How to Make Quality Family Time a Habit

Often, the more time families spend using their screen devices (e.g., smartphones, computers, and television), the less time they spend with each other having meaningful conversations, playing games, or enjoying the outdoors together. If you’re looking for ways to reduce your family’s screen time and create more quality time together, you might have noticed just how hard it is to change your family’s routine.

Fortunately, there’s a trick to it. Psychologists have studied how we form new habits and shared what they’ve learned in easy steps. In this article, you’ll discover five steps for making your new family time activity a regular tradition.

Family Screen-Time Routines: Michelle’s Story

This story gives an example of the challenges involved in creating more family time. When Michelle comes home from work, she spends about thirty minutes on the couch scrolling through Facebook while her kids play video games. She spends the next hour cooking dinner while her kids watch YouTube videos on their smartphones, listen to music, and finish homework on a computer. Everyone eats dinner in the living room while watching TV. After about two hours, Michelle helps her children get ready for bed, then she watches a bit more television before she puts herself to bed.

This has been a routine for Michelle and her family for more than a year. They didn’t really choose what they would do every night. It just sort of happened. Their nightly schedule became a habit, like making a pot of coffee every morning.

She began to notice that whole days would go by without much face-to-face family time. Instead of telling her about their day, her children would watch videos. Instead of taking walks or playing board games, her family would stare at their phones. However, when she tried to change their routine and create time for her family to spend together (without screen devices), her family resisted. Everyone liked the idea, but change is not easy.

“People who smoke cigarettes say ‘Man, you don’t know how hard it is to quit smoking.’ Yes, I do. It’s as hard as it is to start flossing.”

Mitch Hedberg, comedian

Secrets of Forming Any New Habit

To create more family time, Michelle needed to change her family’s routine. Creating regular family time means creating a new habit. If you know the secrets to forming a new habit, it’s a lot easier to do. Here are five steps for forming any new habit:

You can use these same steps to create a family time habit!

How to Start Your Family-Time Habit

Start by deciding what you want to do with your family. Some ideas include playing a board game every Tuesday night, spending ten minutes each evening talking about each other’s day, taking a walk after dinner, or playing ball in the yard every Wednesday evening. Once you’ve decided on the activity (or type of activity) that will become a habit for your family, try these five steps:

Further Reading

Want to learn more? Here are some great articles on how we start new habits:

How to Start New Habits that Actually Stick, by James Clear

The Science Behind Adopting New Habits (And Making Them Stick), Forbes Magazine

Need to Form a New Habit? Give Yourself At Least 66 Days, by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.