Mom Ecstatic That Her Family Movie Night Tradition Failed — 'I Couldn't Be Happier'
The pressure to make family life perfect is huge, and everyone finds it exhausting.
Master1305 | Shutterstock The burden on parents these days to create the "perfect" home life for their kids is enormous, and it feels even more so given how many Gen X and millennial parents were basically left by their parents to run feral and fend for themselves as kids.
But it's easy to make so much effort that it starts to feel forced. Before you know it, not only is everyone irritated by the rigid dynamics, but they'd probably be better off if you just tossed them out the window and went with the flow. That's what one mom on Reddit has recently learned, and it's made all the difference.
A mom is thrilled her family movie night tradition has crashed and burned.
"Our family 'movie night' tradition is dead and I couldn’t be happier," the mom bluntly wrote in her Reddit post. It started a few years ago as a way to bring the family together as a unit for some quality time together, something experts, of course, say is important and is increasingly harder to come by these days, with everyone buried in their phones all the time.
PeopleImages.com - Yuri A | Shutterstock
"It sounded wholesome, and honestly, it was at first," she went on to say, describing how excited her kids would get about the popcorn and picking out the movie. "It felt like we were doing something right," she said. Until it didn't.
Over time, the 'movie night' became a chore that made everyone mad. So she quit.
As you can imagine, the older her kids got, the less harmonious these family movie nights became. There would be fights over the movie, where one kid would always end up hating what they watched.
"They’d get bored 20 minutes in and start bickering or playing on their phones," she added. "I’d end up frustrated, sitting there alone watching some random animated sequel I didn’t even like. Meanwhile, I was stressing about work stuff I was ignoring just to keep this 'tradition' alive."
Finally, after the umpteenth family movie night where someone ended up stomping in a huff, she decided she was done. No grand decree; she just never brought up family movie night again. "And nobody noticed. Not even once," she said.
You might assume she's hurt by this crash and burn, but she's actually relieved. She said their family time is much more relaxed and organic now — sometimes it's board games, sometimes it's a walk, and sometimes it's everyone doing their own thing. But it works. "We still hang out, just more naturally," she wrote. "I’m not forcing 'quality time' anymore just because I saw it on Pinterest."
Studies show 'quality time' isn't nearly as important as we think, and the connection is what matters.
For ages, it has been drilled into parents' heads that "quality time" is what makes the difference in whether a kid has a good childhood or a bad one, but more recent research says that's not really the case. It's the connection that makes the difference.
So, while it's tempting to think that a family all "doing their own thing" in the same room doesn't count as good bonding time, it's the togetherness that matters, not the activity itself. And nothing makes a connection harder than being forced to make one, and then having to navigate the drama that ensues when the stress of it all gets on everyone's nerves. We all hate "forced fun" at work, for instance. That doesn't change just because it's our family!
But more importantly, kids soak up the emotional stress their parents are going through, which led researchers to conclude in a 2015 study that quality time that creates drama, like this mom's contentious movie nights that drove everyone crazy, actually does more harm than good.
Sure, a family movie night may make for a more idyllic mental picture, but the actual connection is where the rubber meets the road. A board game, a walk, or simply zoning out individually but together is still "quality" time, and it's a lot less stressful than perfection, too.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
