Family Activities

In our busy on the go society, families should schedule some time together. You can set up some regular occurring activities to help with this. The activities that you add will have to vary depending upon the age and interests of your kids. We recently added a couple of nights that are going pretty well.

We have made Friday night, movie night. We let the girls stay up a little longer to watch a movie with us. We don’t usually start the movie late, so they don’t necessarily stay up so much later. Sometime the girls will go with me to the video store to pick out the movie, other times we’ll watch something that we already have. The girls really enjoy their movie night. If you think creatively, you can incorporate other things into you night to make it stand out. Maybe you could dress up as your favorite characters from the movie you’re going to watch. You could also make dinner or snacks that are related in theme your movie, maybe you could make Mexican food, if the story takes place in Mexico or some of the characters are from Mexico. You can also decorate you place around a theme of your movie and involve your kids in this and they’ll feel more involved.

We also have a game night. We usually do board games. The game that you pick will need to be age and developmentally appropriate for your kids. If you have very small kids, you might want to avoid games with lots of little pieces that they might swallow or lose. One of our daughters is very good at memory games, so she enjoys those. Our other daughter is at the point where she is just starting to understand rules, so we don’t play games that are too complicated. Board games are good because you can challenge your kids mentally. You can get them to incorporate strategy and planning if they’re old enough.

I have an aunt that used to have family dinner every Sunday. This was nice because her kids would all come over on Sunday and it was some good quality time spent with the family. Later on the family dinners weren’t so frequent, but this is something that your kids can look back on with fondness later in their lives.

How many activity nights should you have? That will vary depending upon everyone’s schedules. If your kids are already super busy with baseball, soccer, boy scouts, girl scouts, and all the other activities that are available to kids to today, you might not have so many slots that you can schedule in. Some parents go overboard and their kids have activities planned every day. It is also good if your kids have some time where they can do things on the spur of the moment, (maybe your kids might want to invite a friend over, but can’t do this if they don’t have any openings in their schedule). It is also important to remember that you kids are growing and developing and too many activities can hinder their development. If you don’t go over board in your family activities, they become something that you and your kids can look forward to, if you have too many of them, they aren’t so special.

Take some time and think about what you might be able to do together as a family. While you might know your kids very well, it wouldn’t hurt to ask them what they’d be interested in and involve them in the planning. So go ahead and add a family night or two and you and your kids can look forward to this time together.