"Parenting" No wonder children are unhappy when their parents are too busy at work.

Today is Children's Day. The Children's Day holiday, which has been interrupted for many years, has not only resumed this year, but together with the two weekly holidays and the Ching Ming Festival, there will be a total of four consecutive days of holiday this year. County and municipal governments around the world have launched a variety of Children's Day activities, and many amusement parks, museums, and arts and cultural activity centers have a variety of Children's Day discounts to encourage mothers and fathers to take advantage of the holiday to bring their children out to have fun and go around.

For many busy parents, a four-day vacation is a great opportunity to spend time with their children. Children don't necessarily need to eat big meals and play in the park to feel happy; anywhere is a happy paradise for children when they have their parents with them. The Child Welfare League recently conducted a survey on children. 38% of the children interviewed felt that there was no warmth in their homes, and the main reason for this was the parent-child relationship.

The survey found that Taiwanese children are not easy to tell their parents what is on their mind. Among the interviewed children, 60.6% feel easy to tell their dads and 71.3% tell their moms about their troubles, which are both much lower than the average of advanced countries: 75% for dads and 89% for moms. One of the reasons for poor parent-child communication is that parents are too busy to talk to their children. The survey found that nearly half of the children talk to their parents for less than half an hour a day, and the content of the conversation is mainly about their children's grades and work and rest; nearly 38% of the children eat at the same table with their parents less than three days a week, and as many as 74% of the children say that watching TV is the most common thing that parents and children do to each other.

On the eve of Children's Day this year, Kaohsiung Municipal Government Social Affairs Bureau's Child Welfare Service Center also conducted a survey on children under the age of six in kindergartens in the Greater Kaohsiung area, and found that the top three things that the children most wanted their parents to do with them were to go out and play (12.3%), to play games (11.1%), and to tell stories (11%). If parents are too busy to spend time with their children, it is difficult for children to feel the warmth of the family.

However, "time" is the rarest asset of Taiwanese adults because, according to a survey conducted by the Lausanne School of Management in Switzerland, the working hours of Taiwanese people are among the longest in the world. Even though their average annual income exceeds 20,000 U.S. dollars, the amount of time they are tied up in their work exceeds that of China, where they earn 4,000 U.S. dollars a year. With such long working hours, it is no wonder that according to a survey conducted by the Alliance for Children's Welfare, 20% of Taiwanese families with children have fathers who can't get home until after 9:00 p.m., and more than 10% of mothers can't get home until after 9:00 p.m. Every night. How can parents have the time, energy and mood to spend time with their children when they can't get off work until so late, and when they get home from work, I am afraid they will be exhausted already? Every day, parent-child life is probably like a battlefield, with drums beating frequently and speeding up.

Parents have no choice but to be busy due to life, so they need to put in some effort to create good parent-child interaction. The Alliance for Children's Welfare (ACW) has launched the "3-3-3 Code of Love for Children", which means that parents should hug their children for 30 seconds and listen to and accompany them for 30 minutes every day. In addition, because Wednesday is a small weekend for schools, and many children will be dismissed from school early, it is recommended that parents do not work overtime on Wednesdays, and return home earlier to spend time with their children. The Alliance for Children's Welfare would like to present the 3-3-3 Code to children in Taiwan as a gift for Children's Day this year.

Taiwanese parents are the busiest group of people in the world. However, no matter how busy they are, it should not be too difficult for them to find time to hug their children for 30 seconds every day, and objectively speaking, it is not impossible for them to squeeze out 30 minutes to accompany their children and listen to their voices, so they may just save their time by watching TV. However, perhaps because parents are too busy, in order to be more efficient in disciplining their children's lives, many parents may spend the limited time they have with their children mainly on "instruction" and forget about "hugging", or "reading" rather than "listening". Parents are serious about taking the time to admonish and teach their children, but they may find that the results are ineffective because the parents are tired, the Taiwanese children are tired, and they are not very excited about going home and listening to the lecture. When parents try hard to teach their children, but the children complain, "You don't know my heart," I'm afraid the parent-child relationship will become more and more estranged.

What kids need is the warm and stress-free company of their parents. So, besides taking your kids out on Children's Day today and buying them gifts, please try to adjust your own values and routine. Buy gifts for them, but also ask parents to try to adjust their values and work and rest, do not take work as the most important or even the only goal in life, in the weekday life, try to find time to do the three-three-three rule, so that the child always feel the love of their parents, the courage and willingness to often talk to their parents, interaction; and the government in addition to Children's Day to organize a variety of celebrations in addition to the Government must think about the children of Taiwan is not easy to be happy, the main reason from the parents are too busy to accompany, and the reason why parents are so busy, and with the parents, and the main reason is that they are too busy. In addition to organizing various celebrations on Children's Day, the government must also consider that the main reason why children in Taiwan are not easily happy is that their parents are too busy to spend time with them, and the reason why their parents are so busy has to do with the fact that the entire social system and economic development tacitly approve of or even encourage long working hours. The government must liberate Taiwanese parents from work through policies. Listening and accompanying require time and physical strength, so if parents are drained by work, how can they possibly do it?

From the editorial of China Times