The best inheritance
a parent can give his children
is a few minutes of his time
each day.
- Orlando A. Battista

How much time should you allocate to your child?

Some people, such as writers or teachers, have a greater than usual amount of time to devote to their children. Even with a large family, each child may be able to receive up to an hour of parental time a day. That’s a lot.

Most people will not be able to allocate that much time to the child without making other events in their lives suffer. You should evaluate your life and try to create blocks of time during which both you and your child are available. Those blocks of time should be as big as possible, in order to make the most of the quality time with your children. You may choose to divide the quality time in any given day into more than one period of time. This might even be advantageous for children (or Dads) who have a shorter span of attention.

Sometimes you might even want to re-evaluate your job if it takes away too much of the quality time that you could have devoted to your child. Alternatively, you may want to re-evaluate and cut back some of your own social activities if they dig into your child’s time too much. After all, the time that you spend with your children is not only limited every day but the entire span is also limited. A child will grow up and will leave your home very quickly. You don’t have much time to enjoy his or her growing-up years.

Do keep in mind that now is the time to talk with your children. When they grow up, you will only see them when they visit. The money you earn by that additional hard work may not replace the lost experience of getting to know your children - and the opportunity will not return later, when they have already grown up.

If you really don’t have time to spend with your child then try to imagine yourself twenty years from now. You’ll be older and closer to retirement, and your job may have less importance to you then than it has now. Try to picture yourself looking back at the previous twenty years. Yes, you will have progressed in your work, but will you feel regret for not having spent more time with your child? If you put yourself in a position in which you will regret having spent so little time with your children and you feel that you don’t really know your own child, then perhaps you should re-evaluate your job.

Let’s try a second experiment. Add fifty years to your present age. You've probably hit retirement age. Now, try to look back over those fifty years objectively. Are you disappointed with your relationship with your child? If you will have no regrets and if you have given your child the best that you can, then you are giving your child sufficient quality time. But if you have regrets, then your aren’t giving your child sufficient quality time.

What are those regrets like? You might think, "I’m earning a great salary now; I have progressed to a high position in my firm; I have developed my own business and it has grown. But I would have been willing to sacrifice some of this success in order to have been able to get to know my child better."

If you can predict this feeling fifty years from now, then you may be making a mistake by spending that much time at work. You would not want to be sorry for it later, when it would be too late to correct the situation. If you feel that this might be the case, then re-evaluate your job before you make a big mistake. Take the necessary steps so that you will be able to support yourself and your family in a respectable way, but so that you will not look back with regret later. Don't sacrifice your opportunity to be a real Dad to your child.

Thus, not every Dad can offer the same level or degree of quality. The emphasis is on the time, since every Dad should be able to offer his child the requisite time so that when he looks back at the child’s development twenty or fifty years from now, he will have no regrets.