A trip to Yosemite National Park

Yesterday, our family was in Yosemite National Park, because a niece who was visiting from Dubai had not yet been to the Park.

On the way there, a conversation on family outings started, where each one recalled childhood memories. One mentioned yearly trips to Calamba, Misamis Occidental, where her mom’s family hailed from. Another mentioned wonderful memories about swimming in the local river also in Calamba. Still another recalled the yearly family “camping” trips to different towns in Zamboanga del Sur for the church conferences that his parents attended. All recollections pointed to the importance of having family time, however form it took, during a child’s formative years.

So does quality family time really have an impact on a child?

Dr. Todd Thatcher says it does and lists down the following ten benefits in his article The Top Ten Benefits Of Spending Time With Family:

• Improves mental health
• Helps children perform well academically
• Lowers risk of behavioral problems
• Boosts self-confidence
• Helps kids learn future parenting skills
• Teaches effective conflict resolution
• Reduces stress
• Promotes adaptability and resilience
• Enhances physical health
• Lengthens life expectancy

Parenting NI (Northern Ireland) re-echoes almost the same benefits in their article The Importance of Spending Time Together, with their own list:

• It builds children’s self-esteem
• It strengthens family bonds
• It develops positive behaviours
• It encourages communication
• It can help your child’s academic performance
• It can help your children be a good friend

I’ll leave the psychology part to the experts. But based on my recollections from my own childhood, and my observations through the years, I believe quality family time or spending time together as often as we can (as time and distance allows!), DOES have positive benefits for a child. If you’ve been following my blogs, you will have seen the values and experiences my siblings and I got from our parents, which we claim helped us become who we are today (Bob, Ceejay, and Alex, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong)!

My own list of benefits are as follows:

• It strengthens family bonds — I believe our siblings and I understand the need to keep in touch as often as we can, thus letting our own kids say hi to each other via FaceTime calls so the cousins know that they have other family members in other parts of the world. This is also a driving force for our decision to visit Houston yearly, because this is where most of the closet family members (from my side) reside. Not to mention that it is a much shorter trip, compared to Australia or the Philippines! Although we also love our mothers, siblings, and other immediate family members living there! 🙂
• It gives us the opportunity to explore new things — Exploration is key to toddlers, I’m told and I’ve read. Yesterday afforded my son, Ari, this wonderful activity! He got to see “large rocks!” (as he calls them), enjoy the cold running water from a nearby river, play with stones and sticks and “bubbles!” (which was really ice from unmelted snow), walk/run as freely as he could, hear a crow cawing, see a squirrel scampering, hear all sorts of birds chirping, and have ice cream with the people he loved (his ates (older sisters) Ia and Ging-ging), at the end of the day! A side note here… one of the goals we have for Ari is to visit all the National Parks here in the US, using his own Junior Ranger Passport book. Hopefully it’ll be something he’ll come to appreciate and enjoy when he’s a little older.
• It gives us memories to recall — If you ask my siblings and I about funny memories we have of childhood experiences and family get-togethers, we will have something to share: like the “bumble bee” shirt, swimming in the “trampa” (water gate at the fishpond), being pulled over by the highway patrol for doing 100 mph on the way to Vegas, crazy made up stories by a brother, being a “mermaid” at South Seas hotel, the “tapioca” experience, “Java-rice”, and many others. Each time we recall these memories, we always have a good laugh and relish those times, committing to provide similar experiences for our own children to enjoy and recall down the road.

In closing, I share this item:

Psychology Today: “Close family relationships afford a person better health and well-being, as well as lower rates of depression and disease throughout a lifetime.”

I hope you go out and make those memories with your family today!