Introduction
Multiple generations have heard the advice to spend time with your kids, whether it’s telling your kids that they can’t go to the park because you will be spending time with them, or insinuating they’re not being disciplined by saying “oh, you don’t go to the park because you don’t want to waste your time or you don’t want to be disciplined.” These kinds of well-meaning statements are so commonplace in our culture that most people don’t even realize how harmful they can be to our children.
The Impact of Spending Time With Your Children
When you spend time with your children, it gives them a wonderful foundation of love and affection, connection and belonging, confidence and security, and all of the other important ingredients of a positive and productive relationship.
What are some of the signs of a toxic relationship?
Parents are so focused on getting the other parent to comply to their demands that they forget that children will only learn the values and behaviors they see at home. If children see the parent get the other parent to agree to an arbitrary condition, then they have no way to know what will happen when the time comes to renegotiate. It’s essential to spend quality time with your children, to take the time to connect and engage with them.
What It Means to Spend Time With Your Children
When you spend time with your children, you are purposefully providing them with positive experiences and activities that make them feel loved and cared for. It’s very important that you spend time with them without relying on any of the following excuses:
You’re too busy.
You need to leave early.
They’re too loud or messy.
You can’t make it to their place of worship on Sunday, so you’re not going to take them to church.
Even if you have the opportunity to take your children out, it’s hard to tell your children you are going to spend time with them, and spend it doing something that they might not find fun. What if they don’t want to do something you want to do? I remember when my children were little, and I would ask them what they would like to do.
How to Spend Time With Your Children
While many parents make the mistake of using the "spend time with your kids" advice as a substitute for "spend quality time with your children," the two are not mutually exclusive. Making time to spend time with our children, but not giving them the time and opportunity to spend time with us is a failure on the part of the parent.
Spend Quality Time With Your Children
Quality time with children requires that children feel important and valued. Quality time means that you let your child explore and express himself/herself. Quality time is truly the fruit of the labor and love.
Quality time means that you don’t overcompensate, but instead allow your child to lead. Quality time involves the relationship between parent and child. Not “child-centered” time.
Quality time involves talking.
Why You Shouldn’t Spend More Time with Your Kids
Time with our children is very important for development and life outcomes. But there is a big difference between quality time (which consists of quality activities like talking, listening, reading, or engaging in meaningful social interaction) and quantity time (which consists of the number of hours and days spent with a child). Although the quality and quantity of your time with your kids matter, research shows that too much time with our children isn’t beneficial for their long-term wellbeing.
Time spent with children does not help a child succeed as an adult, as a person, or to be a contributing member of society. As researchers have consistently shown, young children do not show a positive association between the amount of time spent with them and later success in life.
Conclusion.
Children are not in the habit of thinking critically about their experience with their parents. They often are forced to believe the most simplistic or irrational version of reality. This results in their emotional and cognitive development being severely inhibited.
When we spend more time together in the moments when children are listening to us, they are more likely to perceive that we’re compassionate and willing to sacrifice for their happiness. That is, when children perceive that we’re willing to give them our time and listen to them, that we’re allowing them to grow in our presence, the response they get is one that is more likely to encourage them to grow and to show their love and compassion to others.
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