Morning time can be family time

Take advantage of the early hours to nurture your relationships

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is that morning time can be family time. If
weekday evenings feel shorter than you would like, or even

(00:24):
if they don't, morning hours can offer a great opportunity
to connect if you are intentional about this space. Today's tip,
like some others this week, comes from my book I
Know How She Does It, which came out ten years
ago this month. For the book, I collected time diary

(00:44):
data from one thousand and one days in the lives
of women with big jobs and families. I found that
in the one hundred and sixty eight hours that make
up a week, it is possible to work, spend time
with family, sleep, exercise, read, or do anything you truly
care about. Lots of people are successfully having it all.

(01:08):
Even people with intense jobs often do wind up spending
a reasonable amount of time with their children. But one
reason it doesn't always feel like it is that we
often only count the time in the evening. So if
you get home from work at six and you've got
young kids who go to bed at seven thirty, then
it feels like you've only got ninety minutes a day
with them. But this ignores the mornings which exist, and

(01:33):
if you've got kids who go to bed at seven
thirty PM, my sense is that those morning hours can
be quite long. I was talking with a lawyer once
who told me that she never saw her son due
to her intense billable schedule, and her son was about
the same age as my toddler at the time. Then
we moved on to different topics and she started chatting

(01:54):
about toddler wake up times. I was whining about my
kid being up at the crack of dawn, and she
said me two. Well, turns out her kid was often
waking up at about five thirty AM, and she left
for work at eight. This was literally two and a
half hours that she was not seeing at all. Now,

(02:16):
obviously people do need to get ready in the morning,
but my guess is that this is not a two
hour process, Especially if you do have kids who are
up early. You can easily turn morning time into family
time if you think about using this window. So what
would you like to do with it? You and your
kids could have a real breakfast together if you wanted.

(02:37):
If it's summer, you could go outside and play go
for a stroller walk. What a great way to get
some exercise. If you have a play area, you could
get your coffee and go sit there and set an
alarm and then just relax until it goes off. Even
if you don't have young kids. If you feel like
you and your partner are often just ships passing in
the night, perhaps you could use the morning hours for connecting.

(03:01):
Eat breakfast together a few days a week. Decide to
get up on time so you have twenty minutes to
sit together and chat. You can set an alarm so
no one needs to be watching the clock. You could
go exercise together, or whatever you like. I know many
people who listen to a show called Before Breakfast have

(03:23):
elaborate morning routines, and that is wonderful. But we often
think of morning routines as being solar things, and they
can be, but they don't need to be. Build family
time into your mornings and it will happen and you
can start your day knowing you did something good in
the meantime. This is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's

(03:47):
to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening
to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback.
You can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.

(04:11):
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