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It can actually be more complicated and even more difficult than most parents think to spend time with your kids. This is going to depend a lot on the age of your children. If they are in the terrible teens, it can feel a lot like you are constantly walking on eggshells. You want to be their friend, but they’re not quite at the age where you can let them be completely independent. You still have to provide a guiding hand and in some cases, a foot up the bum. This makes it more difficult to make sure that every hour that you spend together is happy and fun. 

That can feel kind of depressing because the time that we have with our kids growing up is actually quite limited. We will spend 30% of our life at work, another 10% in traffic and then there’s the time we spend sleep. It’s a lot of lost days. So you have to make the moments with the kids count. Let’s look at how to do this. 

This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when you are trying to spend time with your kids. You don’t have to take them anywhere. Let’s say you’re celebrating Mother’s Day. There’s no need to say Happy Mother’s Day and then head off somewhere that you want to go or even that your kids want to go with you like a theme park. Regardless of what age your kids are, it’s possible to have a great time at home. For instance, you could make a wonderful meal together as a family. This can be more fun than you think and also teach kids a valuable life skill that they’ll probably appreciate later than right in the moment. But it’s still worth thinking about. 

Or, how about just sitting down with a good old fashioned board game. Even teens, as much as they will fight tooth and nail at first, may recall happy memories of playing these when they were younger. Just try and avoid things getting too competitive. 

Time is precious, it really is and this harkens back to the fact that it doesn’t matter how much you spend. You don’t need to buy your kids presents for them to like spending time with you. The classic example of this would be an expensive family vacation or the camping holiday. Kids might think they’ll enjoy the former more, but give them a chance. They might be surprised to discover how fun heading out into the forest can really be. Particularly, if you pack the schedule with wild adventure after wild adventure. As long as you are together as a family, this is going to be time well spent. 

Finally, this ones a tad more difficult because the kids probably will fight you as much as they can on this. They’ll beg you to let them keep their phone or their tablet. You have to be firm. Just for a couple hours say ‘no tech’ and make sure that you are following this rule too. It’s a little hypocritical to ask your kid to relinquish their phone if mommy is still keeping a close eye on her own.