Dad - It's time to spend time with the kids

Good afternoon everyone!  Hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving holiday with your family and friends.  We are glad to again have to opportunity to share with you how we can increase our happiness.  I hope last weeks post made an impact in your life and you were all able to find a little more peace by seeing people as people and staying out of the box.  This week we are going to focus on the men of the house.  You heard me Dad this one is for you.

Now have any of you experienced the following experience? Take a look at the video below and think about your (or your husband's) interaction with the kids.

We are all guilty of it at one point or another.  Sometimes we feel we are too busy or too tired.  The truth is there should always be time for our kids.  Whether it be reading a book, going fishing, wrestling on the couch, or having dinner.  Let's make some time guys. This post is for the fathers and focuses on father leisure time with their children.  This subject is especially pertinent to us authors since we are both fathers of two little children.  It will be largely focused around an article about the importance of a father’s participation in family leisure activities (Buswell, Zabriskie, Lundberg, & Hawkins, 2012).

time for our kids.

In our day and age it seems we are experiencing a new kind of fathering.  Marsiglio (1991) described a new father as one involved in seeking to establish close, intimate bonds with their children while providing nurturance and affection, engages in day-to-day caregiving tasks on his own, and is involved with daughters as much as he is sons. Marks and Palkovitz argue the new father is not new at all is rather a return to post-industrial fathers when the father was involved in many aspects of their child’s life. Among these ideas of fatherhood is the underlying trend if fathers are becoming more involved in the home with their children in an effort to provide better outcomes for their children.

Research shows fathers who are involved with their children in playing and caregiving are related to positive outcomes for their children (Brotherson et al., 2005; Pettit, Brown, Mize, & Lindsey, 1998). Playing and caregiving could include changing diapers, preparing dinner, dressing the children, or getting up during the night with younger children. Positive benefits include positive mental development (Roggman, Boyce, Cook, Christiansen, & Jones, 2004), greater problem-solving skills (Easterbrooks & Goldberg, 1984), and increased interaction with peers (Pettit et al).

In her study Buswell looked at father participation in leisure through the lens of the core and balance model we talked about a couple weeks ago.  Here is a small review in case you have forgotten.  There are two types of family leisure patterns, core and balance.  Core activities are usually done inside or near the home, are performed often, and typically require little or no financial resources.  Examples include watching television or movies together, shooting hoops in the driveway, playing board games and video games together, or going on family walks. Balance activities on the other hand are usually done away from the home, are novel experiences, not done as often, and may require more resources such as time, effort, and finances. Examples of these activities include family vacation, camping out, going on a hike, or attending a public swimming pool together.  Core leisure activities usually relate with family cohesion while balance leisure activities usually relate with family adaptability.  Now back to the current study.  During this study father involvement in core family leisure activities proved to be strongly related to all aspects of family functioning (both cohesion and adaptability.) One interesting finding came from the children’s perspective.  Children felt the involvement of their father in core family leisure was the strongest predictor of family adaptability.  Additionally, satisfaction with core family leisure with the father involved was the single best predictor of all aspects of family functioning.  Are we starting to see a trend here?  Fathers, it seems like if we are going to be present for family leisure the every day, spontaneous core leisure activities are most important to our families’ cohesion, adaptability, and family functioning. 

Even after taking into account family characteristics such as highest level of education, annual income, unemployment, and history of divorce, father involvement in core family leisure was the strongest predictor of family cohesion. In other words, fathers who regularly participated in activities such as watching television and movies, playing board games and video games, eating home meals, playing sports in the yard or park, attending their children’s performances or competitions, gardening, reading books, etc., together with their families reported higher levels of family cohesion. These incredible findings are consistent with those of a recent study indicating daughters who play age-appropriate video games with their fathers report stronger mental health, a stronger sense of family connectedness, and exhibit better behavior (Coyne, Padilla-Walker, Stockdale, & Day, 2011).

In the 1970s terms such as Disneyland dad became commonly used to describe the leisure patterns of fathers, particularly nonresident fathers. This term characterized fathers in a negative light suggesting they interacted only occasionally with their children often disrupting regular family life by showing up and only participating in expensive or extraordinary family activities, or in other words, balance family leisure activities. Findings from the current study show participation in core family leisure activities is much more important in respect to family functioning than participation in balance family leisure. Although participation in balance family leisure activities is important and needed, fathers’ involvement in the everyday, home-based, common family leisure activities held more weight than the large, extravagant, out-of-the-ordinary types of activities when examining family functioning.  Therefore, rather than the occasional expensive family vacation alone, the satisfaction with regularly occurring home-based family activities such as eating dinner together, participating in hobbies and informal sports and yard activities together, watching television together, or playing board games and video games together with the father present was the single strongest predictor of all aspects of family functioning, particularly from the youth perspective. Scholars, professionals, families, and fathers would benefit to examine the emphasis placed on fathers spending time with their families in everyday activities. More importantly, it should be recognized, in the case of family functioning, fathers should focus on the quality of interaction and satisfaction of family members during the regular time they spend together in family leisure.

For those of you who work with families and particularly fathers, you would do well to use this information to help develop programs to promote fathers being more involved in quality, everyday, home-based leisure activities with their families. Fathers may want to consider participating in activities such as family meals, board/video games, practicing sports and hobbies, reading together, or other common activities easily done together at home with little or no resources. Professionals could also consider teaching fathers the importance of their involvement in everyday leisure activities, provide ideas for activities fathers could be involved in, and facilitate regular participation in such home-based activities.

Challenge:

Dads around the world, I know life can be exhausting sometimes.  Between your career, school, family, and a variety of other responsibilities you have a lot on your plate, but don’t forget to make time for your children and family.  Like we just learned it doesn’t need to be an extravagant weeklong vacation away from work.  The simple activities like wrestling, having family dinner, playing a board game, or reading a book will really make the difference.  So our challenge to dads everywhere is to make an extra effort this week to improve your core leisure time with your kids.  Play in the yard, read a book, or play go fish.  It will be well worth your time, I promise.

Share:

What are some of your favorite father leisure activities?  How do you make sure to find time to participate in father leisure activities after a long day at work?  Please share with us your thoughts, ideas, and questions.