Free Time At Home And With The Family: It Is Also Okay To Do Nothing
It’s okay if you don’t do anything “extra” with your free time at home with your kids. That will also generate emotional connection between you and it is important to encourage it.
Many parents, either because they are on vacation, for work, due to illness or for any other circumstance, when they have days off and, therefore, more free time to spend with their children, tend to organize a multitude of activities, games, buy ingredients for make recipes as a family, think about crafts to do with children, experiments …
Perhaps those productive tasks also included rearranging playrooms and dusting off alphabet flashcards and subscribing to dozens of educational apps.
Thoughts about free time
It is possible that you, as a parent with more free time, have taken a step further and have also wanted to take care of your mind with puzzles , books to paint, improve your children’s calligraphy … Perhaps, some of your thoughts in those days have been :
- “Maybe now I can commit to a seven-step overnight skincare regimen.”
- “Where can I create a training space at home?”
- “Oooh! I can finally organize the thousands of photos on my computer that make it run so slow! ”
- “Which book should I read first?”
- “This is a good time to really focus on training the dog to stop barking at our doorbell …”.
Really, there is nothing wrong with this line of thought. If you’re a goal-oriented person and you do better with structure and boundaries in the week, that’s fine. But, after the first day of being home with your young children, you will feel like you have failed at something.
You haven’t done anything and you don’t have to feel bad about it. You haven’t done anything extra with your free time. Maybe you had the feeling that you did nothing and that made you feel worse. Possibly, you realized that this little vision you had to turn those days off into a high intensity New Years resolution workout was useless.
Nothing happens for doing nothing
You have to give yourself permission to survive, to enjoy your family, and the rest, again, can wait. To measure your success, measure your happiness; It is not necessary that you spend hours and hours with your young children doing homework, recipes or crafts to feel that you are doing things right. Sitting on the couch hugging them and singing songs in their ear is fine too.
Your worth is measured by simpler things. Are your children safe? Are they loved? If cleaning your child’s closet is what you want to do, great, but if falling asleep seven minutes after turning off the lights in your baby’s room is all you want to do right now, that’s fine too.
Because, yeah, in the end, all you have to show is a family that stays safe and loved. Although crafts and experiments are rare or if you have lost your temper when your children made those “simple” recipes with you.
And, perhaps, when you stop having those days off for this with your family, you will miss those moments of doing nothing, but being all together at home.
Your children need you in their free time
Yes, what your children really need to enjoy their free time is to spend it by your side. They do not need you to run to buy materials to make crafts, since many of them can be made with things you have at home. They don’t need to be doing activities all day, they may not want to nap, but they may agree to watch a movie with you or play tickle in bed next to you.
These days with more free time are days of reflection, so as a parent, do n’t feel guilty if you haven’t done everything you had on your to-do list. Also, don’t feel bad if you don’t do them today and want to save them for tomorrow. Are you happy at home? That is what really matters.
