Research shows that many children today spend far less time with their parents each day than they did a decade ago. The reality is that with fathers in particular children might only spend 30 minutes a day with him as he is gone before they awake in the mornings and doesn’t get home until after 7.00pm each night.

By that time he is exhausted and young children are about to go to bed and older children are often busy with their homework.

Increasingly working mothers have the same difficulty spending time with their children as, when they get home, they have to attend to dinner and the household chores and there is no time to simply chat and relate.

What Does This Lack Of Time Mean For Our Children?

What does this mean for our children? If parents are not spending time talking with them, asking them questions and finding out how their minds work who is influencing them? Who are they listening to, who are they telling their problems to and whose advice are they taking.

It is said that children are a product of their environment but if parents are not in the environment whose environment is your child a product of?

More and more children rely on the internet to get answers to their questions and to connect with people. This is dangerous as you don’t know who they are actually speaking with. It may not even be a real person and may be a made up identity who does not have your child’s best interest at heart. Also this technological communication means that your child is losing the ability to relate to another human one on one.

Children also rely heavily on their peers and this means that when friendships fail it is quite devastating for the child as they may have lost their primary support network.

What Is The Answer?

It is important that parents are very aware of this problem and schedule time each day to talk with their children. They need to ask them questions and listen to them. They need to be with them, making deposits into their emotional bank account (as Stephen Covey says). If they do not they will lose their children.

A possible solution may be to insist that the family eats together even if this means delaying dinner until quite late so that dad can be there too. After dinner the whole family should help with the clearing up as this builds a routine based on normalcy and is something that the child can rely on to happen.

There should also be a routine where one of the parents spends say, 10 minutes in the child's room, asking about his or her day each evening before they go to bed. This should rotate between parents so that a relationship builds between each parent and each child. If one parent is away this practice should be maintained by phone or Skype. It should become part of the family’s culture.

You will be amazed at how quickly closer relationships will develop if these practices are followed.