“There is nothing like staying home for real comfort.” — Jane Austen
Life isn’t always easy to navigate. Work, school, activities, people, and other things can at times pull family members apart rather than bring them together. Too often, we feel as if everyone is traveling on a different road.
But we don’t necessarily have to change our road maps radically in order to find family time. All we need to do is to get together and ask these questions:
• How do we feel about our schedules? Our time together?
• How can we better balance our individual commitment and our family time?
• Is anyone having their time use determined by others? (For example, sometimes a child may have lot of time alone because others are busy.) Are your children overscheduled?
• How can we make home time more appealing?
• How can we steer our family more in the same direction rather than opposite directions?
One way to spend time together as a family is to spend time at the table. It’s an old idea but a good one. Asked how many times a week all the people in their household ate dinner together, 22 percent of surveyed youth said none or one, 32 percent said two to four times, and 45 percent said five to seven times according to a Search Institute survey.
But the picture changes as kids grow older: 60 percent of 6th graders have meals with the whole household five to seven times a week, but only 29 percent of 12th graders do the same.
How often do you gather the whole household at suppertime? Ask your teenagers for ideas about making meals worth staying home for.
Search Institute research shows that youth are more likely to grow up healthy when they go out “with nothing special to do” two or fewer nights per week. Spending time at home is a critical factor in the healthy development of children. Young people can find themselves with too little to do or too much to do, depending on their circumstances. Ideally, time spent at home is a balance of unstructured play or leisure, being with family, and being alone.
Try these 10 ideas for fun times at home:
1. Rent a funny movie on a weekday night. Make popcorn.
2. Have a family snowball, leaf, or soap suds fight.
3. Camp inside. Set up a tent or just pile sleeping bags on the living room floor.
4. Listen to the music that each family member likes and learn something about the performer.
5. Read the Sunday comics together.
6. Invite your child’s friends over and treat them to a special family activity or outing.
7. Have a family treasure hunt complete with map and clues.
8. Hide fun notes for others to find.
9. Have a family breakfast in the sleepiest member’s bed.
10. Cook dinner together, each family member preparing a dish. Then, for a change, eat dessert first.
These ideas came from Search Institute’s Ideas for Parents newsletter. Go to www.search-institute.org/whatsnew for downloadable newsletters. For information on Ideas for Parents newsletter master set or other parenting resources check out www.search-institute.org/catalog or call 800-888-7828.
— Courtesy of ARA Content
