15 Minutes a Day!

We had an exciting moment in our house a few weeks ago. We signed Maya up for kindergarten. She is so excited and wants to go right now. While I was there they gave me some papers to read. One that caught my eye was "Tips for parents of Kindergartners." I decided to read it to see if there was anything we could do over the summer to keep up on learning. As I read the list it gave the usual things about eating healthy and bedtimes but one thing that I couldn't believe said, "Spend 15 minutes of uninterupted time with your child each day." 15 MINUTES! Why do they think that 15 minutes a day is enough for a child? Is this a way to make working parents guilt free for only seeing their children a few minutes a day? Since I don't know who wrote the flyer, I decided this was the next best place to address the issue. I first need to put a disclaimer that I am far from the perfect parent but this is my phylosophy on parenting and one aspect of why I think it is important for me to stay home with my children - so here you go: You can't PICK the time that your child needs you? You may spend 15 minutes with them but they may not get anything out of that 15 minutes. You can spend 3 hours a day with them every day for a week and they may remember only 5 minutes of it. If you are only spending 15 minutes a day with them, what are they doing the rest of the time? Isn't that having more of an effect on them? If they watch one 1/2 hour TV show they have just spent twice as much time with that one show than their parent. And, unfortunately, they'll remember the show before they remember the 15 minutes with mom or dad. This is how I see it, Maya and I pretty much spend every hour together except when she is asleep or I go on a rare date with my husband. Even if we aren't together, we are in the house together. She doesn't want to be around me the whole time, she likes to be with her sisters or play on the computer but, she can come to me ANY time she wants, just like her sisters. For example, I am in here on the computer and Maya came in to show me something she wants to make that she found in a book. I stopped and looked at it for about 5 minutes with her. If she had to wait for our "15 minutes of uninterupted time" she would have forgotten about it and we never would have had that fun conversation of planning a craft to do and we would have never done the craft. Now we have another fun thing to do over the summer. It's more important for her to know that she can come to me almost ANY time she needs me. Another fine example of this is something I read on my friend's, the Randall's blog. "Craig was out mowing the grass and Lauren wanted him to blow bubbles with her. So, because he is awesome and knows grass can wait, but little people can't...he blew bubbles with her." They are so right, little people can't wait. Thanks for helping me prove my point, Randall's.