5 Simple Ways to Reconnect with Your Family

Being busy can complicate life and create a disconnect within your family. Work schedules, school, extra-curricular activities, and social commitments are common factors for a busy life for many of us. Add technology to the mix and we can easily appear to be connecting with our family, but we truly aren’t. Here are 5 simple ways to reconnect with your family.

Put down the Electronics

In a world where technology has made staying “connected” to others, it has also created a disconnect within the home. Emails, text messages, social media, televisions, video games, are all distractions to building relationships with our partner and our kids.

Plan your day and make the effort to be present and not distracted by technology when they arrive home or when you arrive home at the end of the day. This simple action is one of the most important ways to reconnect with your family.

A simple conversation will help you see into their day and find out how they are feeling.

Welcome them home, and ask them how their day was.
Find out what the best part of their day was and why it was.
Ask them how they felt about that event that made it so wonderful.
Watch their face light up telling you.

How was their face when you welcomed them home or when they welcomed you home? Did it look stressed? Did their energy seem deflated or off? Find out what frustrated them during the day and help coach them through those feelings.

Join the Hygge Challenge

When our boys were little I didn’t do this very well, and it took my oldest coming home with a black eye for me to realize I could do better. We were close as a family but our kids know that life was busy and sometimes would try to handle issues themselves instead of relying on us for support.

The black eye? It took some very keen mother intuition to get to the root of the problem, and when I did I was heartbroken. Our son had been the target of a bully for months at school. The teachers didn’t notice and we had been so distracted with our busy lives that we missed the signs.

That event changed me. I made a bigger effort to be present with them. I’m not perfect but the small effort has brought me closer and more in tune with their emotions. It’s helped pick up on little signs, that they don’t want to “bother” us with. It’s brought laughter after a long day too.

I remember one day, my daughter announced that she had done a crunch. That’s right, a solitary single ab crunch! I’ll bite….”Just one crunch?”, I asked. Her response was priceless and had us all in stitches. “It was by accident”, she replied. “I was laying down at carpet time and had to sit up, but it was a crunch mom!” As we laughed I thought, well she beat me today! Good going girl!

Become Interested in their Passion

What’s their favorite sports team, superhero, video game, or book series? What could they talk your ear off about? What could they teach you about? This might not be simple for you if you aren’t interested, but you might be surprised by what you find out when trying to find out more.

Do your own research to find out something about that passion, so you can start a conversation with them. Find that nugget of information that you don’t quite understand or will spark a conversation with them. You might surprise yourself and learn to like their passion too.

I’m an engineer and love a good scientific invention, but I never really was “into” superheroes. Well, I do admit that I would watch them on television growing up, but I wasn’t into them like others are. My oldest though, knows the difference between Marvel and DC, knows who belongs to who, their superpower, and more. His superpower is researching backstories for his passions from LEGO Bionicles to video games or television shows.

I didn’t know there was a backstory between the original Bionicles that led into the backstory of the new Bionicles until our son mentioned it one day. I simply knew that he built Bionicles growing up and we played the board game a lot in those years.

Now I find a show that he recommends and I make an effort to watch it. How does this help? Well, he now is an adult, living out of the city from us and I can call him up and just talk television if he wants. We can just chat. The last call we had, he told me he had nothing to say. We talked for an hour. Was it filled with deep conversations? No, but it felt good to connect with him.

Family Fun Nights are a Must!

Dig out those games from your childhood, find a game that is themed around their passion, watch a movie, or play a multi-player video game. There are endless possibilities for having fun. The key to using this as a way to reconnect with your family is to do it as often as you can and have fun.

Join the Hygge Challenge

Get the kids involved in picking out the activity for the night. Have fun. If you have small kids that love to play cards but get frustrated trying to hold the cards, there is a simple DIY cardholder that saved our family card game. It might help your family card night as well.

Make the meal that night, simple and fun to eat while doing the activity. Limited evening times can make it challenging so you want to be able to overlap the fun with the mealtime if possible.

I have friends that schedule weekly fun nights. They make it a family rule not to schedule activities on Friday nights. That is family night.

If you can’t do that, don’t worry. The key to making this simple is to plan to do it as much as you can and enjoy it. Create those memories. No deep talks. Don’t save the world (unless that is the game). Just fun and laughter.

One of the mandatory family fun nights in our home is Christmas Eve. We will have finger foods for dinner and play games. The kids are able to open a family gift that night. It will be a game of some sort of movie. We will then settle in and let the competition juices flow, filling the house with laughter and teasing fun.

This year our Christmas was the start of changes to our family dynamic. Our oldest had moved away from home, our middle son was preparing to leave home soon, and our daughter was trying to adjust (along with us) to not having her older brothers at home.

Our oldest works retail so Christmas hours are pretty crazy. He works Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. This year we were blessed that he made the three-hour drive after a long day of work to spend Christmas with us as a family.

We prepared the Christmas Eve tradition as planned and I fully expected to start without him, but the two youngest insisted that we wait for our oldest to arrive. It was a late night that night, but it didn’t disappoint. My heart was filled with joy, knowing that this little family night tradition meant just as much to the kids as it did to us.

Campfires and Backyard BBQs

Get outside away from the distractions, enjoying nature, and just relax. Pull out those conversation hints that I mentioned earlier in this post and enjoy each other. Finding ways to reconnect with your family is putting all other commitments aside and just be with those you love.

This can be a simple BBQ in your backyard or a camping trip for two, as a simple getaway to reconnect with your partner. How about a camping trip just outside the city? You can bring the kids to their activities during the day, or the older kids can still join you for the campfire at night after work.

This is not only a great idea for just the family, but we’ve used the idea to help the kids reconnect with friends as well. With busy lives, kids don’t get time to hang out with their friends either. Having a backyard campfire or BBQ was a great way to bring them together to have some time together after a busy school year or long cold winter.

As a parent, I loved watching the kids interact and reconnect with their friends. Hearing the laughter was a joy to my ears. When I look back at the memories of our boys growing up it is those moments, along with our own family moments that make me smile.

Road Trip!

I know being in the car when you spend endless hours during the week in the same vehicle, may not be high on the priority, but hear me out. Getting the kids in the vehicle to go on a road trip can be fun. They can help plan the destination, help plan the stop points, and what to see and then they are fully engaged and excited about going.

You also have them in a vehicle for hours, so you have a great opportunity to pick their brains and find out all the funny things that are going on in their little heads. Kids have great imaginations and are hilarious. You might want to take an opportunity to rediscover that.

Here’s another bonus to the road trip that I personally look forward to and have for over 24 years. When the road trips are long and the kids are asleep or taking some downtime watching a movie, then my husband and I will take that time to talk about life.

We talk about where we’d like to go visit, where we want to take our careers, we talk about our life together. We don’t talk about the kids, because we do that on regular days. Instead, we reconnect with each other.

Staying connected builds healthy strong relationships that help families in stressful times. It helps married couples be more than just parents to their kids. Kids learn to have healthy relationships with others and to know that their parents have their back in tough times.

Most of all, finding ways to reconnect with your family will create long-lasting memories. Memories that don’t have to cost thousands of dollars but are worth infinitely more.