Concerned You Don’t Spend Enough Time With Your Kids? Science Says Quality Beats Quantity

As Inc. colleague Jessica Stillman writes, “Work, sleep, family, or fitness: pick three.” Balance is difficult to achieve. Compromises are inevitable.

The tradeoff that tends to make people feel the guiltiest? Spending less time than they want with their kids.

But if you want to raise emotionally healthy kids, the quantity of time you spend with them isn’t the only factor.

According to a classic study described in the book Total Leadership by Wharton professor Stewart Friedman, the number of hours busy people spend with their kids each day is not the best predictor of their children’s physical and emotional health. 

Instead, a better predictor was whether the parents were distracted when they spent time with their kids.

According to Friedman:

If you’re thinking about work when you’re with your child, the child knows it and it affects him or her.

Time and attention are not the same thing; there’s a big difference between physical presence and psychological presence. You can be spending time with people, but if you’re not psychologically present, you’re not doing anybody any good.

In short, time is good — but focused, undistracted quality time is better. (And so is what Jerry Seinfeld calls garbage time. As Seinfeld says about spending time with his kids:

I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about “quality time” — I always find that a little sad when they say, “We have quality time.”

I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.

Because that’s when real life happens.

Quality time or garbage time, the key is focus. You’re with your kids, and you’re not doing anything else. Thinking about anything else. Worrying about anything else. You’re just there, with them.

But that doesn’t mean you can never be work-focused and work-driven. The study focused on what Friedman calls the inner experience of work:

• A parent’s perceived values regarding the importance of career and family 
• The psychological interference of work on family life (Friedman defines this as thinking about work when you’re physically with your family)
• The apparent control over time spent working

Those factors, rather than the quantity of time spent together, correlated with the degree children displayed behavioral problems, something Friedman feels are key indicators of mental health. After all, kids are less likely to act out when they’re relatively happy and feel good about themselves.

That’s why undistracted time is just one piece of the puzzle. How you feel about your work also matters. According to Friedman, “To the extent that a (parent) was performing well in and feeling satisfied with their job, their children were likely to demonstrate relatively few behavior problems, again, independent of how long they were working.”

If you love your work but are distracted, you lose the impact on your kids of your passion for your profession. 

“A parent’s psychological availability, or presence, which is noticeably absent when they are on their digital device,” Friedman writes, “was also linked with children having emotional and behavioral problems.”

In simple terms, 30 undistracted minutes are better than 60 minutes dipping in and out of emails.

So how can you improve your ratio of focused time?

One way is to block out family time the same way you block out work time. Have dinner as a family. Help your kids with their homework. Watch a movie. Get outside. Do something. Do anything.

Just do it together, undistracted.

It won’t be as hard as you think. Every family has peak times when they can best interact. If you don’t proactively free up that time, you’ll slip back into work stuff.

Working when you’re home is okay. Telling your kids, “I need 15 minutes to send a few emails, and then we’ll go outside and play,” is okay — as long as you put everything else aside after those 15 minutes and just play. After all, one of the factors Friedman identified is how you feel about your work. It’s okay to show your work is important.

You just have to show that your kids, when you’re spending time with them, are just as important.

As Friedman writes, “We were surprised to see in our study that parents’ time spent working and on child care — variables often much harder to do anything about, in light of economic and industry conditions — did not influence children’s mental health.

“So, if we care about how our careers are affecting our children’s mental health,” he continues, “we can and should focus on the value we place on our careers and experiment with creative ways to be available, physically and psychologically, to our children, though not necessarily in more hours with them.”

Because you may not be able to control how much time you spend with your kids.

But you can control how you spend it.