It negates quality time for the family as well as reduces the spouse to a child – who must now spend more time with the children and not with the husband. Some men argue that this practice is driven by the fact that if they do not work extra at home then they will not be able to finish their work. In most cases this is total fiction.
It may actually mean that the person is poorly organized at their work place, or that they are taking onto themselves work that does not belong to them. They may do this in order to impress their seniors at work, but at the expense of their family life and availability.
A well organized person will do all his work at the work place and be fully available to their family when they get home. Work that is left over from the previous day can easily wait to be done tomorrow when you get back to the office. Your family, many times, cannot wait and must not be made to wait. Children do not stop growing and learning new things just because the father is currently too busy to spend time with them.
Your wife and the maid are not the father of your children. They can never play the role that the father has to play. This is not to say mothers are always available to the family. Some mothers get so busy with club, church and other activities that they too become scarce to their families, including their husbands. A smart spouse will strive to strike a balance between work and home availability.
An imbalance between these two critical areas can have very serious consequences for the family as a whole. Striking that balance is a matter of deliberate decision making.
You need to make a decision to be available to the family even when there is a lot that needs to be done in the form of work or reading the papers. It is also possible to read the papers together with your spouse and share the stories therein. This can also be done with the children when they reach a suitable age.
This may encourage a culture of reading in your children, something that is fast receding in this day of the flat screen TV and DVD. By the way, watching the TV together is not a way of being available to the family. When you watch the silly box together it is not the father or mother who is available; it is the TV that is available. That box can dominate your lives to the extent that you become strangers to each other while living in the same house.
In our house, for example, the TV must not be turned on before 12 noon on any day. The TV must be switched off when we have our meals together. It does not matter what is on screen. That way we are able to talk together and discuss anything we like. That way we get to know each other thoroughly.
Some good friends have cautioned that if they do not carry the laptop home or read the newspapers they will get bored long before the week-end is over. I have rejected that as a lame excuse. You need to be creative about quality time. Devise the activities that you would like to enjoy with your spouse well in advance.
Devise the activities that you and the children can do together. These must be enjoyable activities; but they should not cost you an arm and a leg. In these days of financial hardships, it is easy to hang all the ills of family life on the lack of money. Devise ways of making money together as a family.
Post published in: Lifestyle