10 Incredible Benefits of Spending Time with Family
It is no secret that there are numerous benefits of spending time with your family. However, due to the hectic nature of modern life and the promotion of hustle culture, most people are always busy working and never find time for family or anything else.
The widespread use of the internet, social media, and other digital communication channels does not help in this either. Even though they enable people to stay in touch with each other easily, the connection through the screens of digital devices can never replace face-to-face interactions.
In this post, we shall go over some of the incredible benefits of spending time with your family to help you know why you should find ways to do it more often.
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Benefits of Spending Time with Family
- It strengthens your bond
Any relationship requires nurturing to remain strong over time. Your relationships with the people in your family are not an exception. Strengthening the bond between you and your loved ones is one of the benefits of spending time with your family.
Some ways to spend more time with your family and strengthen your bond include, talking and listening to each other, playing games, eating together, establishing family traditions, doing household chores together, and planning activities to do together, among others.
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- It improves your mental health
The effect of spending time together on mental health may vary from family to family depending on how you interact with each other. However, for most people, better mental health is one of the benefits of spending time with their family because doing so brings out positive emotions in them.
Doing fun activities together and cracking jokes will help in elevating your mood. Additionally, since these are people you have most likely known for your entire life, you are more comfortable talking and sharing your problems with them when you are going through a difficult time.
Having people to talk to instead of bottling up your emotions will help in reducing stress and preventing depression; that is another reason why you should spend more time with your family.
Another benefit of spending time with family is that you feel safe and more secure with them than when with any other people. This could reduce anxiety and help you build self-confidence. Improved mental health is one of the reasons why you should spend more time with your family.
- You learn conflict-resolution skills
As much as you might wish to always have fun and be on good terms with the members of your family, it is inevitable that you will sometimes wrong each other, get on each other’s nerves, and, perhaps, even fight.
But the best thing about family is that you all know you have no choice but to make up eventually because you can’t avoid each other forever.
You have to find ways to resolve your conflicts whenever you do something wrong to one another, whether by yourselves or by looking for a mediator from outside the family. Therefore, one of the benefits of spending time with family is that it helps you learn conflict-resolution skills, which you can use with your loved ones and other people.
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- You develop social skills
The very first people you ever had to interact with are your family, and that is where you learn social skills.
For instance, most people are taught social skills such as respect, obedience, empathy, cooperation, sharing, and listening, among others, since childhood. As such, one of the benefits of spending time with family is that you get to learn the art of socializing.
You can use the social skills learned from your family when interacting with other people. These skills will help you communicate better, network, make friends, and build deep, meaningful relationships.
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- You learn how to deal with different types of people
Families are made up of people with various personalities, some of whom you probably wouldn’t like or include if you had to choose who your family should be. But since they are your family and you can’t change that, you have to learn to deal with people with unlikeable traits.
You will know when to be patient with them or tolerate them and when to set boundaries, set them straight, or cut them off. These skills will be useful because you will likely encounter people with similar traits to those family members in the outside world.
Your experience with toxic relatives will help you know how to interact and deal with other difficult people, hence why this is among the benefits of spending time with family.
- Spending time with family promotes good behavior
Let’s admit it; most of us are on our best behavior when spending time with our families. Now think about what will happen if family members spend more time together. No matter what age you are, your family influences your behavior.
For instance, most kids regard their parents as their role models, and thus they might try to emulate their behavior and the values they instill in them. It is no surprise then that one of the benefits of spending time with family is that it will lead to better behavior when you are with them and even when you are away from them.
As the kids grow older, they will also have fewer behavioral problems than those from families that never spend time together.
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- It improves performance
Whether you are an adult or a child, one of the benefits of spending time with family is that it makes you perform better at work or school. It could be because of the reduced stress and anxiety resulting from quality family time or the better communication and availability to help and guide each other.
According to studies, children with more involved parents have a better chance of succeeding academically as they will be available to help them with homework and other issues.
As for adults, spending more time with your partner and kids will result in better mental health and reduced workload at home, thereby improving productivity and performance at work.
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- You create better memories
Everyone would love to look back at their lives and remember all the good times they have had. Unfortunately, plenty of people often have many regrets later in life because they were too busy working to spend quality time with their family and do things together.
You may regret all the things you sacrificed for success. You could get consumed with guilt about all the lost time you could have had with your family, obsess about all the experiences you missed, and think of all the people you disappointed or influenced badly along the way due to your absence or actions.
All these can make you get stuck in the past and affect your mental health negatively, thereby hurting your quality of life in your later years.
Avoiding regrets and creating happy lifelong memories are some of the benefits of spending time with family.
READ ALSO: 7 Things You Can Do Now That Your Future Self Will Thank You For
- You learn how to love and be loved
Your home environment when growing up can have a profound effect on how you turn out as an adult. How you are treated and how you see the people in your family treating each other will affect you, emotionally and mentally.
Your upbringing will determine the things you value, how you feel about yourself, and how you feel about others and interact with them. Therefore, if you grow up surrounded by people who love you and each other, you will learn how to love yourself and others. That is why learning how to love and be loved is one of the benefits of spending time with family.
Learning how to love yourself will also help you recognize your worth, and thus know how you deserve to be treated.
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- You build a strong support system
No one can go through life without ever needing another person. As such, it is important to build a support system that shall give you practical and emotional support whenever you need it. Who is better than your family to provide it?
The people in your support system will love, inspire, and encourage you as you go through the ups and downs in your life’s journey. They know and accept you the way you are, motivate you to chase your dreams, pick you up when you fall, help you deal with difficult emotions or situations, hold you accountable when needed, give you new perspectives on things, and do many more things to support you.
Building a strong support system is one of the reasons why you should spend more time with your family to obtain all these benefits. Be there for your family, and they will be there for you.
READ ALSO: 5 Best Types of Support We Need in Life (+ Why a Support System Is Important)
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are many benefits of spending time with family. Don’t allow work, social media, conflicts, or other distractions to deny you the chance to reap all the above benefits.
Since you now know the reasons why you should spend more time with your family, you should make time for them no matter how busy you are and always try to maintain a good relationship with them.
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I don’t have much family but I think this counts for friends as well. Great post!
Yeah I was thinking the same!
They surely can apply for friends too because some of them are even better than family. Thanks so much for reading, Jamie!❤️
Learning to deal with different kinds of a people stuck out for me. It’s most effective with large families. You just HAVE to learn that.
Very true. Thank you so much for reading!❤️
Thank you for sharing!
You are welcome, Olivia ❤️Thank you so much for reading!