Wholesome Recreation

"Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, comapssion, work, and wholesome recreational activities."

-The Family: A Proclamation to the World

We are counselled that our free time should be used to create the best life possible.  We should choose activities that promote individual growth, and strengthen our families.  There are many activities that we can choose from.  What we choose will depend on our families, their interests, the ages of your family members, and the amount of time you have.  Wholesome recreation can be something small, like playing a quick board game, or it can be elaborate, like going on a family vacation.

Wholesome recreation can be a teaching/learning experience.  We should spend some of our free time teaching our children.  We can teach them to read, ride a bike, play a sport, bake, or garden.  When we take our time to do these things, we can help them build their knowledge, make memories, and we can also build our relationships with them. 

Our every day lives are becoming more hectic all of the time.  We have work and church responsibilities.  Our children have homework, and they are involved in extra activities.  One way that our family has tried to spend time together, even when we are busy, is to attend the activities of each member of our family.  We have enjoyed cheering each other on at soccer games or dance recitals.  My husband has also volunteered to coach some of our kids' teams in order to spend more time with them.

We also love to spend time together at home.  We try to make sure that we eat dinner together each night.  We also enjoy playing board games, playing sports together in our yard, and eating treats.

Creating fun family traditions has also helped us to spend time together.  When we have traditions, it is easier to carve out time with each other.  Some of our favorite traditions are carving pumpkins at Halloween, decorating the Christmas tree together, and watching fireworks on the 4th of July.

Our family has also been blessed to be able to take a vacation together once a year.  Sometimes these vacations are more elaborate than others, but getting time together, away from the hectic pace and responsibilities of life has been a great thing for our family.  We have made many great memories together.

"One of the main problems in families today is that we spend less and less time together.  Time together is precious time--time needed to talk, to listen, to encourage, and to show how to do things."

--President James E. Faust