As a mom who worked full-time while my kids were small, I worried a lot about how the time I gave my career might have a negative impact on them. At the same time, though, I knew I wouldn’t be happy as a stay-at-home mom.
There were moments when Mike and I struggled to balance two careers, two kids and a household. We knew there were ways we could shift that balance–by selling our house and buying a smaller one, making it possible for our family to live on one income. But we never made those changes. Had they felt important to either of us, I know we would have.
Instead, though, we focused on giving our family quantity time.
What I mean by quantity time, though, is not that I gave my family every moment. I mean that, when I was with my family, I focused on giving them my attention. I’ve written about some of the ways I devoted time to my kids, but quantity time isn’t only about being focused on the people you love. It’s also about making them a priority.
That means valuing time spent sitting on the couch with your kids more highly than the time “wasted” by watching a TV show they love.
It means using the time you spend in the car, driving your kids to and from various places, as a chance to talk through a problem they’re having at school.
It means taking the early hours of Saturday morning to have a conversation with your partner, rather than sleeping in.
The phrase “quality time” was created in the early 1970’s, just as larger numbers of primarily white women began to enter the workplace. This reduced the amount of time they spent at home with their children. So, at first, the phrase was used sarcastically. The implication was that, since women were no longer offering their time in quantity, they had to offer something less valuable in its place. (Never mind that, for scores of women, the privilege of staying at home to raise their children was never available. That tells us what we need to know about the sincerity of concern for children’s welfare.)
But it turns out that, as a culture, we really believe in quality time. “Date night,” for instance, has become the solution to the problem of spouses not taking the time to communicate regularly. Summer vacations have come to be viewed as a designated “family bonding time,” rather than the many hours we spend together every day.
Those instants of quality time became a way to compartmentalize our interactions with each other. Determining what that time actually accomplished wasn’t something most of us thought to do.
In comparison to those “quality” pieces, quantity time is often devalued. Over and over again, Mike and I were encouraged to schedule a “date night” and leave our kids with a sitter–but we honestly preferred to have a family movie night on Friday evenings. We followed that up with a “coffee date” in our own living room on Saturday mornings. The truth is, we’ve always spent more time together than most other couples we know.
Those Friday night movies didn’t feel like anything particularly special to our kids, of course; they were our routine. Our children wanted family vacations to Florida, like the ones their friends were taking. (Never mind that many of those families fought during their time on the beach, unaccustomed to spending any time together. Never mind that we all laughed our heads off throughout The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.)
Quality time is the easier gift to give because it’s contained. It’s easy to identify; it’s the time blocked out in red on our calendars, marked VACATION! It’s the date and time printed on a ticket to a play. It’s the boarding pass for a trip you’ve planned.
Quantity time is more difficult to offer–both because it makes greater demands on us and because it’s so often invisible.
It was the hour of sleep I sacrificed every morning in order to teach an 8 a.m. class, just so I could be home in the afternoon and my children could hang out with me rather than going to after-school care.
It was the time we devoted to playing a game like Mad Sad Glad around the dinner table, asking the kids to tell us what made them happy today, what made them angry, what broke their hearts.
But by giving quantity time to our kids, Mike and I gave them a family that genuinely enjoys being together. Mostly, that’s because we know how to be together.
And that’s the real purpose of quantity time: making sure the people you love understand that you don’t need an excuse to be with each other. You don’t need a week marked off as VACATION! You can hang out together just because that’s where you like to be.
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