Family Nights: The Last Bastion Of Family Togetherness

With both parents often working, many families today miss out on time together. While parents are busy with their jobs, children and teens tend to spend most of their time outside the home. Families find it very difficult to spend quality time with one another, and often setting up ‘family nights’ works best in such a situation.

Family nights are among the most effective ways of making up for lost daytime family togetherness. They are fairly easy to set up, too – just choose one night a week and make sure that everyone is at home.

The point is to share a meaningful experience, and this does NOT include watching your favorite show on television. For successful family nights, you need to set some rules and follow certain principles:

Choose A Day And Time

To begin with, set an evening each week on which the entire family comes together – a Friday or Saturday night usually works best. The general idea here is to involve all family members in fun activities of common interests.

Initially, you may find it difficult to accomplish this, but once you establish what the family enjoys doing the most together, the stage is set for a tradition that bonds your family and leaves everyone with fond memories.

Ensure That Everyone Commits

When a family decides on a family night, each member shares in the responsibility of making it work. During the day, parents as well as their children juggle jobs, school and other activities, but family nights should allows everyone to settle down and share their week’s experiences, excitements, frustrations and adventures.

Parents keep away from work and the telephone – the children finish their homework and other school activities before the ritual begins. Each member makes an effort to make a family night a success.

Undiluted Family Time

Family nights revolve around activities that involve everyone (as stated, passive entertainment like listening to music or watching television is out.) You could play board games, word games, visit relatives, play outdoor games or go for long walks together. Family nights are for something light, fun and collective enjoyment.

Family nights can make up for lost daytime family togetherness

Launch Family Night At Dinner Time

Dinner is the best time for launching a family night. By dinnertime, everyone has ideally wound up their day’s chores, and the best conversations take place over a communal meal. It is important to ensure that everyone is at the table – especially the children. Very importantly – do not involve friends or anyone else in family nights!

Even more importantly, make sure that family nights are bonding time between parents and children (it is hard enough to encourage kids to talk about their experiences.) Discuss a wide range of interesting topics over the dinner table – this will help improve communication between the members of your family.

Good communication makes it easier for everyone to share their difficulties and disappointments, and to laugh at their own follies. When we do not communicate with our own family members and do not share a bond with them, we tend to ‘sublimate’ our disappointments and hardships.

Years later, you will cherish these little times of joy spent together. Family nights are among the most effective ways to interact with one’s children, and to get to know them better while they are growing.

They are a sure-fire way of bridging generation and communication gaps, too. With the enormous stress that families face today, family nights make a decisive difference by helping family members share their strength and cement their relationships.

Copyright © Ruhi Khalid Parwani

This article may be reprinted with the complete author bio and a link back to http://www.lovingyourchild.com

Additional resources:

Free Great Parenting Show – Want to know how to build a joyful connected family? Participate in this teleseminar series that features some of the top parenting experts in the world. Ensure that your family thrives with new parenting techniques and powerful information that these world-class parenting educators use in their own families, and have taught to millions.
How to Become an Awakened Parent – An in-depth, comprehensive program that leads parents through a step by step process of examining themselves in order to raise empowered children. Master simple strategies for becoming an awakened parent, equipped to parent in a way that matches the world your children are growing up in.