Raising Kids Not Grass

There’s an old story told about a man who got his neighbors angry when he stopped maintaining his once lush lawn. When he and his wife started having children, less time was spent on the lawn. Weeds overtook the grass. Bare spots began to appear where his growing kids would play their regular kickball games with the other neighborhood children. One day, his next door neighbor asked, “When are you going to take care of that lawn of yours?” The active and involved father quickly replied, “I’m raising kids, not grass.” We only have 1,440 minutes in each of our days. We choose to spend each minute doing something somewhere. During the few fast and furious years that you’ve got your kids in the house, why not carefully invest as many of those minutes as possible in your kids, rather than in things like long overtime hours at work, playing golf, or any other number of time-consuming pursuits that you could easily allow to steal the time you could be pouring into your kids?