Spending ‘Special Time’ with Your Kids Helps Them Succeed in School

boy succeeds at school

Quality Time = Academic Success

We know that spending time with our kids helps them become well-adjusted and happy.  However, we may not realize that there’s another great benefit of special time with our kids – it positively impacts their success in school.

Several research studies have shown that there is a correlation between the quality family time we spend with our children and their academic success.

The best part about it? You don’t even have to do specific educational activities with your child during the quality time you spend together.

Non-Educational Activities

When it comes to younger kids, from baby to toddler to elementary school age, all games are learning experiences for them. While younger kids play, they are developing skills like listening, sorting, and counting. So for a younger age it’s clean that they greatly benefit from fun activities that aren’t necessarily educational.

In contrast, older kids would seemingly benefit from doing strictly educational activities, but they definitely won’t want to spend time with you practicing reading or math…

Luckily, research has shown that spending time together helps their academic success even when you are not doing educational activities, but rather are doing something you both enjoy.

It’s true that while it’s always beneficial to make learning fun by playing games that test math skills or creating a science experiment, it’s not the only thing necessary for your child’s academic success. There’s no question that practicing and reviewing educational materials will help your child in school, but it won’t build your relationship. However, building your mutual relationship does help your child in school, and that’s why it’s worth spending some quality time together.

Simply talking with your kids helps increase their language and listening skills, which will in turn help them be more successful when they start school.  Playing with your children helps them develop socially and emotionally as well.

Feelings are Stronger than Smarts

According to a study by North Carolina State University, positive parental involvement is proven to be more important for a child’s success in school than any other factor, including how good the teachers and school actually are. That’s pretty amazing!

It’s also been proven that a child’s level of intelligence doesn’t necessarily equal scholastic success. Less intelligent kids can easily do better in school if they have a positive relationship with their parents, as a 2010 study has shown.

The same study also found that kids who have a lot of quality parent involvement believe they are smarter and will do better on standardized tests. In other words, just by spending quality time with your kids you will increase their confidence and feeling of self-worth.

When we spend quality time with our kids, they are more likely to be motivated, persistent, and focused, which translates into increased academic success.

Conclusion

So now that research has proven that special time with our kids, no matter how we spend it, is important for their academic success, I think we can all agree we should try to spend quality time together as much as possible.

References:

Kim, Christine. “Academic Success Begins at Home: How Children Can Succeed in School.”

The Heritage Foundation. 22 Sept 2008, www.heritage.org/education/report/academic-

success-begins-home-how-children-can-succeed-school#_ftn37. Accessed 31 Oct 2017.

North Carolina State University. “Parenting more important than schools to academic

achievement, study finds.” ScienceDaily. 10 Oct 2012, www.sciencedaily.com/releases

/2012/10/121010112540.htm. Accessed 31 Oct 2017.

Topor, David R. et al. “Parent Involvement and Student Academic Performance: A Multiple

Mediational Analysis.” Journal of prevention & intervention in the community 38.3

(2010): 183–197. PMC. Accessed 31 Oct 2017.