In most homes, and hopefully yours, the living room is exactly what the name suggests. It’s somewhere your family lives. More specifically, it’s where your family hangs out and relaxes, and potentially spends time together. But more and more families are feeling segmented.
We’re all busy, even our kids. Between work, school, extracurricular activities, chores, and family responsibilities, you might find your family spending less and less time together. This isn’t to say that you should necessarily force quality time all the time, but it is a good idea to make your living room feel more welcoming and like a place where your whole family belongs.
Making a Cozy Space
First of all, you should try to actually make your living room a place where your family wants to be. While it’s a bit extreme, imagine your living room is a concrete box. Even if it’s big enough to fit everyone, would you actually want to relax there, or would you rather go somewhere else?
Your living room hopefully isn’t just a plain concrete box, but it could be unwelcoming. Maybe it’s cold or uncomfortable, without enough chairs for the whole family. It might be cluttered and stressful to look at.
So, focus on making your living room cozy. Renovation projects like adding a new carpet or painting the walls could be a good place to start.
Family Decor Projects
Most parents, understandably, have the most say when it comes to the decor of the house. After all, you pay the bills, you own or rent the property, so it stands to reason that you would be the ones to decorate it.
While this is true, sometimes it can be helpful to allow your children to also feel some ownership over the house, so they feel as though they belong there. Get them involved in decorating the common rooms. While you might have the final say, ask them about what colors they prefer or what wall art they like. Consider displaying their drawings.
All of this will make the living room more welcoming to the whole family, not just the parents.
Encouraging Quality Time Together
Finally, it’s important to actually encourage your children to spend time with you in the living room. You could take the authoritarian approach of basically telling your children to sit in the living room, but this often leads to resentment.
Besides, who wants to spend time with someone who doesn’t want to be there? All that happens is that your kids are miserable because they feel forced to be in the room with you, and you’re miserable because they’re grumpy and probably ignoring you.Instead, make it fun. Play video games or arrange movie nights. Actually incentivise your children to spend more time with their family in the living room. Accept that, to some degree, your kids will end up spending a bit less time with you and more time with their friends as they get older, but also make sure they know where they’re welcomed and loved.
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