As parents our days can easily be filled to overflowing with all the tasks that are required to keep our families running: making meals, doing dishes, driving kids to activities, washing clothes and working. These are certainly not the most important things in our lives but they can quickly take over our most of our time. It's easy to say things like:
o "I'll play a game with the kids tomorrow."
o "We'll go for a bike ride together soon."
o "I'll volunteer when I have more time."
The things that are the most important to us are also often the ones that are the easiest to postpone. The problem is that sometimes we delay so long that we miss the opportunity. Our children will not want to have a tea party or play catch with us forever. They quickly grow up. If we want to share special times with our children, we must intentionally carve out the time to do these things.
Everyone's life will come to an end and we don't know when that will be. At the end of your life, what do you want your children to remember about you? Certainly I don't want my kids' strongest memory to be "Mom always kept the bathrooms really clean!" However, if I want my kids to remember special times we shared together, then I need to take time today to play with them, listen to them and be there for them.
Carving out time for the truly important things isn't easy but it's worth the effort. Let the bathroom stay dirty one more day and enjoy having fun with your children today!
Kathy Slattengren is an internationally recognized parenting educator and founder of Priceless Parenting, http://www.PricelessParenting.com. Priceless Parenting provides an online parenting class which teaches effective discipline techniques for positively dealing with misbehavior.
While raising her own two children, she learned many wonderful
parenting techniques from classes, seminars and books. Through studying
research, she discovered a universal body of knowledge about how
effective parents do their job. Her Masters of Education degree from
the University of Washington combined with her Bachelor’s degree in
Psychology and Computer Science from the University of Minnesota has
enabled her to pull together parenting research into a course that is
easy to understand and apply.
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