Top Tips to Spend More Time With Your Kids

When you are a parent, you may have to juggle your kids, your work, and other commitments, such as caring for elderly parents. With a huge number of different tasks on your to-do list, you may feel as if you have no time to spend with your kids and to watch them grow up. If so, here are some of the top tips that you can follow to ensure that you can spend as much time with your kids as possible before they are adults.

Make Sure Elderly Parents Are Cared For

Many people in the sandwich generation find themselves pulled between their children and their elderly parents, and you may start to resent the amount of help that your parents need if it is disrupting your family life. As such, if you are beginning to struggle with looking after your parents as well as your kids, you should consider broaching the topic of retirement communities. Retirement communities can help your elderly parents to live well nearby, without relying on you and your family to care for them. They can also be great options if your parents are struggling to cope with many of the most common health issues that elderly people develop.

Find Family Activities

Rather than focusing on hobbies that you can all perform independently, you may try to find hobbies and activities that you can all enjoy together at the same time. For instance, you may decide to take up walking or a sport, or you might decide to take the plunge into the world of arts and crafts. These will then allow you all to have fun simultaneously and enjoy a bonding activity that can bring you closer as a family outside of the stresses of your daily routine.

Manufacture Time Together

Many people try to find time within their routine to spend together, or they believe that the daily chores that they perform together equal quality time with their kids. However, instead of waiting to find time together, you need to create and manufacture this time, even when it seems as if you have no time to spare. By making sure that there is always a set time that you spend together or pushing back other priorities to simply relax with your children, you will be creating memories that they will remember for a long time to come.

Avoid Overtime

It can be easy to get wrapped up in your work and to forget the importance of spending time with your children. However, you can make sure that you spend time with your kids and get a better work/life balance by declining to do overtime, ensuring that your work timetable allows you to work set hours only, and turning off your cell phone and all of your work emails when you get home.

You should also try to avoid doing work when you are at home or have a set place where you do this work so that you are not tempted to carry on working during dinner or playtime.