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Ideas For Quality Family Time

By The Rescue® Team
Team RESCUE®

You may know your family inside-out from years and years of living together, but how much of the time you spend together is ‘quality time’? Many family memories will be spontaneous, and comfortable silences and quick interactions are a big part of being super close with someone. But creating quality time to really bond and share fun experiences or chances to grow can take a bit of organising! Here are some ways to include extra quality family time into your schedules, even when you all lead busy lives.

Find common priorities 

If everyone in your family often has a full plate, it might be hard to find chunks of time to sync up and hang out. You could turn a chore or commitment into quality time if you find a priority you all share. Whatever it is that you all prioritise – exercise, reading more, baking – coordinate so you can all share the time and support each other through it.

Say your kids are studying and you have work to do from home – if it's manageable, put aside some time for everyone to set up their workspaces in a communal area and keep each other company while you share those focused brain waves! This is also a good chance to get insight into what everyone is working on and how it’s going.

Set a family challenge

Sharing a goal is a great way to bond, and a family challenge – like who can walk the most kilometres in a month – can add an extra fun dash of competition and incentive. Even if you don’t spend time working toward the challenge together, you’ll be thinking about the same stuff, you’ll all have something to relate to each other about, and it encourages frequent check-ins.

Choose an activity you all enjoy or want to get better at and establish the rules and your timeline. For example:

Reading challenge.

Rules: You must be able to quickly summarise what’s just happened in your book around the dinner table. Count the amount of pages read and whoever has the most at the end of a week or month, wins.

Prizes optional! It depends on how seriously your family takes competition!

Share a weekly show/have a dedicated movie night 

Whether each week you watch a new episode of a show you all enjoy, or once every fortnight or month you have a standing movie night, enjoying entertainment is an easy low-energy way to put time aside to be together.

If you’re all feeling engaged, you might share some jokes or gasps as the story unfolds and enjoy a debrief afterwards. Or, if you’re all tired, you can just chuck it on, share the space and maybe talk about it over breakfast tomorrow.

Connecting while apart

Busy routines can have you passing each other by, maybe even eating at different times or having commitments out of the house at different times. If your family members are all old enough to have smartphones and you have access to smartphones, find a common app you can make a group chat about. 

Whether it’s sharing your daily Wordle score, playing a Scrabble game back and forth or competing for high scores on Candy Crush, an online game can have the wonderful by-product of keeping you in touch! Just make sure this doesn’t encourage excessive screen time. 

Dinner discussion topics

Family dinners are a classic quality time activity. You might enjoy hearing about everyone’s days and catching up. You can keep dinner time extra interesting by having everyone write a discussion topic and pulling one randomly from a hat. 

For example, you might want to know if your family members could only eat three types of cuisine for the rest of their lives, which would it be? Or if they had to choose between reading books or listening to music, which one and why? You might learn a lot about how your family thinks!

Family matters

Not every family is close. It just doesn’t always work that way. If you have a family unit you can spend time with, being there for one another can help you all grow and learn as individuals. A shoulder to cry on or somebody to laugh with can make even the hardest times a little bit easier. 

If you or a family member are struggling with feelings of isolation or overwhelm, try to lean on each other, seek professional support and reach for RESCUE Remedy® for some natural balance. We hope you enjoy your next family dinner!