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This content was sponsored by Audible.ca
Being a dad is one of the most important roles a person will ever play, and good fathering isn’t just about big things like providing for your family and modeling healthy emotional behavior: it’s also about the little things, like spending an afternoon doing a puzzle or listening to stories before bed.
Investing time is one of the most important ways to build strong relationships with your kids that will give them the love and support they need to develop into healthy adults. It isn’t always easy to find new things to do with them, though, especially as they get older, so here are three ways to spend quality time with children of any age.
1. Let Them Choose the Activity
Think back to your childhood. What were your favorite things to do? What could you not wait to get into when you got back from school? What activities and games did you dream about doing when you went to bed at night?
As parents, we often want to direct children toward activities we enjoy ourselves, or that we think would be educational. But one of the best things about having kids is watching them move through the world, developing their own interests and obsessions, and sometimes one of the most enjoyable ways to spend quality time with your children is to let them involve you in their favorite games and pastimes.
2. Listen to Your Favourite Audiobooks Together
If you’re looking for ways to pass a quiet evening at home with your family, listening to an audiobook is one of the best ways to do so. Not only do audiobooks provide thought-provoking entertainment, they also give you a chance to share important moments of reflection, insight, and inspiration with your children.
But listening to stories isn’t just a good way to help your kids develop an essential practice of stillness, quiet and empathy in a busy world. It is also a chance for you to share important experiences from your own life with them. Introducing your little ones to a beloved audiobook from your own childhood, for example, is a way of creating family traditions, of building a sense of connection that will bind you together for years to come.
The best way to find children’s audiobooks with stories your kids will love is through an Audible membership. Audible lets you browse new titles and old classics, making it easy to share your personal favorites and to discover new ones together.
3. Involve Them in Household Work
We tend not to think of chores as a way of bonding, but some household tasks can provide a great opportunity for spending quality time with your kids.
Take yard work, for example, or cooking — whether you’re raking leaves and cleaning out the shed or prepping a chicken for roasting, there are lots of safe little jobs you can give your children that will open up space for real conversations to happen while helping them learn valuable skills at the same time.
Time can be a scarce resource, and it’s easy for parents to feel that they aren’t investing enough of it in their kids.
But spending quality time with your kids can be as easy as asking them to teach you how to play their favorite video game, or putting on a classic audiobook while you drive to the grocery store, or even just asking them about their day while they stir the risotto and you add the cheese.
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