What is Quality Time with Our Children?

What is quality time with our children? Is it the time we spend watching television with them? Is it the time we spend reading to them, eating with them, putting them to bed, washing them, playing sports with them in the yard, or is it the time we spend with them on our long commute to work and school?

It is all of these. Quality time with our children is time with our children. Even the minutes or hours we spend arguing with them and punishing them is quality time. When you think back about your own childhood, what do you remember most, is it the great big stuffed animal your parents bought you, or is it the stupid little rubber ducky one of them won for you at the local fair or the amusement park. Maybe you don't even remember what the prize was, but simply that someone tried hard to win it for you and did.

In our age of consumerism and lack of time we often forget that what brings closeness between two people isn't the money they spend on each other, but the time and attention that they spend on each other. When we fall in love, though we may shower gifts on one another, what we give most is our time and attention. We treasure the gifts not for their monetary value, but rather because we treasure who gave them. How did we come to treasure that person? With time.

Inherently, I believe we all know this. That is why the absent parent feels guilty and buys large and expensive gifts for the child in order to minimize her guilt. However, these gifts mean little to a child on an emotional level. Five minutes spent reading a story, watching the child's favorite cartoon or just hanging out, have more meaning. Even the time we force our children to help us clean up the kitchen with us brings more closeness than any gift we could buy.