Do you have at least two children and always feel like you can't give any of them enough time and attention? Try these tips!
Especially in our hectic everyday lives, it can be difficult to give each of your children the same amount of time and attention. Children especially love attention. And small children in particular are extremely good at demanding that from mom and dad.
Between work, household time, time as a family, time with your partner and also time for yourself, time with each child individually is sometimes neglected.
It doesn’t have to be an extensive event. The simplest everyday moments often offer the most beautiful opportunity for some togetherness between mom or dad and child. For children, quality counts over quantity.
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You and your partner can do a great division of labor on this point. For example, if you do the weekly shopping every Thursday, grab one of the children while your partner watches the others at home. Every week it's a different child's turn.
Children don't have high expectations about what they want to do with mom or dad. The high demands usually come from ourselves. Our children are just happy to have time alone with mom or dad - and most children think shopping is great anyway.
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Stagger bedtimes based on age
If you don't send all your children to bed at the same time, but allow the older children to stay up a little later, you create short moments in the evening in which each child has you to themselves. First the youngest child has time alone with you, then the older one and so on up to the eldest.
A quarter or half an hour is completely sufficient. You don't have to change anything about your bedtime routine, you just vary the time.
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Take turns doing weekly to-dos
If one of your children has a fixed weekly appointment, it would be a good idea for you and your partner to take turns taking them there. At least if your jobs allow it. This automatically creates time that each of you can spend alone with the child. Sometimes the best conversations happen during a car ride like this.
Have a special day for every child
Time for special activities with each child is sometimes forgotten. A good way to prevent this is to have fixed appointments. For example, if your child's birthday is February 5th, you can specify that the 5th of each month is the "one-on-one date" day.
Since your children probably all have their birthdays on different dates, no child is left out and you don't forget any appointments.
If you have twins or children who were born on the same day but in different months, you can of course use any date you like.
What exactly the individual date looks like is up to you. You can go away alone with the child and do something special, but you can also simply decide that you will go for a walk alone for two hours in the afternoon or go on a bike ride, see a movie or go out for cocoa and cake. There are no limits to your imagination.
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Determination day for each child
You can also let your child determine an entire day, from getting up to going to bed. It can choose what you do, whether and where you go or even what you eat. This can even be done in the presence of siblings and can therefore be easily integrated into everyday life. Of course, each of your children gets a day of determination.
An annual event
As I said: Children benefit from quality and not necessarily from quantity. If monthly individual dates are too much for you, you can also have a special event once a year. It's best to pick something that both you and your child think is great.
This can be one weekend a year when you collect mushrooms together. This could be a specific Christmas movie that you watch while drinking cocoa with marshmallows.
It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you celebrate this event and both have fun! These little traditions are the moments your children will remember for the rest of their lives.
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