One-on-one time

No matter how many children you have, it can be hard to fit in one-on-one time with them. We’ve always struggled to figure out how to do this well in our family. However, it is something I consider to be super important for strengthening those parent – child bonds. It provides a valuable time for talking and asking questions without other siblings listening in.

Some families I know do regular daddy dates on eg. a Saturday morning, and this is what we tried for a while. But as a mum, I feel like I need that individual time with the kids too, since the busyness of a homeschooling day doesn’t really lend itself to deep and meaningful conversations.

Our current solution

So in the last term we decided to dedicate one evening a week – just 30min to 1 hour before bedtime – to spending one-on-one time with each of our children (except the baby). We rotate our way through the kids, and because my husband and I schedule it in for the same time, it works efficiently and doesn’t eat into our precious evening (childless) time too much.

The kids all look forward to their turn and we have kept it very simple thus far with activities such as: going for a walk, playing a game, doing some art together, or chatting through a useful developmental book (more on this later). In future, we might do the occasional outing for a special treat, but the main thing is to do something!

I’m so pleased we’ve finally managed to get into a rhythm with this. Now that it’s become a regular weekly event, the kids are great at holding us accountable too. My hope is that this time enables us to keep tabs on how our children are feeling about life, and that it accustoms them to chatting with us about important issues.