“He Does Things with Me” The most important factor in quality time is not the event itself but that you are doing something together, being together.
When seven-year-old Nathan was asked how he knew his father loved him, he said, “Because he does things with me.
Things like shooting baskets and playing games on the computer. And going to the pet store together.” Quality time does not require that you go somewhere special.
You can provide focused attention almost anywhere, and your most nurturing quality times will often be at home, when you are alone with a child. Finding time to be alone with each child is not easy, and yet it is essential. In a society where people are increasingly spectators rather than participants, focused attention from parents is all the more critical.
In many homes, children would miss their computers and other electronic toys more than they would miss their fathers.
Children are more and more influenced by forces outside the family and they need the strengthening influence of personal time with their parents. It takes real effort to carve out this kind of time in your schedule, and yet making the effort is rather like an investment in the future—of your children and your family.
If you have several children, you need to look for times when you can be alone with each one. This isn’t easy, but it can be done. Consider Susanna Wesley, who raised ten children in eighteenth-century England. She scheduled an hour a week with each one alone. Her three sons, Sam, John, and Charles Wesley, became poets, writers, and preachers; Charles penned thousands of hymns, many of which remain classics in the Christian church. In addition to helping her children learn the alphabet, writing, and math, she taught them politeness and good manners, moral values, and frugal living.
In an era when women had little opportunity to advance, she prepared her daughters with a full education. The wise mother once told her daughter Emilia, “Society offers no opportunity for the intelligence of its women.”1 Emilia later became a teacher. While we don’t necessarily advocate all of her ideas about raising children, we can admire the way Susanna set her priorities and then carried them through. The key to qu ality time is found in the values and priorities you as parents determine to cherish and implement in your home.
Positive Eye Contact Quality time should include loving eye contact. Looking in your child’s eyes with care is a powerful way to convey love from your heart to the heart of your child. Studies have shown that most parents use eye contact in primarily negative ways,
either while reprimanding a child or giving very explicit instructions.
If you give loving looks only when your child is pleasing you, you are falling into the trap of conditional love. That can damage your child’s personal growth. You want to give enough unconditional love to keep your child’s emotional tank full, and a key way to do this is through proper use of eye contact.
Sometimes family members refuse to look at one another as a means of punishment. This is destructive to both adults and children. Kids especially interpret withdrawal of eye contact as disapproval, and this further erodes their self-esteem. Don’t let your demonstration of love to a child be controlled by whether the child is pleasing you at the moment.
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