Do You Spend More Time With Your Kids Than Your Parents Did With You?
Growing up, did you feel like your parents’ room was completely off limits, but now your kids treat your bed like it’s their own personal hangout? Or maybe you have no recollection of your parents sitting on the floor playing Barbies or building Legos with you, but you’re constantly hitting the criss-cross applesauce to color alongside your child. One parent took to Reddit to ask if anyone else has noticed they spend way more time engaging with their kids each day than they ever did with their own mom and dad.
“I know my kids are still really young (3 and 6), but I never remember capturing so much of my own parents’ constant attention. As long as I can remember as a kid I was either playing with friends or playing in my room until dinner was ready or I needed to help around the house or something,” OP writes. “My parents would come home from work, turn on the news, make dinner, chores, get ready for the next day, etc., but there was never a ton of one-on-one interaction.”
On the contrary, OP says from the moment they get home after work until their kids are in bed, they are on — playing, talking, and making dinner with the kids. Even though the 6-year-old has a room full of toys, they rarely go in there and play solo.
“I don’t think any of this is necessarily bad, it just was not the experience I had with my own parents. I guess I’m more curious about what other parents experience is within this dynamic?”
The comments beneath the post point out that 3- and 6-year-olds do still need a lot of attention and help, and that maybe OP doesn’t remember that part of their childhood clearly enough to recall just how much their parents were around. But the bulk of the comments suggest there are plenty of other parents who feel the same way.
“My husband brings this up a lot. Like our kids are regularly on our bed watching TV, using our bathroom, trying to chat while we take showers, moving their toys into our room, etc. We barely knew what our parents’ bedroom and bathrooms looked like,” replied one commenter.
“Growing up I don't think I ever stepped foot in my parents' bedroom without knocking, and now my kids are just... living in there sometimes,” wrote another. “My 4yo follows me into the bathroom and narrates everything I'm doing or asks random questions, and I'm either finding it endearing or completely losing my mind depending on the day lol. The constant togetherness is totally different from how we were raised, but honestly I kind of love it even when it's exhausting.”
All these commenters, they’re onto something.
Research has shown that modern-day parents spend significantly more time on child care than parents in the 1960s. According to one study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, mothers in 1965 averaged 54 minutes a day spent on child care activities; moms in 2012 doubled that at 104 minutes per day. For dads, the time spent nearly quadrupled — 1965 dads spent roughly 16 minutes per day with their kids, but today’s fathers clock about 59 minutes.
But why the shift to so much togetherness? Especially when most households have two working parents instead of one who stays home?
“I think there are two things at play here. First, the pressures we put on parents these days to constantly spend time with their kids, curate activities, be super involved, etc., is wild. My parents would have laughed us out of the house if we asked them to help us play with something or take us somewhere to have fun (which I see a lot from my nieces and nephews). They supplied toys, but the rest was up to us to take care of without bothering them,” one commenter wrote.
They go on to say that when we were kids, nothing was instant — toys ordered from catalogs took weeks to arrive, there was no entertainment in long lines or on car rides. We may have just been better at entertaining ourselves because we had no other option but to learn.
source https://www.scarymommy.com/parenting/do-you-spend-more-time-with-your-kids-than-your-parents-did-with-you
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