Not quality time.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI\u2019ve got three kids (soon to be four); the oldest is just shy of seven years old. I\u2019ve got a full-time job. And yet I\u2019ve got a web log; I write open-source software in Tcl; I\u2019ve written a couple of (unpublished) novels. (And my wife is still speaking to me!)<\/p>\n
And, far from neglecting them, I spend a lot of time with my kids. How do I have time for all of this?<\/p>\n
Partly, it\u2019s because Jane\u2019s mostly a housewife these days. A lot of household chores get done while I\u2019m at work, and that gives us both more time in the evening. (And may I say, both Jane and I are grateful that we can afford to live this way.)<\/p>\n
But the main reason is that we\u2019ve never accepted the notion of quality time.<\/p>\n
Quality time, so far as I understand, is all about making up for the fact that you don\u2019t have much time to spend with your kids. Since you\u2019re short of time, make the most of the time you have! Make it time of high quality! On the face of it that\u2019s a fine thing\u2013for some definition of \u201chigh quality.\u201d What people usually seem to mean is \u201cmaking the child the center of your attention.\u201d\u2013by playing a game together, say. Or reading a story. And that, by itself, is also a fine thing. Put them together, though, and you\u2019ve got a problem. More to the point, you\u2019re depriving your kid of what I call \u201cquantity time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quality time is about spending your time doing things with your kids; quantity time is about making space for your kids in the things you do.<\/p>\n
For example, I spend a lot of time sitting in a comfy chair in my study with a book or my laptop. I share my study with a playpen, several small chairs, a Nintendo GameCube, and a fluctuating population of Lego, K\u2019Nex, and sundry other toys. And if the kids are awake, I\u2019m often sharing it with one, two, or all three of them. They get my attention when they want it\u2013say, to separate a pair of Lego bricks, or answer a question, or sometimes just to sit in my lap for awhile. My little girl Anne has been in my lap twice just in the twenty minutes I\u2019ve been writing this.<\/p>\n
A digression: I recently installed Mac OS X 10.2.3, code-named \u201cPanther\u201d, on my laptop. And one of the new features of Panther is called Expose. And the neatest feature of Expose, from my point of view, is that I can press a single key, and all of the windows on my screen fly off to the sides, almost completely exposing the desktop. A second press, and they all come flying back. And this is neat because I\u2019ve got a picture of David and James as my wallpaper, and almost every day little Anne walks up to me and says, \u201cWhere David? Where James?\u201d<\/p>\n
And I push F11, and she smiles and points and says, \u201cThere David! There James! There Scooby!\u201d (David is wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt.) And I nod, and she smiles, and then I push F11 and go right back to what I was doing.<\/p>\n
Though I know you couldn\u2019t tell, I just took a break to tell bedtime stories to David and James. (I\u2019m reading Dave The Book of Three<\/i>, by Lloyd Alexander.)<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t often take the kids out just to spend time with them; but if I go out to run errands, I usually have one or two of them with me.<\/p>\n
When I wash the dishes after dinner (that\u2019s one chore that doesn\u2019t<\/i> get done while I\u2019m at work), I make David come help me. He doesn\u2019t always want to; he often has other things he wants to do. But that\u2019s another side of quantity time\u2013it\u2019s not always fun. The night before last, consequently, David and I had a long conversation about making the best of it\u2013about how to be cheerful even when you\u2019re doing something you don\u2019t want to do.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s really the key: quantity time teaches kids amazing things. Because I\u2019m doing my own things, they learn that they aren\u2019t the center of the universe. They have to amuse themselves, so they learn to be self-reliant. On the other hand, they know that I\u2019m there if they need me, so they learn trust. They get to see me doing whatever I\u2019m doing, whether I\u2019m shopping, or paying bills, or washing dishes, or writing software, or just sitting and reading a book\u2013and that\u2019s how they learn how life is lived.<\/p>\n
And sometimes, of course, I spend time just playing with them, because that\u2019s part of life too.<\/p>\n
A lot has changed in the last ten years. My oldest is nearly 17; my youngest is nearly 10. I\u2019m not doing the open source software so much, I\u2019ve written a third (unpublished) novel, I\u2019m still blogging, and I still have a full time job. (And my wife is still speaking to me!) And my kids still come and see what I\u2019m doing, and I still read to them in the evening (right now we\u2019re reading Wyrd Sisters<\/b>, by Terry Pratchett). On the whole, everything above still makes sense to me.<\/i> <\/p>\n
____
\nphoto credit: nicksarebi<\/a> via photopin<\/a> cc<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This was first posted in January of 2004. I\u2019ve got three kids (soon to be four); the oldest is just shy of seven years old. I\u2019ve got a full-time job. And yet I\u2019ve got a web log; I write open-source software in Tcl; I\u2019ve written a couple of (unpublished) novels. (And my wife is still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,20],"tags":[212,213],"class_list":["post-1128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blasts-from-the-past","category-christian-living","tag-parenting","tag-quality-time"],"yoast_head":"\n
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