2022 was a stressful year for a lot of adults. Helping your family grow closer in 2023 against the backdrop of 2022 must be an appetising prospect for all families.
You probably found that you struggled to connect with your kids as much as you’d like because you were busy or worried about money. It’s understandable considering the circumstances, but it may also be time to change that.
If you want to improve your relationship with your kids, then you need to make sure you make a committed effort to do so. We’re talking about a handful of things that you can do to ensure your family grows closer this year. Let’s take a look.
Spending time together to help your family grow closer
Naturally, the first thing you can do to help your family grow closer is to spend more time with your kids. With the hopes of patching up the relationship that was trained over the past year. However, this method needs a few simple preparations to be effective.
The first thing is to pick the activity you do carefully. If it’s too stimulating and engaging. Then they’ll just want to have fun and not spend time with you meaningfully. However, if you pick an activity that isn’t fun at all, you will sour the mood. You need to find a happy medium.
And secondly, don’t try and force a particular topic of conversation or make your kids engage with you. Instead of bringing the family closer, it’ll make them more distant. They naturally talk and chatter when they’re entertained. Which is how you want it to be.
Don’t overcompensate
If you’re trying to spend time with your family this year. This is great, but a lot of people often feel that they need to overcompensate as a result. You don’t need to do this.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make up for a little distance, and you will. But you need to trust the process and wait for it. Kids are pretty intuitive even when they’re young – if you try to overcompensate with them, they’ll know.
Instead, you should make a committed effort to naturally become closer again. Don’t try and force the situation, or do anything too much. Your children will naturally come around to you, but you need to be prepared to put the time in and make that happen.
If this all sounds like a mess of contradictions, don’t worry. Kids are a difficult type of family members to talk to. Because you don’t want to skew their perceptions of you and you also don’t want to overdo it. To help the family grow closer, you need to get back to the status quo. Then you can go slightly above that, but not too far.
Closing thoughts on helping the family grow closer
Building a close relationship with your kids can be tough – we’ve all been there as parents.
The best thing you can do is take it slowly and try not to think too deeply about the process.
Think of your relationship with your family like riding a bike. Once you get back into the swing of things it’ll be like nothing has changed. You don’t need to think too much about it – it’ll all come to you naturally and the family will grow closer with time.