Making Family Time Part of Your Routine with Older Kids

Wondering how to work family time into your regular routine? It can be hard to make a family fun night happen, especially as your kids get bigger. Here are some strategies that work for us with teens and young adults.

It probably started with food. All things with me usually do.

Since I was already cooking food to feed an army, it made sense to make it a little fun and allow it to morph into family time experiences.

When the boys were little, I instituted different food routines to follow, such as Taco Tuesday, Pizza Friday, and Pancake Saturday. Those meal plan theme nights have morphed and changed a bit over the years, but overall the idea of having regular recurring events punctuate the week has been helpful to me.

I love routines. I know that I thrive when I have regular things to do each day, week, and month. So it makes sense that I’ve developed routines or systems around family time.

Now that our children are in high school, college, and beyond, we’re working in other routines as well.

The kids’ schedules are such that Monday through Thursday, someone or everyone is someplace else. And they have their own lives and ideas of how to spend their free time.

Family time generally happens on the weekends and I’m learning that it’s good to be intentional about it. Here’s how it’s currently working:

Friday Pizza Night

We’ve had homemade pizza on Friday nights for well over 20 years. Now that Bryan grills pizza, it’s become the veritable highlight of his week. He really doesn’t want us to skip it.

We typically eat pizza while watching a movie or a movie-length episode of European TV. We’ve just finished the last season of Astrid so we’re looking for something new.

The kids who are home know that Pizza Night is a given and so there’s a reason to look forward to coming home from whatever other Friday thing they might also be doing.

We often include their friends or church friends into the experience. In those instances, we skip the movie so we can focus on the people.

Monthly Open Game Nights

Something new that we’re adding to the weekend mix is a monthly open game night for the kids and their friends. Our new house is set up for entertaining, so this is one of the things to coincide with the priorities I set a couple years ago.

This has been a great tradition to develop over the last 18 months. True confessions: it did require some dying to self. But, I’m so glad that whatever I viewed as a sacrifice happened because it’s been a great experience.

Even if it goes way past my bedtime.

Sunday Dinners

Sunday Dinners continue to be a highlight of our family time together. This past week the time change hit me hard, but I tried to lean into it by setting up Sunday Dinner on the patio. It was a little cool, but it was nice.

Topics covered, prompted mostly by them:

🌼 three books of the Bible you’d want on a deserted island (22yo made a strong case for Leviticus 😳)

🌼 the difference between christology and christophany (I didn’t know the second was a thing)

🌼 that God buried Moses Himself and that became a point of contention between Archangel Michael and the Bent One (Jude 9-10)

February was a weird month for me so I didn’t always set the table. I’m learning it’s okay to skip sometimes. Some weeks it’s nice, some weeks it’s not.

Either way, I cook something that everyone enjoys and we all eat together. Sometimes we have long conversations, sometimes not. All of us enjoy the nights when we linger.

Occasional Adventures

With kids ranging in age from 16 to 27, it’s hard to pin everyone down. Second Christmas is one of our solutions to this.

I take whatever we can get when it comes to family time with older kids, sometimes all of us can be there, and sometimes we can’t.

Going to Disneyland together in January was a highlight. A few years ago we celebrated a birthday all together at a vacation rental in Los Osos.

But, we’ve done adventures with a limited crew and those are good, too. Whether it’s a weekend away in Monterey Bay or a one-night meet up to see the Kings play, I’m so thrilled to make family time happen with my older kids.

Hold it all loosely.

I think it’s important that as the parents, ergo, the supposed ones with more maturity, don’t require attendance at family events. Make it a “get to” instead of a “have to”.

This older podcast episode of What Have You does a great job of explaining that. Make your house a fun place to be, and your older kids will want to be there!

More Good Ideas for Family Fun