Our entire family seems to feel tired most of the time. What can we do to reclaim family time and not feel so worn out that we can’t enjoy it?

Your family is experiencing overload. Burning the candle at both ends has become the norm in our society. Consider the following statistics:

People now sleep 2.5 fewer hours than people did 100 years ago. We’re sleeping less than our grandparents did.

The average workweek is longer now than it was in the 1960s.

The average office worker has 36 hours of work piled up on his or her desk. It takes us three hours a week just to sort through it and find what we need.

We spend two years of our lives playing phone tag with people who are too busy or too tired to answer the phone and five years waiting for people who are trying to do too much and are late for meetings.

Our children have less free time than children in the late 1970s.

We’re a piled on, stretched-to-the-limit society. Overload comes when we have too much activity and stuff in our lives. Simply put, most of us are stressed by our pace of life.

In Traits of a Healthy Family (Harper Collins, 1988), family specialist Dolores Curran noted, “the lack of time might be the most pervasive enemy the healthy family has.” It sounds to us like your family needs to push the pause button. Before you say you don’t have time to pause, consider what would happen if there was a death in your family. You would push pause and the rest of life would come to a standstill. Don’t wait for heartbreak to happen before you suspend what you are doing to enjoy being together. Take into account the benefits of making family time more of a priority.

The first benefit of choosing time for your family is better health for yourself. Unrelenting stress harms our bodies. We know that, yet we let it continue day after day. A second benefit is stronger relationships. When we fail to carve out time for each other, our relationships suffer. Relationships take time—time to sit and talk, to listen and enjoy one another. Bringing life back into balance will benefit you personally and the people you love.

While we may bemoan the pace of the society in which we live, we still must live in it. But that doesn’t mean we must hand over all control. Curran found that healthy families learn to control time so that it doesn’t adversely affect them. Here are some common characteristics Curran found among families that have been successful at reclaiming their family time.

They view time as controllable. One of the best ways to do this is to keep a family calendar. There was a time our family kept separate calendars, and that was a disaster! We then started coordinating our calendars and checking in at least once a week.

They balance work and family life. The most common imbalance involves the overworking dad. The rewards of work do not justify the neglect of self and family.

They balance couple and personal time. We invite neglect into our marriages when we do not plan ways to have fun and share interests.

They play together. Stressed families ignore playtime and others defer fun until vacations. Smart families make having fun a priority.

In 1 Timothy 5:8 we learn that anyone who does not provide for his own family, whether it be wife, children, or aged parents, has practically denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. We normally think about providing for our family’s financial needs. That is a part of the meaning of this passage, but not the whole. We must provide for all of our family’s needs, including their need to spend time with us. We encourage you to move family time further up your list of things to do. |L

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