5 Ideas for Spending Quality Time With Your Child

When you have multiple children and a busy work schedule, it can be hard to spend quality time with your children. As a mom who owns her own business, I can tell you, it’s sometimes a challenge. Usually when I take time off I have to make sure my team can fill-in or that everything is taken care of before I plan to go offline. My schedule isn’t always so flexible and some weeks I work 7 days a week.

Finding the time can be hard, but so is coming up with some fun ways to spend time with your child. While there are a lot of ways you can have fun, you want to balance fun with a sensible budget or the need to avoid a lot of planning ahead. Usually on my days off or on the weekends, we do a group outing with the four of us. Or we spend time together indoors watching a movie.

While group outings are great, spending one-on-one time with each child is important to grow and nourish each individual parent-child relationship. I don’t usually do a one-on-one every week, but instead try to rotate a special day with each child, each month.

Lastly, while you’re enjoying your special time together, remember to put all phones away. No need for extra distractions because the idea is to enjoy each other without outside distractions.

Parent hack: The best way to make sure you spend quality time with your children, is put the activity time on your calendar. Consider allocating the same time every first Saturday, for example. That’s an easy way to remember or plan for that special outing  coming up.

If you’re looking for some fun ideas and ways to spend quality time with your child, read below for my five ideas!

5 Ideas for Spending Quality Time With Your Child

1. Have a special lunch or dinner with your child. Everyone has to eat, right? Share a special meal with your child to his or her favorite restaurant and splurge on dessert. For a recent outing with my youngest son, we went to Culver’s to enjoy burgers, fries, and dessert. My son really enjoyed the special treat and time together. I even let him get two frozen custards. Culver’s is one of his favorite restaurants because he loves the burgers and the frozen custard. He also loves the onion rings, the perfect complement to his burger.
2. Go somewhere fun to play board games. Grab your favorite game or a deck of cards and go somewhere to play a game or two! A park, coffee shop, all great places. Sometimes a change in scenery is all you need to make something extra special or fun.
3. Go bike riding. A fun bike ride is a great way to spend time together with your child. Try to find a quiet bike trail where you can bike side-by-side and enjoy some conversation. Or, pack a lunch and have a picnic somewhere along your route.
4. Cook together. You don’t have to leave the house to spend quality time with your child. Cook a meal, show them how to make their favorite dish, bake a dessert, etc. Try a new recipe and enjoy the teamwork it takes into making the special dish. Go to the grocery store together  Don’t forget to share with the rest of the family!
5. Do a craft together. When my kids were younger, we used to do a lot of crafts together. As they got older, it was harder to keep them entertained with crafts, especially with so much technology at their fingertips. However, there are so many fun things we can do together now that they are older, that they couldn’t do before. Painting, decorating flower pots, sculpting clay artifacts. So many fun things to do.

Despite how hard it can sometimes be, I make spending quality time with each child important and a priority. What ideas do you have for spending quality time with your child?