Inhabit Quality Time
Or: what Tim Urban's "The Tail End" taught me about parenting
What would you do if you only had four and a half hours left with the person you love?
I don’t mean just any time - I mean the time you are completely present with one another, receptive to where the conversation takes you.
Recently, I discovered I could only expect 4.5 hours of quality time with my five-year-old before she turns six in August…10 months away.
Here’s how it happened: on a recent Tuesday night, my kind, wonderful daughter had an epic tantrum. I’m not talking crying and yelling for a bit. I’m talking kicking-and-screaming, completely dysregulated, who-is-this-person kind of tantrum.
Later that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why? What was going on with her?
Tantrums are inevitable when kids are young. They also look different as we get older. They turn into miscommunication between partners, awkward dynamics with colleagues. They’re contained but painful: not the kind of time anyone wants more of.
And yet, so much of the time I was spending with Anna involved one - or both - of us missing each other. Not in big, dramatic tantrum ways. But in the smaller, subtler ones. If quality time was a formula, ours looked like this1:
Quality Time = Time x Energy (of whoever's most exhausted)
When Anna’s energy was negative (because she was tired, hungry, or cranky), we weren’t having quality time. The same held true for me: when I was tired, rushed, stressed, or distracted, I couldn’t expect to be present for her.
It turns out, this kind of meh time was pervasive. It was happening in the way I rushed to get tangles out of her hair so she could get to school. Or when I shut off my work email and took a minute before asking her to repeat what she said.
These moments are an inevitable part of raising children and they’re nothing to be ashamed of: Anna needs untangled hair to avoid pain in the future. I need to answer work emails to keep my job.
But it also wasn’t the time with her I wanted more of.
Inspired by one of my favorite pieces of all time, Tim Urban’s “The Tail End,” I ran the numbers. With 30 minutes together in the mornings before school, three hours each evening, and all day together as a family on Saturdays, Anna and I should have had 73,110 minutes together until she turns six. 1,219 hours. 51 straight days.
But was any of that the golden time?
The 30 minutes before school didn’t make the cut, given all the detangling, toothbrushing, and clothes-putting-on. The three hours in the evening couldn’t be counted on either, with cooking and two other kids to care for.2 Even Saturdays, when we have our phones off and spend time as a family, didn’t reliably yield what I wanted with Anna: high-quality, one-on-one time.
I thought back to the last time we’d had an unhurried, focused conversation. The kind where she’s telling me when she felt left out at recess. Or what her imaginary siblings (Shlira and Feera) think of first grade. Or when she looked up suddenly and said “I feel like we’re in a story.”
It turns out, that conversation was two weeks prior, when we’d gone for a 15-minute walk together around the neighborhood. The time before that was the month before, for yet another one-on-one walk.
The realization hit me in waves. I was losing my five-year-old daughter. If things kept going, we’d have only 4.5 hours of reliable quality time before she stopped being five-year-old Anna and evolved into an equally lovable - but different - six-year-old Anna.
Here’s why it matters: five-year-old Anna is different from four-year-old Anna. She has a different best friend at school, different stories she likes to read, different music preferences.
Here’s four-and-a-half hours, in back-to-back “Baby Shark” songs - something four-year-old Anna couldn’t get enough of but five-year-old Anna can’t stand:
Here it is in episodes of “Gabby’s Dollhouse,” a show she watches with our next-door neighbors that I trust isn’t destroying her brain:
And here it is in those 15-minute walks:
🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️
🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️
🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️🚶♀️Oftentimes an article like this will end with a reminder to treasure one another because time is precious.
Those reminders are important. But there’s a gap—between knowing what we should do and establishing the habit systems that get us there.
That’s why I started this newsletter: to bridge the gap. It’s also why I compiled the Check-Up—a reflection exercise to consider how we can invest our time, money, and energy into habits that strengthen our most treasured relationships.
Ultimately, my aim is outlandishly high: to shift the experiences we treasure (like quality time with my daughter) from effortful, one-off exceptions to the regular fabric of our days. Habitual changes. Sustainable changes. That we stumble through over and over and over…until we don’t.
Because it’s worth it.
Because Anna told me a few weeks ago she feels like we’re in a story.
And I don’t want that story to end.
PS: If you like these graphics, you will appreciate one of my all-time favorite pieces: Tim Urban’s “The Tail End,” which inspired many of the above visualizations.
Math nerds rejoice! A more technical way to convey this would be: Quality Time = Time x min (Energyₐ, Energyⱼ) where whoever has “min” (“minimum”) energy dictates the upper limit of quality time. You could also divide it up by the number of people around. Math!
It feels very important to note at this point that my younger two kids are equally important to me. Thankfully, at the time of this writing I am consistently getting one-on-one time with each of them without having to think about it: my baby (while nursing) and my two-year-old (while sitting with him in the bathroom, waiting for him to poop, fully engaged in whatever he wants to tell me).
the thought of Anna reading this when she’s older and realizing she has the most loving, most intentional mother 🩷
So helpful and powerful.