Having a family is a huge responsibility. It changes your lifestyle from being focused on yourself to something inherently selfless. It requires raising kids to be good and dependable adults, which means that we need to set a good example. But parenting isn’t just all about strict rules and values. Being there for your children doesn’t have to be imposing or intimidating for them. Despite your busy lifestyle and maintaining a job, you also have to make sure that you spend quality time with your kids.
Create a Connection with Your Children
Whenever you spend time with your family, make sure you are fully present in the moment. This means putting away your phone and doing activities with your loved ones. Your work is important, yes, but your children are more in need of your attention when you are at home. Making the most of the time you spend with them ensures that you build a healthy relationship.
Help Keep Them Away from Bad Influences
Bonding with your children exposes them to good, clean fun. Plus, if you’re up for the challenge, you can create educational activities for them to work on. You can try safe science experiments like putting Mentos in cola bottles or blowing huge unpoppable bubbles. For good old simple fun, you can also have a fort-building contest or water gun games. This way of spending time with your kids helps keep them away from negative influences often associated with a lack of attention at home.
Good Behavior Should Be Learned at Home
While many children’s learning is experienced in school, there is still a lot they can learn from their primary influences: their family. It’s important that what they see at home is positive and promotes good behavior because they will bring it to school. If they see their parents getting upset and using inappropriate language, they might think it’s natural and okay to do so as well. What they see from their biggest influences will truly affect their behavioral development.
Develop Life-long Skills
Apart from learning good behavior from parents and other adults in the family, spending time together as a whole can help your children develop skills they can carry through to their adulthood. For one, it helps them develop confidence and agency, especially if you let them make decisions on their own. Bonding develops empathy as well, an essential tool to use when socializing and dealing with people in general.
Find Teachable Moments
Every interaction is filled with potential for education. Even in fun moments where you’re just playing around, it becomes an organic moment where you can teach more about life. Take, for example, playing ball with them. Kids would often ask, “why does the ball fall when we throw it up?” Even in these simple but sincere moments, opportunities to teach them can arise. Cooking together, cleaning the house as a unit, and doing things together are rife with opportunities to impart lessons in life and practical knowledge.
Get to Know Your Children Better
Spending time with your children and listening to them gives them a sense of security. They will learn to trust you with their problems instead of turning to other people for comfort. Especially if you are going through a rough patch, going through, or have gone through a separation, it’s important that you attend counseling as a family. This lets your children have an opportunity to express how they feel about the entire process, and it helps you have a stronger bond as a family.
Relieve Stress Together as a Family
Of course, having fun helps ease the stress away. Whether your kids are stressed in school, or you are stressed with work, finding the time to bond and do activities together as a family can help all members feel better at the end of the day. Talking about how your day went, laughing about moments in your life, or even just sitting quietly together, are the important and stress-relieving moments in our life.
It’s a Good Way to Exercise
As adults, and especially as parents, we’re often too busy to dedicate time to exercise. Of course, the benefits of physical exercise cannot be understated, but sometimes, it’s more important to focus on our children. Fortunately, even the act of playing with them and spending time with them counts as a form of physical exercise. Running or playing with them, walking them to their favorite parks, lifting them, doing stuff around the house with them- these all involve physical movements that, when accumulated, counts as a significant exercise.
Spending time with family is one of the most precious moments in our life. No matter how busy we all are, we need to adjust our lifestyle for our family. After all, we don’t have forever to spend with them.
