Quality time vs. Quantity time

Spoiler alert…….. Today I may step on some toes. What I am suggesting here can be done by many families……… but, perhaps not by all.

I know a family. Mom and Dad both worked low wage, maybe even minimum wage jobs. They had a child and Mom decided to stay home and be a full time at-home mother. I looked at their financial situation……I thought that they were insane. The numbers just didn’t work according to my vision of what a modern family should have and be. They struggled for years. They did without things that we all take for granted. And…… in the process…… they raised a really fine son and he is now starting his family. They made a choice. They gave up a lot of material stuff and raised their son themselves. I’ve changed my mind. Looking back, their decision is one of the wisest and most unselfish I have ever seen. They chose relationship and family over stuff.

I grew up in the 50’s. My family, in retrospect, was comfortably middle class. I thought we were wealthy because we lived in a stone house. Go figure. We had a used car that ran most of the time, one black and white tv that worked most of the time, one room in the house that had air conditioning that worked most of the time, and 15 year old appliances. My dad worked and my mom stayed at home and raised me and my siblings. Today, a family living the way we did would be considered poor. Maybe………. but we were very happy……..we were rich.

The tv tells us that we “need” all kinds of stuff: 2 flat screen tv’s, two or three late model cars, 3 or 4 $500 cell phones, internet, cable tv, health club membership, membership on a “select soccer team”…… you get the drift. Having these things is the new “normal”. But, having these things usually requires a 2 income family. In other words, we have bought into society’s standard for a “comfortable” life and have accepted the 2 income budget that goes with it. In order to support this modern lifestyle, mom and dad both have to work….. often long hours….. often more than one job. In short, we have turned the job of raising our children over to strangers…..or worse…..to machines in order to have more and better stuff. But, I doubt that our modern families are any happier than the 1950’s family that I grew up in.

We talk about giving our kids “quality time”. But the truth is that we don’t get to plan what will become “quality time”. Our children will look back 10, 20 years from now and decide what the quality time was. And it won’t be the big party, the trip to Disney world, or the lavish Christmas. It will be the conversation at dinner, sitting in the back yard one summer evening, being there after the big breakup, the wordless hug, that first ten minutes after a disastrous day at school.

We can’t plan out an hour or two of “quality time” from 7 to 8pm on Tuesday night and execute the plan. The best we can do is give our kids a large amount of time and hope that some of it…… when they look back at what shaped them into adults ……. will have been “quality time”. This means that either mom or dad has to BE there…….a lot. I don’t think that it is critical which one. The work of “being there” is hard work…….it is emotionally taxing ….. and our society places no value on it.

We can’t give our children “quality time”, but we can give them “quantity time”……and some of it will turn out to be quality time. The truth is that the secret of creating quality time is to give our kids lots of time……lots of us. This job cannot be farmed out to a nanny or a day care………or a video game.

Greed is a prejudicial term. We usually apply it to people whose lifestyle is well above our own. Greedy people are bad…..right? But, there is a low level of greed that has become normal. Our very high, now normal, expectations of the stuff we should have has led us to also accept as normal the idea of turning the raising of our children over to strangers. We take ourselves out of our children’s lives so we can work, so we can fill our children’s lives with stuff.

New definitions:

Love your neighbor………. give your children your time and attention by raising them yourselves……… be there when they get off of the bus after a disastrous day at school. Talk to them more than the tv does. Throw large amounts of “quantity time” at them………. they will find the “quality time” in it.

Greed……….. give your kid a car….. give them the latest video game and a state of the art cell phone…..and throw in an hour of yourself………. from 7-8pm……. on Tuesday evening.

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”  And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.

Jesus, NIV

Thank you Cindy…….. for the sacrifices that you made…….to give our sons your time……yourself…… both quantity time…….and quality time.