RULE 66

Mix and match

This Rule helps to build your relationships with your kids, and their relationships with each other. It also helps things along if you’re in any danger of having a favourite child, resenting certain qualities in your children, or feeling you don’t have enough in common with them.

Lots of traditional families (especially two parents + two kids families) tend to hang out together a lot. Maybe during the week one or other of the parents will be off working, but at weekends they all go out as a family. I know loads of families like this, and it’s generally reckoned to be a good thing.

Well, yes … and no. You can have too much of a good thing. It’s important to make sure that you also spend time in as many different combinations and permutations as you can:

• Make sure each child gets time alone with each parent.
• Both/all kids hang out with one of the parents (vary which one).
• One child can have both parents to themselves while the other(s) are elsewhere.
• For families with three or more children, two kids can spend time with one parent while the other(s) go with parent number two. Don’t always split this the same way.

This also gives you the opportunity to develop special relationships with each child. Maybe child 1 gets to cook with one parent and go for walks with the other. Meantime child 2 looks at books with one and plays in the park with the other. If each child has their own special thing that they alone do with each parent, they will all get to feel really special.

It’s an especially valuable system if your family includes step-children or half-siblings. This approach gives everyone the chance to forge individual relationships with each other, rather than only seeing their step-parent, for example, when the step-brothers and sisters are there too.

If you’re a single parent, of course this is much harder.^* But it’s still worth taking every opportunity to have someone else look after one or more of the kids while you get time with the others. And when you can get one child to yourself – maybe the others are with friends or at a party – do something special with them, rather than just getting the housework done with less background squabbling.