Meaningful Time With Your Little Ones: A Guide for Parents
That’s the best I can do right now on a title. I think it gets right to the point. We have bits of time during our normal days to spend with our children. But I don’t think we always use the time in a way that has meaning, or which as a good connection. Routines begin, and with it a sense of being on auto pilot. You can even argue that many of these routines are bad habit.
At heart, I want to be the best parent I can be to my children, 7 and 6 at the time of this writing. I want to be a constant light to them. I want my presence around them to be uplifting to them, at all times. But this is easier said than done for us parents. Some days we may be feeling stressed. Our attention gets spread over a lot of areas. Particularly on regular workdays, like those days where you may just have 4-5 scattered hours with your children because of your work schedule, and their school schedule. School/Work days can be challenging. People get tired, they may just want to relax, watch TV, play games or with toys, be left alone, you name it. Other work evenings you may spend time together, though in a passive way, like watching a movie together. Certain routines and habits develop, and I find myself feeling a lack of connection with my kids. It feels like I am missing out on something. It feels like I am not connecting with them on a deeper, more meaningful level.
There is this feeling that I’m not doing enough as a parent.
Why do I feel this way? I look at how I was raised. My early years, before 10 are kind of a blur. Lots of cartoons, some homework, after school programs. But the school days felt like a routine. My parent went to work, came home late in the evening, watch some TV or listened to music, and went to bed. From my standpoint, after school I just wanted to watch TV shows, wrestle with my brother, play Nintendo. If it was warmer I wanted to go to the school yard and play stickball, basketball, football with all my friends in the neighborhood. But looking from hindsight, I missed out on alot of opportunities, opportunities to learn different things, maybe art, maybe a musical instrument, maybe just some simple but critical life lessons around having clear goals, creating plans to achieve them, and keeping some focus on them. Maybe I missed critical life lessons about love, loyalty, hard work, service to others, emotions, religion, spirituality, confidence, passion, worry, and fear. This isn’t a knock on my parents, they taught me many of these concepts, but in a more indirect and inconsistent way. There certainly was no plan behind the teaching. Things came up as they came up, and teaching stemmed from being reprimanded about something. I think they still had some good effect, but certainly left me unaware, or even confused about a lot of things that are important for kids to learn. So, from my own experience growing up, I can see that this topic is quite important. We need to use the time with our children in a more meaningful way, every day. There is a ton of opportunity to teach and improve their well-being.
In modern times, this topic seems even more important. I see how parents choose to spend their time with their children today. These habits are concerning, and I am shamefully guilty of falling into some of these habits. Children consumed by smartphones and tablets because heck, I want to watch that ballgame. I need to work tonite so sit down and watch your cartoons on TV. It’s concerns me more and more every day. As parent, we take this easy way out to keep them entertained, happy, and of course to give ourselves free time. We don’t really plan out and take the the time to provide important activities, lessons and teachings about love, loyalty, creativity, hardworking, service to others, emotions, religion, spirituality, confidence, passion, worry, and fear. So what can we do differently with our regular time with our children?
Foundational Steps: Here are some things you should seriously think about, ponder, and implement.
Decide, that as a parent, you want to take a more conscious approach about how best to use your time with your children. It’s an important foundational step. You need to establish intent. You need to recognize the importance of developing meaningful time with them.
Take Inventory. Determine how you are spending time with your children today. What time are you spending well? What time are you not spending well? Is it meaningful? Are you establishing good connection with them at an emotional level? Are you kids learning something important? You have to know where you are before you can move towards where you want to go.
Create your lesson plan. Think about how you want to better spend your time with your kids. What do you want to do? What do they want to do? What do you want to learn from, or about them? What messages, what lessons do you want to share with them? What messages and lessons will help them? What can you say or teach them to help them through a problem they are currently experiencing? I find that parents rarely think through this at the right level. There is a difference between “I put them into Taekwondo” vs “They are in Taekwondo learning about discipline, respect, self control, balance, and persistence. Huge difference.
Get cracking’. Execute on your lesson plan. You have to make a conscientious effort to do this.
Pretty simple set of steps. If you are stuck on ideas for #3, below are some examples of activities and lessons that you can easily apply every day.
Example of Daily Activities and Lessons For Your Children
Breakfast Time: Sit down with your kids and use the time to teach them. Potential topics are endless. Since your eating, use the time to remind the about the importance of eating good foods with nutritional value. Ask them what they are going to do at school today, and give them some motivation and encouragement to attack it with energy and focus.
Washing up / getting dressed: Again, be involved here. Remind them of the importance of self care, and self love. Many children may be developing worries, or maybe insecurities and loss of confidence about how they look, so use the time to remind them of how beautiful and unique they are. Tell them how beautiful their smile is, how bright their eyes are. Make this a habit. The goal here is to continue growing that self love, and to help them drop any self judgements about physical characteristics.
Dropping/picking up to/from school or bus: I find this time to be a great opportunity to remind them of the importance of discipline, effort, concentration, and focus on their school work. It’s also a good time to ask them about their goals for the day, which helps them build capabilities around thinking and planning their days. Also, use the time to tell them how powerful and capable they are, and tell them you believe in them, and that they need to believe in themselves. When picking them up, continue to build on the momentum from the morning. Ask them how there day went, what they were able to accomplish, and what challenges they may have experienced (which can be used for future quality time and lessons).
Free Time between school and dinner: There are lots of opportunities here, particularly activities the kids can attend after school. The important thing here is striking a balance between what your children enjoy, and what will continue to develop them. Also important is making sure you teach your kids key themes and meanings behind the activities. If it’s an art class, teach you kids the beauty of their imaginations and their ability to create anything in the world that they desire to. If it’s sports, teach them the importance of focus, determination, collaboration, and team spirit. If it’s yoga, teach them the importance of love, being, essence, spirit, and gentleness. When your children are at home with you during this time, have a plan for their activities. If they want to play outside in the yard, teach them the importance of being outside with nature, running on the grass, breathing the air of the trees, and respect for nature and its beings. There will also be a time for homework, so you want to remind them about the importance of practicing, of repetition whenever they are learning something new. It’s not just about “go do your homework”. It’s also about reminding them the value of this activity (learning, practicing, remembering) and why it’s important not just for school, but for anything they will want to accomplish through their lives.
Dinner Time: I can’t emphasize the importance of actually sitting at a table with your children and having dinner. The opportunities at this time are endless. First, get your children involved in making dinner. I find that my children love to be involved here. Whether it’s helping with food preparation, or setting the table, your children may enjoy it. But as noted above, it’s important to teach them why this time is important. It’s a time for everyone in the family to share things about their day, whether good or bad. These stories can be very educational. Below are some examples of stories I have shared with my children, including the educational value I was able to get across to them:
I got upset at a colleague who was not putting in the effort at work: I used this experience to share the importance of teamwork, helping, encouraging and motivating others, and believing in others, and how it helped my colleague improve her performance at work. I also taught my children that judgement, blaming, and negativity towards my colleague would also have made things worse, by hurting our ability to work together and by further demotivating my colleague.
I had to present my work to an audience and was nervous: I used this experience to share the importance of preparation, self confidence, belief, and imagination when talking to a large group. I taught them that it’s normal to be nervous, and the way to remove those nerves is to be well prepared, and that the more prepared you are, the more you will believe in yourself. I also taught them the importance of imagination as a tool for preparation, and that by imagining a good presentation ahead of time, it felt like I had already given the presentation.
My work was criticized by my boss: How to take criticism is a critical life lesson for anyone, including children. So I used this time to remind my kids that nobody is perfect, and nothing we do is ever perfect. Instead, all we can do it do the best job we can do in each and every experience in life, and then learn from those experiences so we can do it better next time. It takes a lot of pressure off of us when we realize this. We are NOT perfect. Life is about DOING YOUR BEST, and GETTING BETTER EVERYDAY. Failure is illusion towards inevitable success.
I am stressed out because there is a lot of work that needs to be done: Dealing with stress is also important as life demands continue to grow. I used this experience to teach my kids about setting goals, planning, about the importance of thinking about how to solve problems efficiently. I also taught them the importance of asking for help when needed, which is not easy for children to do.
I got promoted: I used this experience to simply remind them of the importance of discipline, continuing to work through your goals, continuing to push through setbacks, and having faith that you will reach your goals. I also used it to remind them of the times that persistence and hard work helped them reach their goals, whether graduating from Kindergarten, learning to hit a baseball, creating a beautiful piece of artwork, or becoming a yellow belt.
Bed Time: I find this time to also be of critical importance. It’s a good time to reflect on the day, and instill key principles, values, and learnings into your little ones. One thing I noticed is that children have an amazing capability to take in information at this time. Brain waves are very slow at this time, so their attention and ability to listen is highest. So what can we teach them at this time? One thing is to just remind them of how well they did during the day. Tell them how proud you are of them. Remind them of how much you believe in them. When they are lying in bed, read or tell them a story about important values. Right before they are about to fall asleep, fill them with thoughts and feelings of love, compassion, and safety. Allow them to take these thoughts and feelings into their dreams.
Remember, these are just examples. While I think they are good examples, you, as a parent, must think through the values and lessons you want to instill into your children, and you must bring these into the time spend with your children every day. You need to develop the intention to create meaningful moments with your children every day, and then create them! Have a plan, write it down, and execute it. Its an incredible opportunity for continuously developing your children, by instilling important life lessons and values into them, so they have them through their lives.