How much time does your family spend together? Like really, actually, together?

A typical week for us sees me running off to host an event, my wife working late with clients. This happens while we juggle the boys with soccer, dance, and art. When parenting is a team sport, it’s easier to divide and conquer the routine to get everyone off to everything when they need to get there, but spending time as a complete family is a challenge.

It’s a Sunday afternoon as I write this, Zacharie is upstairs watching Harry Potter as a reward for finishing the book, while my wife takes Charlie out for some shopping errands. Before that, I was out doing groceries, while she and the boys were cleaning up. The day has been a lot of coming and going, and not a lot of togethering.

We may see each other a lot during the day, but how much time do we really spend together, as a unit? Probably only a few hours, having dinner and watching a show, before scrambling out to evening activities.

Why don’t you run a quick mental inventory of how much time your family spends together.  Really think about it. We spend so much time tracking our money our steps, our fitness, our schedules, but .. do we track the family time that matters most?

Watch the video below. Leon’s engaged in a social experiment designed to track family time spent together called Project Smart Furniture:

Leon’s found, on average, Canadian families spend 14% of their time together doing all kinds of activities. In the home, the living room is a central location for gathering and spending family time together.

Of course it is

It’s where our boys and I get on the floor and play dominos, it’s where the basket of laundry gets brought to fold while watching tv, it’s where we all pile and cosy up together to dig through a Harry Potter movie reward or devour the latest season of Survivor.