Working Full Time & Spending Quality Time with Your Kids

How to Work Full Time and Spend Quality Time with Your Kids

If it weren’t for the need to pay bills and eat, I’d spend no time working and more time hanging out with my children.

Back to reality.

If you work outside of the home, you know as well as I do how draining it can be. The average working person spends more time at work than at home. Yet, we still need to give that same time and attention to our children.

Well, not the same. No way can I give my family 40+ hours of my time a week. I’d die.

Instead spending the same amount of time, the goal is to spend quality time.

How I do It

Like I said in “How to Be a Cool Special Needs Mom,” I’m no expert. However, after being a mom for over 24 years and having 3 rug rats children, I have some tips to share.

The biggest thing I’d stress is for you to NOT discount small blocks of time. It’s easy to think that because you only have 15 minutes to spare, it’s not worth much.

In your children’s eyes, every minute of your time is worth its weight in gold.

Taking the time out to check in and see how your children are doing and what’s going on in their world is appreciated more than you know.

My CJ doesn’t do much verbal communicating. Yet, I always make it a point to ask how his day is and how school was. He just smiles but I know he understands. To him, mommy is around and paying him attention. That’s what’s important.

After working each day, a good practice to have is to take an hour before bed and spend it with your kids. It could be as small as watching one of their favorite TV shows to playing a game with them. Do that for an hour from Monday through Friday and you’ve spent 5 quality hours of time with your child.

Then, there are the weekends. I make it a point of doing little to no work on Saturdays. I spend the majority of my day with my child (the teenager is in her own world). Sometimes all we do is cuddle and play with his cars.

Planning Time

Even the busiest of workers gets vacation time. If you have vacation a couple of times of year, you can split the two between you and the family. Take one family vacation where you spend 5 or more uninterrupted days with your child(ren).

Spend the second vacation with your significant other. Going it alone is another option since “Me Time” is also very important.

It’s easy to neglect or take for granted spending time with your children when you are tired from working all day. Stealing back short moments and planning can help you spend plenty of quality time with your kids.

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Michelle’s profile: https://supportforspecialneeds.com/members/reviyve/

On Twitter:  @SpecialMomSpace and her blog, Special Mom Space