Are you a busy parent who feels pressure to create “perfect” family moments—but still worries you’re missing what really matters in parenting?

In the middle of full schedules, work demands, and daily responsibilities, many busy parents believe meaningful memories require big trips, extra money, or elaborate planning. That mindset can quietly pull us away from intentional parenting and leave families feeling disconnected—even when everyone is technically together.

The truth is, some of the most powerful parenting moments happen in the small, ordinary experiences we tend to overlook. When we stop chasing big moments and start practicing intentional parenting, connection becomes easier, more natural, and far more sustainable for busy parents.

In this episode of Parents Making Time, we share three simple, realistic ways to create core memories through intentional parenting—without adding stress, time, or financial pressure to your already full life.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

• Three practical ways busy parents can create lasting core memories through intentional parenting
• Why simple, everyday parenting moments often matter more than big, expensive experiences
• How being present—especially outdoors—strengthens connection, reduces stress, and deepens family relationships
  
  

If you’re a busy parent who wants to be more intentional in your parenting without burning out, this episode will help you start building meaningful family memories—one small moment at a time.

When you finish listening, we’d love for you to connect with us on social media!

Follow us on Instagram and like our page on Facebook to keep the conversation going. It’s the best way to get quick tips, encouragement, and resources to help you make time for what matters most—your family.

Easily improve your intentional parenting efforts at mealtime with our FREE resource, Dinner Conversation Starters.

Download our FREE resource, 30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids, created for busy parents like you who need easy, actionable ways to have daily meaningful connections with their kids in less than a minute!

Parenting Questions? Email us at [email protected] (Please note, your question may be featured on the show).

For parenting inspiration, time management ideas, and encouragement for families, follow the hosts' individual accounts:

Anthony Craiker: Instagram | LinkedIn

Jennifer Craiker: Instagram

Interested in joining our free online parenting community? Send us a DM to receive an invite!

Enjoy the show? Leave a rating & review: Apple | Spotify

 

 

Transcript

Parents Making Time Ep. 19

Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Before we get started today, I wanted to make you aware of a free resource that we have called 30 Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids. This is a list of quick and easy things that you can do to have meaningful connection with your kids in 30 seconds or less. You can get that by going to our website at parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource.

Go there today so that you can start building lasting memories. One micro moment at a time.

Jennifer: As we were preparing for this episode, I started to think about the moments from my own childhood that still stand out. The memories that still stand out to me the most aren't the big picture, perfect moments. They're the long car rides to visit family singing along together to John Denver and the carpenters, or the Saturday afternoons spent picking beans as a family in the backyard garden or the not so quiet evenings.

Gathered around the table playing games of Uno with my parents and five siblings. Those moments didn't feel extraordinary at the time, but they became core memories [00:01:00] today on parents making time. We are sharing three easy ways to create core memories with your family. Simple, intentional moments that don't require more time, more money, just more presence.

Anthony: This is parents making time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

When I was growing up, our family lived in Cape May, New Jersey for several years. One of the things I remember most about that time is my mom taking us to the beach during the summer and how much I loved the sounds of the ocean, the salty air, the seagulls flying overhead, building sand castles in the grainy sand, and the waves crashing on me as I played in the water.

I loved the beach as a kid. I also remember that sometimes on the [00:02:00] weekends we would go to the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, which was one of my favorite things to do. We'd often go to the pier and you could pay a few dollars to get a book of tickets that would allow you to ride the roller coasters and the rides actually rode my first Loopty loop roller coaster there.

We'd get soft serve ice cream and just enjoy the night air out on the boardwalk. Those are some of my favorite memories from my childhood. 

Jennifer: Those are fun memories, and I love that they're simple. I think the mistake that we as parents make is we put all of our efforts into the big moments and we forget those smaller ones, or sometimes we just give up altogether on trying.

Anthony: Yeah, and I think we do that because we believe that the things that we need to plan need to be big or expensive or really special or really different in order to matter to create those core memories. 

Jennifer: And when we do that, we start feeling disconnected from each other because we're not making those efforts as a family.

We're not living a [00:03:00] full family life. We're there together in our home, but we're individually coexisting instead of having experiences that really bring us together and connect us. 

Anthony: There are three things that you can do to create core memories that we've learned over the years, and the first is to do something different.

The second is to do something the same or create a tradition. And the third is to explore a new place. And we're gonna talk about each of these three. The first one, do something different or out of the ordinary. We have a great example of this from a few years ago when all of our kids were still in the house, and we are not a camping family not by any means.

Jennifer didn't grow up camping. I didn't grow up camping. So camping is not something that we had ever done as a family with our own children, but we decided one time that we were gonna go camping and we purposely decided to go camping not too far from home, just in case it was a total [00:04:00] disaster, and we wanted it to be an authentic camping experience.

So we had tents we had two tents from what I recall, one for. You and the girls and one for me and Ethan, and we went out to the campsite and we set up the tents and we brought all sorts of stuff with us food and probably much more than we actually needed to go camping for one night. This was a one night camping trip 

Jennifer: One night.

20 minutes away? Yeah. 

Anthony: Yeah. Just 20 minutes away from the house and we. Roasted marshmallows that night. And as we were sitting around roasting marshmallows, we had a bunch of raccoons start approaching our little campsite, and it was scary. There was a picnic table there, so Jen and the kids got up on the picnic table and I had my.

What do you call it? The 

Jennifer: roasting fork or whatever? Yeah, the fork 

Anthony: that I was using to roast the marshmallows. And I was like shoving that towards the raccoons, trying to get them to back away. 

Jennifer: The funny part of that though is what you don't re, what you [00:05:00] didn't say is there was still a marshmallow on the fork.

And so it was like almost taunting the raccoons. We, yeah. It was really funny. Yeah. 

Anthony: Anyway, eventually the raccoons left and we promptly got in our tents and zipped them up and spent the night and then got up the next morning and went home. It wasn't a total disaster. We did actually make it through the night camping, but it was maybe not what people think of when they talk about going camping.

Nevertheless, that became a core memory for our family, and it's something we still talk about. We still laugh about. The kids ended up having a great time doing it. We've, we never went camping after that because we're just not campers. But we still talk about that trip today. 

Jennifer: Do you remember when we got home, Natalie actually drew a picture of you with your fork?

And the raccoons, and it said something like, dad, the raccoon hunter. Yeah. And you hung it on your wall, and [00:06:00] I'm sure we probably still have that somewhere. 

Anthony: Yeah. So doing something different or out of the ordinary, that can be a great way to create a core memory. Number two, as I mentioned, is doing something the same or making a tradition.

One of the ways that we did this was years ago when I was traveling a lot for work, we would sometimes bring the whole family with me, and this was a really inexpensive way to go on a little trip. Now we live in Florida, in Orlando, Florida. And so when you live in central Florida, you're, two to four hours away from a short vacation in any direction.

And so I would drive all over the state, and so oftentimes have to stay the night because I'd have court, multiple days in a row or whatever. And especially during the summertime. Jen and the kids would load up with me in the van and we'd go and take a short trip. And one of our favorite places to go was down near Fort Myers, Florida.

That's in the southwestern part of the state. There's a, an island called Sanibel Island, [00:07:00] and I would have hearings in Fort Myers, Florida. And then we would go out and explore Sanibel Island. And it was a really inexpensive way. And most of my travel costs were covered, including hotel, because this was for work.

And it was just a neat way. And so that kind of became a little bit of a tradition, especially during the summertime. Over the years where we'd all go together with dad on a work trip. 

Jennifer: One of the things I loved about those trips, especially the ones to Sanibel, is they were so easy because we chose the things that we did the first time, and then we just repeated them.

So there was no question about what we were gonna do. We knew that we would spend the evening at the Fort Myers Beach and then. The next day we'd get up and we'd go out to the island and we'd go to a very specific spot and we'd then have ice cream for lunch and go maybe over by the lighthouse and then head home.

It was very predictable, so there wasn't a lot of effort that put went into it really. But there's so many good memories. 

Anthony: There. We talk about those trips a lot, and I think [00:08:00] those are one of our kids' favorite moments, favorite memories from their childhood. 

Jennifer: Definitely. So the last one is to go explore someplace new.

So when our kids were in elementary school and spring break would come along, I used to think. My mind, like we need to have an adventure every day. And these adventures would be small and simple, but we would go try new things that we hadn't done yet in our area. So I can remember we would do strawberry picking.

There was this one place called the showcase of citrus, which obviously oranges grow here. And it was this amazing farm, right? Behan behind Disney World where they grew citrus and you could go and pick them. And we spent an afternoon there. There's also a park nearby. Called the wetlands where you can actually walk amongst the gators.

It sounds a little dangerous. It probably is, but we went, would go for walks and explore that and going on those. Adventures for me are those core memories for when my kids were small, and I think that they would remember those things too. They would tell you, oh, mom used to take us to these different places, and we'd go and [00:09:00] explore and just trying something new.

Sometimes it went really well, sometimes it didn't. But we were having fun together. 

Anthony: Yeah, sometimes too and this is where. The core memories that we created are a little bit bigger in terms of expense and planning and that kind of thing. But sometimes, if we had a family reunion that we would go to, we would tack on a couple of additional days to go do something else as a family on that trip.

Jennifer: So one of those ones that I particularly remember was when we went to we actually flew into Nevada and then we ended up in Utah and then California. We went to a lot of places on that trip, but we were really exploring new things and something you'll notice about all of these stories that we've just shared, that they all have in common, that we were outdoor.

There's a reason for that. There's actually science that connects being outdoors and increasing our ability to concentrate, be more imaginative and inclu, including increasing our working memory. There are multiple studies on that subject. 

Anthony: The brain actually remembers [00:10:00] experiences better when multiple senses are involved.

So outdoors, naturally engage those senses, right? You've got sight, sound, touch, and smell. All at the same time. And the science shows that memories made while engaging multiple sensory pathways are more durable and easier to recall. So when you do these three things, you do something different, you do something the same or create a tradition.

And you explore a new place, they can be done in lots of different ways, but if you make those things happen in nature, they're even more likely to become core memories for your family. Researchers have found that even a single profound experience in nature. Can leave a long lasting imprint on a person's sense of self and the way that they relate to the world.

It's the kind of memory that stays with you for years and years. Time and nature also as an added benefit, boosts your mood, reduces stress, and helps our brains shift out of that everyday [00:11:00] autopilot mode that we're often in. And all those things make experiences much more memorable. And that matches what the science tells us.

Emotion rich novel experiences are encoded more deeply in our brains than just the routine everyday moments. So when you slow down, you step outside and you connect with the natural world. Whether that's a hike, a, a camp out 20 minutes from your house or just watching the sunset. You're not just getting fresh air.

You're creating the kind of meaningful memories that your family will remember for a lifetime. 

Jennifer: That makes me think of just one other real quick memory that I want to share that has to do with outside, again, tacked onto a family reunion, but we were all together with my family. We'd had a horrible night actually.

Long story. I won't go into it, but basically just everything that could have gone wrong and everyone was a little grumpy and it was you who had the thought, let's go outside and watch the sunset, and it actually turned it into this beautiful memory. I can [00:12:00] remember us walking outside and everyone's mood lifted and it's something I know my mom still talks about.

Remember the time we went and watched the sunset. I really think that there's so much truth behind the science of. Outdoors, creating those mood boosting, but memory creators, that's a great thing. 

Anthony: If you like today's episode, please leave a rating or review on Apple or Spotify and please share this episode with a friend.

Bonus points if you do, 

Jennifer: coming up next time on parents making time, we're asking the question, should you monitor your kids' phone? It's a topic that many parents feel unsure about, and we'll talk through the fears, the gray areas, and how to make. Thoughtful, age appropriate decisions about technology so that you can protect your kids while still building trust and connection.

Until next time, make time to become the parent you want to be. [00:13:00]