This morning the Sunrise program on Channel 7 ran a story of children in the United Kingdom being asked their feelings about the amount of time their parents spend on their phones and computers. These children felt “stressed”and “sad” about being ignored and felt like their parents didn’t care about them. According to Dr Michael Carr-Gregg children need only 8 minutes of undivided attention every single day but don’t seem to be getting it.
This reminded me of the Harry Chapin song Cats in the Cradle. It is the story of a father who doesn’t have time for his son. After constant rejection the son vows “I’m gonna be like him, yeah, you know I’m gonna be like him”. When the father retires and wants time with his son he finds that the roles have been reversed and now his son has no time for him saying “I’d love to, dad, if I can find the time”. And the father realises that “He’d grown up just like me, my boy was just like me”. The moral of the song being that you can’t expect more from your children that that which you have been willing to provide.
I have a 2 year old grandson and he’s the joy of my life. Every moment with him is special and wonderful. There is much to gain from spending time with your children and grandchildren. The time to start is now. Children grow up quickly. Before long it will be too late and you would missed out on something special, something that can’t be replaced.
After publishing this post I finished reading a book called When Breath Becomes Air # (to be reviewed in a later post) by Paul Kalanithi. Paul was a neurosurgeon dying from terminal cancer. He and his wife had a baby daughter shortly before he died (she was 8 months old). His appreciation and love for his child and the time he had with her was stated beautifully as follows:
” There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past. That message is simple:
When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been and done, and meant to the world do not, I pray, discount that you have filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, now, that is an enormous thing.”
# Kalanithi, Paul. (2016). When Breath Becomes Air. Random House.
The book may be purchased from Booktopia.