Quality over Quantity?

So a while back I overheard a conversation somewhere  about spending quality or quantity time with your kids- about which one is more important, I can’t remember where exactly I heard this conversation but its stuck in my head ever since.

Ive been thinking about it recently and asked my dad what he thought to which he replied something along the lines of “I don’t like the way people try to define quality time- is it the new way where you have to be physically doing something with your baby every second OR if your in the same room each doing your own thing is that also quality time? Because I believe that all the time that I spent with you guys was quality time, whether or not I was taking you for ballet or movies or whether we were just chilling in the same house and doing our own things. All of it was precious. The doing nothing and the things we physically did together. I cant really answer the question” and then my mum added “as long as there was a feeling of peace and a loving surrounding, thats all that mattered”.

Hearing this from my parents made so much sense to me, but also confused me more, what do I really think is more important? Quality time. But the real question, like my dad asked, what really is quality time?

I think of course it’s actually important that you are spending enough time with your kids, I definitely wouldn’t say spending 1 day in a month with your child is sufficient, whether its the most quality time ever, if you understand what I mean. Having said that I think that it’s much more important to spend “quality time” and not so much the amount of time, even though  there is something to be said about spending time with your kids daily. Can you hear my confusion in my text?  I mean obviously parents work, you have to leave your kids at home, or even like me- I bring my kid to work so I’m distracted and won’t really be able to play with O. I remember once when Olive wanted our nanny more than me and that really hurt me at the time (find my blog post about this here), I realised that it was because the time our nanny was spending with O was concentrated on O, they played and laughed etc, whereas I was trying to do everything at once, juggling O and work together which didn’t really work for either O or the work I was doing, so now I believe that when I’m with O I do my best to spend “quality time” and entertain both of us and leave everything else like work, my phone or anything else that would take my time away from O. Of course it can not always be like that as I have too many things to do in a day but there is AT LEAST once in a day where I consciously put everything else aside and have some full concentrated time with O.

I want to open this up to all of you- What do you all think? I am so curious to know what your opinions and experiences on this are! Please do drop a comment so we can have a conversation about it!

 

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