The amount of time you spend in focused attention with your child is directly related to your child's experience of being a child, as well as their overall deve

The amount of time you spend in focused attention with your child is directly related to your child's experience of being a child, as well as their overall development, and your memories of them as a child. Like the other poster said - there are only so many Christmases that are magic. But to take it further - there are only a finite number of developmental milestones, and your time and energy and attention absolutely have an impact on those milestones (barring a disability or something like that). For example - our oldest started speaking in (hilariously speech impedimented) full sentences at 12 months. People wondered if he was a genius baby. No, he's pretty average in terms of raw computing power. We spent an ENORMOUS amount of time with him as a baby, just talking. We narrated everything we did. We spoke to him as a human person, instead of babbling back at him like a lot of people do. We described the steps of everything we did. We explained the reasons for what we were doing as we were doing it. That focused, invested time had a clear, and definite impact on the child's development. And that's not even talking about the benefit for our mental health when engaging in a substantive manner with that tiny weirdo.