Choose Wholesome Recreation

Play Together, Stay Together

Families that play together stay together, especially when their play is uplifting and wholesome.

Family vacations, holidays, birthday celebrations, and other activities build strong bonds and feelings of self-worth.

The phrase “Remember when we…” is sure to bring love and laughter in the years to come.

There is great value in appropriate recreation. Life seems to consist a stewardship of time and choices requiring “nearly constant exertion.” Work enables and sustains life, brings a sense of self-worth, and purpose. However, wholesome recreation is important to create balance with a hard day’s work.

“Music, literature, art, dance, drama, athletics—all can provide entertainment to enrich one’s life and further consecrate it,” Christofferson says. “At the same time, it hardly needs to be said that much of what passes for entertainment today is coarse, degrading, violent, mind-numbing, and time wasting. Ironically, it sometimes takes hard work to find wholesome leisure.”

Build Up Rather Than Tear Down

D. H. Oaks teaches that leisure time should be filled with activities that uplift, inspire, and draw individuals closer to family and friends. He notes and warns against the trend of setting aside dignifying entertainment and replacing it with demeaning and destructive activities.

Remember to always build us up and never tear down one another. We should apply this principle in the ways we use our time, including our recreation and our diversions,” Consider the themes of the books, magazines, movies, television shows, and music we in the world have made popular by our patronage. Do the things portrayed in our chosen entertainment build us up or tear us down?

Engage in the Best Recreation

“Consider how we use our time in the choices we make in viewing television, playing video games, surfing the Internet, or reading books or magazines. Of course it is good to view wholesome entertainment or to obtain interesting information,” Oaks says. “But not everything of that sort is worth the portion of our life we give to obtain it. Some things are better, and others are best. Leisure time should be filled with the best activities rather than those that are merely good.

H. B. Eyring, also gives guidelines to follow when filling recreational time: “Too often we use many hours for fun and pleasure, clothed in the euphemism ‘I’m recharging my batteries.’ Those hours could be spent reading and studying to gain knowledge, skills, and culture.”

Balance Is Crucial

Seeking out the best recreation can actually provide families with emotional nourishment to overcome trials and challenges in life. Recreation should be balanced with learning. Family evenings together and family activities are two settings where children can be fortified.

In a materialistic age, when recreation and convenience are the suggested priorities of our society, we might all well ask ourselves, how well are we providing for the well-being and strengthening of our families?

Time Together

Be careful of over-scheduling families in good recreational activities such as sports and other school and club activities. These activities should be carefully regulated, too.

Parents should act to preserve time for family, family activities, family evenings together, and the other precious togetherness and individual one-on-one time that binds a family together and fixes children’s values on things of great worth.

"Create meaningful family bonds that give your children an identity stronger than what they can find with their peer group or at school or anyplace else. This can be done through family traditions for birthdays, for holidays, for dinnertime, etc.“