No time for the bedtime story? How modern life is stealing our family moments

This article is a collaborative feature written in partnership with Park Christmas Savings, based on insights from the More Time for What Matters: The Time Poverty UK Survey 2025. The survey gathered responses from 4,469 parents with children under 18.

Once upon a time, the bedtime story was sacred in our house. Cyrus would pick his favourite, usually something involving an animal with questionable manners, and I’d do the voices. Badly. He’d giggle, interrupt and demand to turn the pages himself. We’d sometimes get through three pages before he declared he was “too tired” and fell asleep mid-sentence.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed those moments changing. By the time the dinner dishes are done, emails cleared, school uniform found and my gym session complete, I’m running on fumes. There are nights when I sit on the edge of Cyrus’s bed, book in hand, and feel my eyelids droop faster than his.

And sometimes, if I’m being truthful, I don’t want to read the story.

It isn’t because I don’t want to spend time with Cyrus. It’s because by that point in the evening I have spent the day being required by somebody, somewhere, to do something.  Dinner. School things. Washing. Finding whatever has mysteriously disappeared despite apparently living in our house. Even the gym, which I love, takes another chunk out of the day.

Then I look at the book and think: Do we really have to do this tonight?

And almost immediately comes the guilt. Because apparently motherhood has a remarkably efficient internal audit department.

The research suggests the pressure is real. Parents are short on both time and energy, and financial strain is increasingly tangled up with both.

• More than 61% of parents say they do not get enough quality time with their loved ones.
• Two in three say the rising cost of living has eaten into their family time.
• More than half regularly skip bedtime stories or one-to-one chats because they are tired or stressed.

When asked what they would do with an extra hour in the day, most parents didn’t dream of grand adventures. They just wanted to sleep.

I laughed when I read that. Not because it was funny, exactly. Because I understood it.

Others said they would use the time to talk, properly talk, to their children.

Family psychologist Dr Pam Spurr explains why those small moments matter:

That line about “five minutes of real connection” stayed with me. Because that’s sometimes all I have.

But when I stop scrolling, put the phone on silent and just listen, I mean really listen, Cyrus always surprises me. He tells me what made him laugh that day, what he’s secretly worried about, or which footballer has suddenly become “overrated”. This is the bit I had missed.

Cyrus is not the little boy from the beginning of this story anymore. Bedtime has changed because he has changed.

Sometimes he still wants a book, sometimes he reads to me. Sometimes the book barely gets opened because he suddenly needs to tell me something that apparently could not possibly have been mentioned during the previous 12 waking hours.

Maybe five minutes of real attention matters more than forcing ourselves through 20 pages so I can tick “bedtime story” off my imaginary list of things good mothers are supposed to do.

The financial side matters too. More than half of parents in the survey said they could no longer afford some basic leisure activities, while one in four had taken on extra work to cope with bills.

If someone takes extra work because the food bill has risen, or stays late because they cannot afford to lose hours, that family time has not disappeared because they failed to “prioritise what matters”.

It has been sold.

Parents are constantly told to make time for family.

Katherine Scott, Director of Marketing at Park Christmas Savings, which commissioned the survey, says:

“Parents are running on empty. When money’s tight and workloads are heavy, it’s those quiet, meaningful family moments that get squeezed out first. But those little moments like a bedtime story are the glue that holds families together.”

There is a contradiction here that I don’t think we talk about enough. Of course our children need our attention.

But exhausted parents probably do not need another piece of research to wave at themselves when they fall asleep halfway through The Gruffalo.

There are nights when I manage the story. There are nights when Cyrus reads to me. There are nights when we talk instead. And yes, there are nights when bedtime is rushed because real life has got in the way.

I am trying to stop treating those evenings as evidence that I have failed some invisible parenting assessment.

Family time is not something we can measure neatly in minutes. The bit Cyrus remembers may not be whether I finished the chapter. It might be that I put my phone down when he wanted to tell me something.

I used to think protecting family time meant protecting reading to him each night. Read The Wonky Donkey  book five times over. Do bedtime properly. Make the memory. I’m not so sure anymore.

Cyrus is growing up and the stories are changing, and so are the things he needs to tell me. My job isn’t to preserve some perfect version of bedtime from when he was little. It is to notice when he still wants me there.

One day he won’t ask me to sit on the edge of his bed. He won’t need another page, or suddenly remember something desperately important about school just as I am trying to leave the room.

I suspect I won’t miss doing the voices.

But I will miss being asked to stay.

Has the way you spend time with your children changed as they have grown older?

Is there family time you thought you had lost, only to realise it had changed?

For information from Park Christmas Savings on planning and budgeting ahead for Christmas, visit
getpark.co.uk/budgeting.