What Are Your Best Tips to Spend More Quality Time With Your Kids?
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Today, let’s share our best tips for how to spend more quality time with your kids — it’s always good to do, and it may be a New Year’s resolution for you as well.
What are your ways of making sure you have quality quality time with your kids as a working mom? Do you feel mom guilt about not spending “enough” time with them? Do you cope by focusing on quality over quantity?
Besides spending quality time with your kids, we’ve also talked about how to have fun with your kids when you’re the disciplinarian parent and asked readers whether they’re able to eat dinner with their kids.
In our post on how to find time for hobbies as a working mom a few years ago, we suggested some ways to involve your kid in your hobbies and interests, and more recently, we shared some board games that don’t suck.
Five Great Tips to Spend More Quality Time With Your Kids
Here are some ideas from readers from our last discussion where we asked the readers what they do for quality time with their kids:
- When they’re old enough, get your kids involved in your exercise activities (ride bikes together and so on).
- Choose one day a week to spend some one-on-one time with your child (tougher when you have multiple kids, of course!); they choose the activity. (One mom said that her husband sleeps in on Saturday mornings and she and her child go out to breakfast together.)
- Take a random vacation day or personal day once or twice a year to spend with your kids (easier to do before your kids reach school age). (The idea of allowing kids mental health days is interesting, too.)
- Try using mornings for some cuddle time with little ones, rather than evenings.
- Doing what you can — for example, making holidays really special and memorable for your kids.
How about you, readers? What are your best tips to spend more quality time with your kids? How do you resist the urge to multitask (check email, etc.) while you’re spending time with them?
It makes me very sad that Moms are/have experienced this. I’m a sing mom of one 3 year old. My twin sister works 3 long days while I stay home with her 4 year old daughter and my daughter. I’m on disability due to 5 failed back surgeries and I have elevated stress hormones and low testosterone which had me feeling a bit irritated with the girls. Normally, I don’t get annoyed with them. I cook, clean and play with the girls every day. Quality time for me is jumping on the trampoline with them, playing with them at the park, playing kitchen and serving food to their stuffed animals and making plsy doh birthday cakes for their “ friends”. I also enjoy playing 80s music videos on tv everyday in the house which makes me happy but the girls have learned the songs and sing with me! That’s what we enjoy. I hate it that parents feel so stressed out and don’t have the energy or desire to be playing with their kids. I don’t have social media and I have a lot of time to purposely do things that we all have fun with. I’ve been doing this since she was born and actually can’t stand the thought of her going to school and becoming a teenager. As she is my only child at 43 years old, I truly feel like I spend my day as though it’s my last bc I thoroughly enjoy my child and she is such a good kid. This makes everything so much easier bc I feel her needs are meet so she sleeps 12 hours straight and eats healthy and hardly ever has any emotional stress or meltdowns. She just started whinning last week but I realized it was caused by swimmers ear infection.
I really hope the stress for you moms is better now, I do believe it would be WAY DIFFERENT for me if I was still married. I can see myself being resentful about having to take care of him too. Meanwhile, if probably be feeling guilty about neglecting “ his needs” for hers. Or feel like I owe him explanations for why laundry hasn’t been finished or what to cook for dinner. So I can completely understand why quality time with kids looks completely different for married working moms than what it looks like for me.
I truly hope you all take care of yourself first!!!!
Don’t be hard on you. Just remember… be silly and crazy. Have a good laugh with your kids!!!
PSA – let’s remember that not everyone works from home even now…
As a long-hours-away-from-home worker, I had a real triumph in this area last year:
**I taught my spouse to do the morning chores**
So, in the 30 mins after our toddlers wake up before I leave the house, instead of making our coffees, unloading the dishwasher, etc, I’m cuddling with my kids while he does the housework. He then has another hour with them before his workday starts, so we both get the QT we crave.
Agreed that this has such a different meaning now than a year ago. We used to be heavy into the errands as quality time (my now 4yo was a delightful shopping companion, whether groceries or browsing). That doesn’t happen now. I’ve had recent success for her deciding that for a set amount of time (like, 15-20 minutes), I tell her it’s just her and me and we do whatever play thing she wants. Ideally every day but let’s be honest it’s probably more like 3 days a week. There is zero direction or planning on my part…usually she wants to be Elsa and save Anna (me) from falling, and we repeat 100x, sometimes we build with magnatiles, do a puzzle, etc. Key is she decides, and it seems to fill her bucket. Also like above posters, I hate the phrase mom guilt.
Quality time has a vastly different meaning now than it did a year ago. We’re trapped in the house together all.the.time. Stuff that used to be our favorite go-to’s either a) aren’t available or appropriate right now, or b) have been done a million times since March, so much so that they don’t provide much respite to anyone. (Another bike ride! Another nature walk! Another batch of cookies baked!) I truly do not know what the answer is, but I have decided to take the expectation of providing “quality time” just cannot be on my list of things to worry about right now.
I’m the parent that reads at bedtime, and I count that as quality time. Lots of snuggling is involved. We also insist that Kiddo join us for dinner, and we’re gradually increasing the time he has to sit at the table to 10 minutes (we’re at 6 minutes). Right now, Kiddo is really into playing independently. He asks us to stay away until he’s ready to show us what he’s built or drawn or put together. I’m not the type of parent to impose myself on his play if he’s happily entertaining himself. Over the holidays, I did help Kiddo with a massive Lego build–mostly, I sat with him while he built, but that was a lot of quality time together. I got a few hugs out of it.
There is no such thing as hoping for quality time for me right now, and this post feels really odd to me given current circumstance for a lot of people. It kind of relates to the person who was asking about ways to be less stressed in this morning’s post– I have to let go of expectations that things will be like in the before-times so I dont explode from stress. Including all these rules and expectations I have for myself about needing to have quality time and what it’s “supposed” to look like if I’m parenting in the Morally Appropriate Way (i.e. only wooden toys and lots of fresh air)
Right now it’s just vast quantities of time together, with very little “quality” to be had. She’s an only child who has been at home since March. Husband and I both work full time from home at the current moment. We’re sick to death of each other.
That said, the best quality time I’ve had with my kid in months was playing mario kart with her on our newly acquired switch yesterday. We were both happy, having fun, and in a good mood. Is this what I expected quality to look like? Nope. But I’ll take what I can get.
Quality time doesn’t have to be recreational. In the Before Times, Saturday errands were my quality time with my daughter. Now it’s walking the dog.
I hate the phrase “mom guilt” and think it should not be proffered as a problem to be addressed through any tips other than tips on how to smash the patriarchy.