Parents Spend Less That An Hour Per Week Playing With Their Children

Exhausted parents are spending less than one hour of quality time each day with their children.

The statistic comes from a Thomas cook study of 1500 working parents with a child under six years of age.

A total of 8 out of ten parents didn’t feel they spent anywhere near enough time with their youngsters during the working week.

Reading time was one of the activities hit the hardest, with the average family only managing to get 32 minutes with books together.

Play time together was another dead end, with the average parent managing a paltry 43 minutes and dinner time conversation reduced to 36 minutes per week.

Long working hours, being caught up with chores and cooking dinner were the things that were the biggest time thieves for families.

Thomas Cook found that parents were more able to spend time with their children on holiday, obvs, with reading to children jumping up to 2.45 hours and play time 6.50 hours.

Family psychology from Channel 4’s The Secret Life of 4 and 5 Year Olds, Dr Sam Wass said: “Parents often have to work hard and, of the time we do spend together, parents and children spend much of it in their own private worlds, staring at screens. But in fact, there’s a huge amount of research suggesting that it’s the time spent together – talking, and doing shared activities as a family – that is most beneficial both for children and their parents.

“Many of the conversations that we do have with children are focused on giving them orders, and telling them what to do – things like chores and homework.

“This is important, of course, but it’s also important to engage in shared family activities where your child takes the lead. This happens much more often on holiday. It’s for this reason, I think, that many peoples’ warmest and most cherished memories, later in life, are of holidays they went on as children.”