When you were a kid, your parents’ room felt completely off-limits, but now your kids treat your bed like their own personal hangout spot? Or maybe you’re always banging applesauce crosses and coloring with your kids, even though you don’t remember your parents sitting on the floor playing with Barbie dolls or building Legos together. One parent asked on Reddit if anyone noticed that they spend far more time interacting with their children each day than they do with their mom and dad.
“I know my kids are still very young (3 and 6), but I don’t remember my own parents always demanding attention. For as long as I can remember, when I was a kid, I played with friends or in my room until dinner was ready or I needed help around the house,” the OP writes. “My parents would come home from work, turn on the news, prepare dinner, do housework, and prepare for the next day, but there was very little one-on-one interaction.”
On the contrary, from the moment OP gets home from work until the kids go to bed. above — Play with the kids, talk to them, make dinner. My six-year-old has a lot of toys in his room, but he rarely goes in there and plays on his own.
“I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just not what I went through with my own parents. I think I’m more concerned about what other parents are going through in this situation.”
The comments below the post point out that 3- and 6-year-olds still need a lot of attention and help, and that OP probably doesn’t remember their childhood clearly enough to remember how close their parents were to them. However, the majority of comments suggest that there are many other parents who feel the same way.
“My husband says this a lot. Our kids regularly watch TV in bed, use the bathroom, try to talk while showering, move toys around the room, etc. We hardly knew what our parents’ bedrooms and bathrooms looked like,” one commenter responded.
“Growing up, I don’t think I ever walked into my parents’ bedroom without knocking. Now the kids…just live there sometimes,” another wrote. “My 4-year-old daughter follows me to the bathroom and narrates everything I do and asks random questions. Depending on the day, I find it endearing, and other times it drives me completely insane (lol). Being together all the time is totally different from the way we were raised, but honestly, I love it, even if it’s tiring.”
All the commenters are on to something.
Research shows that modern parents spend significantly more time raising children than parents in the 1960s. According to a study published in marriage and family journalIn 1965, mothers spent an average of 54 minutes a day on childcare activities. In 2012, mothers worked twice as many hours, at 104 minutes per day. For fathers, the amount of time spent almost quadrupled. Dads in 1965 spent about 16 minutes a day with their children, compared to 59 minutes a day for dads today.
But why is there such a trend toward greater inclusion, especially when most households have both parents working instead of just one?
“I think there are two things at play here. Firstly, the pressure we put on parents these days to constantly spend time with their children, organize activities, actively participate, etc. is terrible. Help them play with something, take them somewhere fun, etc.” If we had asked them to go, our parents would have laughed us out of the house (which we often see from our nieces and nephews). They provided us with toys, but we just had to take care of them without bothering them,” one commenter wrote.
They went on to say that when we were kids, nothing was readily available, toys ordered from catalogs took weeks to arrive, and there were no long lines or car rides for entertainment. Maybe we were just good at having fun because we had no choice but to learn.
