The Best Thing That You Can Give to Your Child Is Not Just Your Time
Modern day parenting requires something more
In my initial years of motherhood there’s no denying that even being a top writer in parenting with many publications, at one point I had really struggled in actually making a friendly relationship with my child.
Identifying the need to change my parenting
My son is two years old and I found it quite challenging to engage in play with him during his active hours. It’s good that the Internet is giving us the knowledge of understanding the difference between open ended toys, interactive toys, sustainable toys, etc etc but it does consume a lot of time and energy. There was a phase where I wanted to give all the materialistic pleasures to my child. Unfortunately, with that I actually ended up becoming a mother who got influenced by the Internet so much that I used to buy toys for my child without thinking of the future. To be honest, I had even spent more than $500/month in buying different toys for my son.
As a working parent I thought that by filling the house with toys I would compensate on the time that I miss to spend with my son.
Sadly the reality took over. Even with all that stuff at my place my child engaged in play for hardly 10 minutes and all that effort that I was putting up in finding the right things for him was getting wasted.
Experiencing the change in my parenting
Recently after my son’s second birthday we went for a family road trip. With decent breaks we covered a total of 900 miles, landed up spending hours in our car, got drenched in the monsoon rain, listened to our favourite tracks, forgot our calorie intake, and enjoyed family time like never before. We are pandemic parents and this was the first time when we took our son out on a vacation. The overall experience was quite overwhelming. Honestly, living the normal life again helped me in experiencing the unadulterated version of parenting. The joy of actually not engaging on screen for days…
