How to help your kids by spending time with them?

The one big mistake parents do and it doesn’t seem to be that hard to fix.

I hear a lot of parents saying that they are so lucky now that their kids have grown up and they have more time for themselves. Now they can go out, on small weekends for two and all sorts of events like that. I heard people that have started some very interesting hobbies after their kids have grown over 10–13 years old.

It is very admirable of those people that they choose to stay by their kids all that time instead of doing something that they found more fun, or enjoyable. I want to congratulate them for the effort because it is an effort. And I have a lot of examples that did not put in that effort. And raising children requires, indeed, effort.

And that is something that seems natural, somehow. Your kids have grown up, they need, or they should need, you less. Thus you have more time for yourself. You don’t have to change diapers anymore, you don’t have to carry them from one place to another, and you don’t have to watch them in the park not to get hurt. They do seem to need you less, so you give them the space.

That is also good. Kids need to feel that they can do stuff on their own. They need to feel strong enough and prepared enough for the world. This will give them the courage to do what they want and love without being afraid they are not enough.

My experience

And this is exactly what we felt and did after my boy got to be 10–11 years old. He started doing other stuff, playing with other kids, doing some sports and even chatting with other kids. It seems it was time to let him loose a bit. We tried to be there for him when he needed something, and also listen to him when he had opinions and stories, and ideas, or when he learned something new. We wanted him to know we support him that we are here for him and that we believe in him and in his feelings and ideas.

But stuff kinda changed somehow. He started to be distracted, it got harder for us to get his attention or to make him focus on tasks. He started having smaller grades at school, and he started fighting at school as well.

We felt him angry and aggressive and with a lack of empathy. And this was a big change from how we knew him. He was the kind of boy that would help the little ones at school or in the playground if someone would pick on them. He would be the one that would get super interested in a science topic or a new language.

Of course, when we talked with other parents we got spectacular advice and points of view like

• He is in his teens. They tend to go crazy now. Be patient
• OMG! Did you get here? So has mine. Good luck guys. But I am sorry for you.
• Oh! And this is just the beginning. It going to get worse from here.

And the best of them all

• Just kick his ass a bit. Show him why he should be good!

This last one is the worst one. I don’t even want to talk about it.

But it got me thinking a little. So, in the same period of time, approximately, we heard 2 things:

1. Parents have more time because their kids have grown up
2. Kids start to change and be a little more aggressive and a little more unwilling to listen to their parents.

I am sure these two are correlated somehow.

The solution

I have a few broken parts in me that are very very not helpful in day-to-day life, but here they helped me a lot.

First of all, I feel guilty and responsible for almost everything that happens around me. Especially with the kids.

I also look for long-term results, as much as I can see them.

These things make me feel a tone of guilt all day for anything and make me feel overwhelmed because I could never find my way towards resolving stuff because I need to fix the core of them.

But in this case, It helped us. I took Andrei’s problems on myself. If I would have spent more time with him I would have helped him with his struggles. Because it was clear that he was struggling with something. There were situations or feelings or emotions that he might have felt overwhelmed with.

So we took them one by one.

First the fighting

We spent time with him talking about what happened when he got into the fights. We went to hot chocos together, we spent time with him in the park if we saw he had nobody there with him. We would play with him with legos ( he is trying to build a gun from legos and I tried to help him with that). I also started to play games with him on the console(unfortunately for my kid, I am not a gamer and he kinda suffers because of that, so I wanted to change that). We wanted to make him feel that we are his friends that we are there for him and that he can trust us. For the trust part, we listened to his stories without any of our personal opinions. We would ask him how he felt in that situation and we would confirm that it is ok to feel that way. We would listen and be interested in his story.

The result is that he is way less aggressive and way less agitated. He is a little more in control of his reactions and he knows when he feels the things that he feels.

The conclusion here was that by being his friend, by listening not to give advice, but to listen and confirm him, he would feel safe enough to open up and release tension.

Second was the focus

He would have trouble focusing on stuff and being present. This is, I think, related to the very easy way of receiving dopamine from external stimuli, especially social media, and especially the short video features of all the apps on phones.

The problem was that he would be lazy in doing stuff that required work, and he would be very very hard on himself when he failed. And because of the lack of focus, he would fail a lot.

For this, we started playing chess. I noticed that he likes it, and I am a little bit of a challenge for him. So in the beginning, while playing he was all over the place, not only in the game but outside of it as well. He would fidget and move, look at his phone, and feel super bad if he lost something.

What I did was to be patient with him. I almost every time, let him win. I wanted to show him that it is ok to lose. I wanted him to see that I like losing because that is how I learn. At the end of the games, I would get a small lesson for myself from the game. I would win as well sometimes, but I would do it with tons of support and praise. I would pick on any good thing he did to point out how he is improving and what he did well.

The result was that after just a few weeks of playing almost every day for about half an hour, my son was focusing 100% on the game, for the entire game, with no fidgeting, no phone, and no jumping around. He would be able to create a plan for himself and follow it. He would be able to beat me fair and square. He also started to learn about chess online, watching videos about it and moves and stuff like that.

The conclusion was that by spending time together on this he started to feel good about the activity. Being an activity that we do together and that he likes he got enough dopamine from it that he did not need the other distractions. And by exercising focus he started to do it easily.

The third one was the problem with the grades and attitude toward school

Here we applied the same approach as in the other cases. It was like two for two so it must work, right?

Well, not soo easy. This time we requested a bit more from him and the response is slower. He struggles with grammar and math. we are lucky enough to be able to help him with both. We started to invest time to explain what he is missing and exercise what he learns. When he fails he feels awful, he blames himself and he cries a lot. We hug him, we tell him it is OK to fail, we try to convince him that failing is the best way to learn, and we ask him what he can learn.

And, most important, we extremely praise him when he gets it right. That is the most important part. We want him to get a tone of dopamine and satisfaction and reward by doing this. We also joke and laugh as much as possible when doing homework to help him associate good vibes and feelings with learning and schoolwork.

The result is that he knows more now and he is not as sad when doing homework as before. He still takes failure hard, but it is better. This is still a work in progress.

The conclusion is similar to the others, a bit more time spent with him, with compassion, patience, and fun makes even school work seem better.

What amount of time should we invest in our children?

So getting back to our initial problem.

I think we got it wrong.

Indeed when the kids are very small they need a lot of time and energy but after some time, like, three maybe four that amount of time starts to decrease. This makes us think that at some point we are “free” from being a parent. We will be free from taking care of the kids. And we get so enthusiastic about this that we stop investing any of our time.

Not only that but, we also say that our kids are good and nice when they do not require time from us. That is bad on soo many other levels.

Now, of course, there is the other side. Too much time. Making everything for them. Not giving them the space or liberty to evolve and gather the strength and self-confidence that they can do anything by themselves. So, too much is also not helping.

What I realized is that, after a certain age, as I said, maybe three or four, the amount of time to offer your kids is the same. With my kids about one and a half, maybe two hours a day is enough.

The idea is that this time is offered consistently and fully present.

Not while doing something else, or watching the phone, or watching a movie. It is 100% of your energy that goes to the child.

How do we do that? Well, that is a story for another day.

I hope this helped you in your struggles with your pre-teen and teen kids.

Hugs and positive thoughts, my friends!