Families are busier than ever: commuting and shuttling kids back and forth to hockey games and dance lessons are just some of the things that gobble up our precious time. Vacations are not only well deserved, they're important in maintaining our health and building strong relationships, a family physician advises.
As Family Day approaches, Dr. Mel Borins urges parents to resist the temptation to catch up on work and to spend time with their children - whether that means playing board games, visiting a museum, playing a game of pond hockey or indulging in another activity your family enjoys.
"Spend time together in a playful way where there are no winners or losers," says Borins, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. "The amount of playtime we have with our children has diminished over time...Just have fun."
Along the way, you're building valuable memories. "You're depositing those very positive memories together in your bank account of memories and will be able to draw from them in the future," says Borins.
He believes vacations play a fundamental role in maintaining good health and also play an important role in transforming individuals and families. He shares that advice in his book, Go Away Just for the Health of It.
"I wrote the book because I was seeing a connection between people coming back from vacation and their health. Often, their symptoms or the complaints they were seeing me about had improved or disappeared," says Borins.
"There are a number of studies that show that people who take more frequent vacations live longer than people who don't take vacations," says Borins. "Taking time off, being reflective about your life and getting off the treadmill of your life seems to be therapeutic. Having fun, playing and being joyful are good for you. It's a stress release."
And though spending time with your children is one of the ingredients to building a good relationship, it isn't a magic bullet, warns Dr. Gordon Neufeld of the Neufeld Institute in Vancouver and author of Hold on to Your Kids.
"You can spend time with a child but that doesn't mean the child has a good relationship with you. Having a good relationship means that he can trust you, depend upon you, feel safe with you, feel comforted and fulfilled by you, and feel invited to exist in your presence," says Neufeld.
That's a welcome message for divorced or separated parents concerned about not spending enough time with their children. "A child's belief that their parents want to be with them is by far more a more critical factor than the amount of time they spend together," he says.
One of the simplest ways to convey that is through your "greeting ritual," he says. "If you want to become the parent your child needs, that child needs fundamentally to be at home with you "¦ They need to see your eyes light up when they come into your company.
"If you're going to fake it, it won't have the same effect," says Neufeld. "There's nothing worse than spending time with someone you feel would prefer to be elsewhere. That time is toxic for the child."