How Are You Spending Your Child's Time?

Time is a fickle thing — there is either too much or too little. It is not the amount of time that is really important, it's how you spend it and who you spend it with.

In a time where our society's parents are running around taking their kids to one event after another, or signing them up for more extracurricular activities than there is time in the day, I have to stop and wonder: are we leaving something out?

Signing your children up for these programs DOES enrich their lives, open up opportunities and help make them the people they will eventually be.

You know what else does that? Throwing a baseball with grandpa, making cookies with grandma, going to the zoo with your aunts and uncles, and playing cops and robbers with your cousins. Those are the moments that both the family members and children WILL treasure for years to come.

The years you have with your child are fleeting. The actual time they WANT to hang out with the family, more so. Too many times, these moments are pushed aside for sleepovers or girl scouts or something MORE IMPORTANT to do.

What is that teaching our children? That family is only there when there aren't more important things to do? Or even worse, just for the holidays?

So I am going to ask every parent out there to do something that may be shocking: PUT FAMILY FIRST! Aunts, uncles, grandmas, cousins, all of them! Make sure your child spends as much time with them as possible.

Don't let the games, play dates, lessons and other activities take over the all important family dinners and outings! Even if you have to schedule everything in your life, please remember to pencil them in. You will be giving your child the best gift in the world, the reason that we have children in the first place — FAMILY.

Believe me, when you are old and gray and your kids are deciding on a nursing home, or you are living with them in their palace of a house (that they have now because of their amazing baseball career that you started) you are going to want that feeling of family to be strong in your little ones!