“Time spent with family is worth every second” -Unknown
Life as a parent to two young kids is busy. Life as a parent is busy. Period. For my family, we are four people in four different places during the week. After a day at work, school and daycare, we all have a variety of other things going on in each our lives. From my kids participating after-school activities, weekend activities like hockey and dance, play dates with friends, birthday parties, grocery shopping, running errands and my husbands part-time job reffing hockey, carving out quality time for the four of us to spend time together often proves to be difficult.
Ever since we had Princess Peach we have tried to schedule specific family time for us to be together, but it is hard. As much as we have the best of intentions to spend quality time together, some weeks it doesn’t pan out as planned. We try as best as we can to eat dinner together, but often the majority of our time spent together is in the mornings on the weekends when we don’t have to be out the door by 8 am.
And I would be amiss to not mention technology. My family is addicted to our technology. Often my husband and I are playing on our phones or my kids playing on their iPads. There have been times at dinner (our time where we are supposed to be engaged as a family), that we are all on our technology. We are not perfect and dinner time is a work in progress! Making small changes like playing a game where we all talk about our day and playing 2 truths and a lie has created some consistency in our dinner times and gives each of us a chance to share parts of our day with each other.
The thing is, life is going by really quickly. I don’t ever want my kids to look back on their childhood and not have wonderful family memories that we made together. I know for me, some of my favourite childhood memories were spent with my parents and sister. I want the same for my kids. But the crazy thing is that on average Canadian families spend 14% of their time together doing all kind of activities. That’s not that much time together at all.
That’s why I love that Leon’s set out to answer this question of how much time do families spend together by conducting a really cool social experiment called #ProjectSmartFurniture. Leon’s wanted to know how much time do family members actually spend together, so they can make the most of it. Focusing on the living room as the centralized spot of family time together, Leon’s helped one family, the Ahluwalia family, track all of their family members-two parents, three kids and two pets to answer this question. It’s important to note that Leon’s put the centralized family-time hotspot in the couch as it’s an integral part of a family’s living room. Each family member wore a wristband which tracked which family members were together and sent a signal back to the couch.
Time tracked for this experiment was based on time spent near the living room. This does not account for total time spent together outside of the centralized space. The results looked at which family members were together, which members of the family spent the most time together and the average number of hours family members spent together per day. You can read more about the Project Smart Furniture experiment and results here.
Watch the commercial to learn more about the experiment:
If you are like me, watching this video made me think. I started calculating how many times in the past week my family had spent quality time together. Project Smart Furniture has made me think about what changes I want to implement in my family to make sure that we are making the memories I want to be creating for all of us. And those memories include all four of us, together.
Be sure to check out the Project Smart Furniture site to get more information, and you can connect with Leon’s on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Disclosure: This is a sponsored post. However, all opinions are my own.
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