Quality Time With Your Children

Hi,

Both my wife and I were near the peak of our career when Jason came into our life.

As in case of most young couple in Singapore without parents living with them, we have to employ a maid to look after Jason while we were at work during the day.

In our case, my parents from Penang came down to stay for 2-3 months to train our maid. We also decided to send Jason to Kinderland childcare school so that he could socialise with other children of his age instead of spending so much time with our maid.

We fear that he would get too close to our maid and learn to speak Philipino English; after hearing such stories from friends.

Still, I would say it was a risk that we took to leave the kid and the whole house to our maid. But that was typical of young working couple and even it is happening today, I believe!

So we claimed that we spent Quality Time with our son......!

Honestly, sometimes I think it is just an excuse or a term that we used to justify the situation that we have to face.

Why do I say it as such?

Jason also woke up early and he saw us off to work. Most of the time, he cried at the door when we left for work. We left with a heavy heart to work...sigh.... I can still remember that pitiful look of his at the door.

We would try to rush home but hardly on the dot, due to the nature of our work as executives or managers. So we were left with only a few hours with him before we call it a night.

I must say that my wife was able to give more of her time to Jason during the first 10 years before I was able to spend more time with him. Luckily, our career allowed at least one of us to be there for him; eg . My wife attended all his kinderarten concerts while I missed a few of them and in Primary 1 and 2, too.

So what is quality time?

I think that you can only called it quality time provided you are able to give your 100% during that period with your child and not distracted by your work or other matters.

We realised that we were not giving Jason 100% of our time when he was in Primary 5 and 6 as we were so occupied with our office work. We started to do more work with the availability of notebooks and broadband at home to link up to the office mail system. Also, we were at the peak of our careers.

But after having said that, there were memorable quality time that I spent with Jason playing with him on bed ( eg. remember our wrestling in bed, in my earlier post ).

However, I still remember what I read in the New Straits Times on a high profile lady banker when she retired. She said that there is no such thing as spending quality time with her children as she always had her work at the back of her head, working at such a high position in the bank, and she regreted not being able to spend more time with her children and watched them grow up.

So my dear firends, it is still a challenge to find sufficient Quality Time for your children, I believe.

As one of my friends told me, parents will only have 10 years of your children life as they will want to be on their own when they reach puberty.

Very true, while Jason is still very close to us today and we still spend the weekend together as a family committment, he is now in his teens and he goes out with his classmates more and also wants his privacy. We can only hold his hands or hug him at home else we will embarass him.

So parents, make the best of the first 10 years with your children and lay a good foundation for the family, especially in terms of communication and family values.

Many parents did not make time for their kids when they are young but when they reached puberty, they begin to worry and try to be close or 'control' their movement. Too late...my friends!

Find that quality time NOW!

Happy parenting,

David