Family Time: Are Phones Welcome ?

Having a family time where every memeber of the family come together in a place to have fun, address or iron out pressing issues. These kind of gathering flourishes and promotes the bond in the family, bring individual closer to each other in the family and unity thrives. Everyone needs to dedicate their time, interest and undivided attention to make the meeting successful.

With the advancements of smartphone usage, it had gotten a lot of our attention, we spend more time with it, we have become more addicted to it than we are to people. Some people could even do without having any physical relationship with any humans as long as a smartphone and internet connection is available. Smartphone in a way, has taken our time and attention to itself because of what we do with, making us less interested in some other things.

My family is not complex at all, we grew up with very strong bond and love: though we might not express it well ( funny siblings rival and fights ). We often get to sit together in the parlour every night, before dinner to after dinner and see a movie together, laugh, agree and disagree about the cast actions in the movie. This was our usual way of life every night. But there are days when dad would call us to sit together and would begin to address some issues or try to lecture us.

We've only had few family time that was 100% set aside to have fun. But living together in harmony has brought many occurrences of unplanned family time, spontaneously happened and everyone would play along. And yeah, I make use of my phone during family time but not when I am directly involved in an activities. If the family time which could be for movie night, fun, serious discussions, I tend to finish every important task on my phone before time for the family time.

My dad is the one who initiates most of the sponteneous family time we have had in my family. Due to the nature of his job, he is sometimes not around us for 3 days or a whole week and whenever he's back it's either he wants to tell us about how it was at work or he wants us to tell him about things that happened while he was away. He has a way of making it fun and getting our attentions to want to talk. At a time like this, we tend to drop our phones to listen to him and in way we all start to talk and share our piece.

Family time also has a way of healing any doubt, any gap and any feeling of been left out amongst family members. Family time could be a retreat for memebers to talk about the future of the family, plan ahead, agree to a course, etc. As long as there is undivided attention, full interest and willingness to participate without any distraction, a family time will always be full of memories that make us smile each time we remember.