“With the cell phone, pager, email and more, there’s now four or five different ways anybody can reach you at any moment,” says Pam Vaccaro, president of Designs on Time in St. Louis.

“That means there’s a disappearance of what we call natural lag – the time to get things done,” adds the work-life consultant. “I think family time has been the victim of this.”

How can parents free up more time with their children? One of the less-known steps is making sure children have more time for them. On Mother’s Day, for example, one of Vaccaro’s young nephews was booked to play in two Little League baseball games.

That was too much. But just as companies demand more from adult staff today, children’s schools, sports leagues and other recreational groups demand more from kids.

“To the children you can say, ‘you can play in one sport, not three,’” remarks Vaccaro.

Parents have to take care of business on their end as well. They have to decide that on most days, office tasks must stop at a time that allows space for family. When at all possible, parents should choose to work at companies that respect this need.

At the least, the immediate supervisor should be brought on board.

“You have to talk to your boss about this because you need to set time to give attention to your children,” says Gonzalo Escobar, an educator in family issues at the University of Illinois extension program in Chicago. “You will be able to do a better job the next day if you feel your supervisor has paid attention to your needs.”

One approach the Illinois program strongly recommends is to get children involved in household tasks and projects. There are several benefits. Kids and parents get to do things together and have the satisfaction of completing a job. And the effort gets chores out of the way more quickly and frees up leisure time together.

None of these things happen just with good intentions, however. The hard reality is that family time must be scheduled.

“Adults need to make an appointment within their mind or actually on their calendar for this,” remarks Kathy Reuter, who also teaches in the Illinois program.

Being serious about this means blocking out other things that come up during family time. That could include unexpected social invitations or new demands from work.

Even ensuring that the family sits down together at dinner requires such measures, experts say. It may no longer be realistic for most people to have seven family dinners a week. Yet a conscious effort at four such meals would be a big step up from the current average of two.

How far do you have to go to make sure your children get enough of you? Sometimes on to the next job or even the next line of work that will allow for it. It sounds extreme, but hard-pressed parents in North America do it every day.

Face Time for Families

Want to see more of your kids? Some suggestions from Pam Vaccaro of Designs on Time:

• Compromise on other commitments. If you don’t have time to bake cookies for all your friends and extended family next holiday season, so be it.
• When you’re changing jobs, make flex-time and respect for family time an important part of the decision. Progressive companies build work-life balance right into their policies.
• Maximize your time at work. Be functional rather than creative with emails. Don’t accept ASAP (as soon as possible) for a deadline, ask for a specific completion date.
• Multi-tasking used to be the mantra. Drop it. It increases stress without adding efficiency.
• Acquire new technology with caution. Do you really need that new communications device?
• Think about how you’ll use that family time once you get it. Flopping in front of the TV together doesn’t count.