Spending An Average Amount Of Time With Your Kids
I decided that I needed to find out how much time working dads are spending with their kids. According to a study, the average dad is spending 4.1 hours per day with his children. This is up from 2.7 hours per day back in the 60s.
I am not really sure what is included in that 4.1 hours. That seems like a lot of hours but it really probably works out to something like 2.5 hours per weekday and 7 hours per weekend.day. If the average dad gets home at 5:30 that would have him interacting with his kids until 8pm.
For little kids, I could buy that. I spend more than that with my nearly four year old twins, but they pretty much follow me around wherever I go when I am home.
So, let’s get back to that average dad who spends nearly every moment between arriving home and bedtime with his kids. Dinner and bath time/bedtime routine will probably take up about 1 hour or so. That leaves the average dad spending 1.5 hours of true free time with his kids. And, that time is probably going to get broken into a before dinner and after dinner play/homework time.
How should the average dad spend that 1.5 hours with his kids?
There are a lot of things that happen in my house that I am sure happen in most houses. We have chores to do. We have homework (but very little since we are in preschool). We have roughhouse playing to do. We have imagination playing to do. We have art projects to do. We have books to read and videos to watch. We have fish and hamsters to feed.
I will discuss all of them in detail in the coming days explaining how I use the various activities to both teach my kids something as well as just good old fashioned bond with them.
Dads. What special things do you like to do with your kids? Do you think you spend more or less than the national average with your kids? With the extra time on the weekend, do you have any special weekend projects/activities that you do with your kids?
Technorati Tags: career, kids, parenting, working parent
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Career and Kids, Raising Kids
4 opinions for Spending An Average Amount Of Time With Your Kids
mdmhvonpa
Nov 14, 2006 at 8:43 am
Hmmm, average. I wonder where this data is coming from. Being in the same house as the kids is probably being counted here. In the morning, I wake the kids, give them breakfast and then take them to school. Roughly 45 minutes. In the evening, I pick them up, take them swimming, take them to karate, eat dinner with them and then read a book before bed time. Roughly 3 hours 45 minutes. Weekends: it’s variable. Depending on the activity it could be 12 hours or it could be 3. Either way, I’m guessing I blow the curve.
When it comes down to it, we spend a lot of time goofing off in the pool and after dinner. A little computer time thrown in and one or two movie nights where we just lay in the master bedroom and watch the tube. After the bath, it’s all Story Time.
mike
Nov 15, 2006 at 2:46 pm
The big thing that I’m interested in figuring out is when the kids get older, how do you spend time with them and still let them have time alone. We’re still at the age where they pretty much want to be around us 24/7. I doubt that will last too many more years.
When the time they want to spend with me decreases, I’m hopefully going to be able to keep coming up with quick things to do with them.
dale
Nov 17, 2006 at 8:07 am
I read somewhere that the average amount of quality
conversation that a dad has with a teen age daughter is about 38 seconds per day. I thought that to be
absurd having two teen age daughters at the time and thinking that certainly could not be true, I began to look at the “quality” (by my own defination) time that I had with them each one on one. Some days there were more amounts of time than others of course but some days I was actually lucky to get the 38 seconds! Wow. So, I guess if you average out all
the time and all the dads and daughters, maybe this
is accurate after all.
mike
Nov 17, 2006 at 8:20 am
Yeah, the teenage years can be rough. I remember pretty much disappearing from my house for several days at a time when I was that age…and I liked my parents.
I’m hoping that if we pay attention to setting time aside with the kids now, that it will be a little easier to get those 38 seconds when they are teens.
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: