and school?
It is all of these. Quality time with our children is time with our children. Even the minutes or hours we spend arguing with them and punishing them is quality time. When you think back about your own childhood, what do you remember most, is it the great big stuffed animal your parents bought you, or is it the stupid little rubber ducky one of them won for you at the local fair or the amusement park. Maybe you don't even remember what the prize was, but simply that someone tried hard to win it for you and did.
In our age of consumerism and lack of time we often forget that what brings closeness between two people isn't the money they spend on each other, but the time and attention that they spend on each other. When we fall in love, though we may shower gifts on one another, what we give most is our time and attention. We treasure the gifts not for their monetary value, but rather because we treasure who gave them. How did we come to treasure that person? With time.
Inherently, I believe we all know this. That is why the absent parent feels guilty and buys large and expensive gifts for the child in order to minimize her guilt. However, these gifts mean little to a child on an emotional level. Five minutes spent reading a story, watching the child's favorite cartoon or just hanging out, have more meaning. Even the time we force our children to help us clean up the kitchen with us brings more closeness than any gift we could buy.
So what do you do if you both work long hours, and your child spends most of his day in your absence? You make yourself available to them when you are with them. If you can't interrupt what you are doing, have them join you. Even if they can't help, they can be in the same room. When you are upset about work or anything else, be irritable, you can't help it, but explain yourself. Explain what made you upset, correlate it to something they will understand from their own relationships with their peers. Share your disappointments as well as your accomplishments with them and they will share theirs with you.
When we first fall in love or begin a friendship with someone we spend hours talking about everything and nothing, we recount our childhood, our fears, and our dreams. Through this we gain closeness with others. To gain closeness with our children we need to tell them these stories as well. When we allow our children to see us as we are, they trust us.
Quality time is time, this doesn't mean that you should spend every waking hour with your child. It means that you should be together when you can. For example, with an older child, have them help you prepare dinner, even if it doesn't save you time, instead of allowing them to be in the other room watching television alone. Take an hour a week to just sit and watch a television program that they like or each of you read your own book on the same couch.
When commuting together, turn off the radio and the MP3 player and instead talk. If they don't want to talk, they can listen to you recount your day. By hearing you recount your day, your challenges, and how you overcame them or how you didn't overcome them, they will learn from you how you deal with problems and they will learn how to tell you about their own day. Magically the wasted commute time, becomes quality time with your children.
When you feel close to your children and they feel close to you, you won't feel guilty that you are not spending enough time with them. You will not magically feel like the perfect parent either. They don't exist, as a parent you will always feel guilty or incompetent about something. But if you feel close to your children and they to you, the burden is lighter.
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this article is a life changing article.parents who don't know what spending quality time with their children mean should learn from this article.
akuboh emmanuel
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