A study commissioned by the toy company, Hearthsong has been weighing heavily on my mind. By querying over a thousand parents of kids under the age of twelve, it was found that although 99% of those surveyed believe play was important to childhood, only 38% spent at least six hours a week in active play with their own kids.

Even more troubling, one in six parents didn't even spend an hour a week with their kids, which averages to less than10 minutes a day in playtime with their sons and daughters.

Hearthsong sells toys, but playing with kids doesn't mean you're confined to Legos and tea parties. There are lots of fun things you can do with your child that don't require plastic items at all. I believe and if both parties are having fun and actively engaged, it counts as play too.

Something even the busiest of families can do for entertainment/play is round-robin stories. This costs absolutely nothing, can be done many places including around the dinner table or when trapped traveling in the car together.

One person starts a story ("Once upon a time, there was a giant onion" ) passes it on to the next person, who adds their own spin to the adventure ("and he accidentally wandered into this village that turned out to be where the Iron Chef competitions were held....") and then passes it on again. It's a simple activity that stretches kids' imaginations and can provide some pretty memorable family moments at the same time For a time, we had a child who had exceptional prowess at working a pirate into every tale and it became a challenge to make a pirate-proof.

Any mundane activity can be turned into play with a little bit of imagination: play catch with the newspaper as you're bringing it the house, or a quick game of tag while waiting for another sibling to be done with track practice, monkey-in-the-middle-of-laundry is done by tossing dirty clothes into the proper sorting pile over a leaping child, playing charades to try and guess what's for dinner or what exciting things happened that day are all ways to incorporate fun into a busy schedule.

Blogger Blackbird has older kids and for some people that makes family time a bit more challenging, but she brilliantly enlisted her children's help to make a list of fun things they wanted to do as a family this summer. The list is genius in it's simplicity: making a fire, creating something with paper mache, working at a soup kitchen, eating S'mores.

It's easy to forget in the daily scramble to get everything thing done, but kids really aren't kids forever. With that in mind, I'm off for a kite-flying session with mine. (Sadly, our first all summer.)