“If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them and half as much money” – Abigail Van Buren

This quote shows how important spending time with your child is in relation to their overall physical and emotional well being and personality development. However, the prevalent high-pressure lifestyles have parents the world over facing the dilemma of how to go about maintaining a fine balance between work and family life. This has further resulted in an ongoing debate regarding which is better, the quantity or quality of time spent with children. The fact is that both need to work hand in hand in order to provide children with the necessary parental support for their emotional and intellectual development. So let us go ahead and take a look at both these aspects (namely quantity and quality) in relation to spending time with your child.                                                                                                                                                             

How the Quantity and Quality of Time Work Together

As a parent, you are your child’s first teacher. The amount of time you spend interacting with your child during their initial years will definitely have an impact on their long term intellectual and emotional development, hence during the initial years spending more time (quantity of time) with your child is crucial.

As your child grows older and starts getting busy with their schoolwork and hobbies, the focus shifts to the time the entire family is able to spend together (after completing their individual chores). During this phase it is the quality of time you spend with your child that has an impact on their physical and psychological wellbeing, for it is now that they need your full attention when they talk about numerous events which have occurred over the course of the day like; funny incidents involving them and their friends, any problems they faced, remarks by teachers or even any achievement of theirs.

Giving them your undivided attention (without checking up on office messages and emails), will not only make your child realise that you have their back but also strengthen the level of communication between you’ll. It will also help you pick up on casual statements made by your child which may hold a lot of significance. So as we can see, the quality of time spent with your child is also important in order to help and guide your child in the right direction.

The above-mentioned facts show how both, the quantity and quality of time spent with your child work in tandem to help shape your child’s personality and therefore how important they both are over the course of your child’s growth and development.