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When I was growing up, there were a couple of weekends when my brothers and my father went off on a business or fishing trip and my mother and I would have the house to ourselves for two peaceful days. It hardly ever happened, so when it did, we would both take full advantage of the quiet. We would even give each other plenty of space, going to opposite ends of the house and only meeting up for meals. I thought an uninterrupted nap was the greatest gift I could give to my mother. I know for sure now that I was right, because it’s about the greatest gift I can receive at this point in my life, too!

When your kids are young, it’s rare to have five minutes to
yourself, even in the bathtub, without a knock on the door. When they are a bit older, their activities can fill every spare hour of the week, which doesn’t include making sure the basic necessities are taken care of: healthy meals, clean clothes, medical and dental needs, and the list goes on. Most mothers I know can feel like they are so busy “doing” life that they are no longer “living” life. Life can go by faster and faster, but be less and less fulfilling.

You’ve probably seen the ongoing parenting discussion on the Internet, at church, at school, and in various groups on the subject of quality time versus quantity time with kids. What I’ve learned raising my own eight children is that they don’t want quantity or quality time as any adult might define it. Children want ALL of your time. And by “time” I mean your undivided, uninterrupted attention. They really aren’t counting the minutes that you spend with them in comparison to others. What they are measuring is how much they feel listened to and acknowledged. All of my memories from my childhood have to do with a feeling or an emotion, not with the hour on the clock or the day of the week. If you think about it, you may find that it’s true for you, as well.

As an adult, I realized that my respect for my mother was deeply rooted at a young age because of the way she gave each of us her undivided attention when we needed her the most. With nine children, it was impossible to give us equal amounts of time, but she somehow managed to make each of us feel understood, cared about, and even uniquely special. Those qualities transcended the amount of time on the clock. If you
had my mother’s attention, you had it fully. She could accomplish in five minutes, through the act of attentive listening, what we contemporary mothers constantly struggle to do; we feel we are basically robbing our children of our undivided attention. My mother was able to make us feel remarkably safe and whole again just through the act of simple listening and caring, even when we became adults. In my mother’s journals from 1992, she wrote about one of my brothers coming over, upset about an argument with his wife:
“I didn’t say much at all. He only seemed to want my undivided attention. That’s what I gave him. I listened to everything he wanted to tell me. Afterwards [he] took a nap. He seemed to feel better when he left. Bless his heart.”

On the “Mother’s quilt” I made to commemorate her life, which hangs in my house, I embroidered the aphorism that my mom used as a template to raise each one of us. She had also written it into her journal in the 1960s and sent it out to readers of her Mother Osmond newsletters in the 1980s to all of our fans. This is it:

Mother’s Recipe for a Happy Child

A pinch of humor

A dash of patience

A hint of friendship

A sprinkle of listening

A slice of kindness

Mix in love and bake with example

Notice the quantities prescribed to help your child be happy: a pinch, a dash, and a sprinkle. Not a gallon of guilt for their normal childhood growing pains, or a bushel of bargaining for your child’s affection because you need her to be your friend, or a pound of self-punishment for comparing yourself to other mothers and feeling like you can’t compete.

Because my mother knew that she couldn’t be there 24-7 for each of her children, she instilled in us the self-worth to believe we could make good decisions and wise choices on our own. That was a key gift she gave to each of us with love. And she and my father stood at the periphery of our lives to lend support when we might need it. He was another constant and steady presence for all of us, his children.

One afternoon when my two oldest children were little and my mother was visiting, we watched as Stephen played LEGOs on the floor with Jessica. Holding baby Rachael on her lap, my mother said to me: “I remember doing this when I was your age. I was sitting in the living room watching Alan, Wayne, and Merrill play with Lincoln Logs on the carpet, holding baby Jay in my arms. I thought this is how God must view all of us: as little children, working to design and build up our lives, trying to make something for ourselves out of all of the toy pieces. And He is watching over us with love, helping us to grow, but not interfering with our free will unless we ask.”

My mother lived the example of what it meant to respect another by listening with an open heart and without judgment. From the time we could first understand, she explained about
free will and agency. She said that we would each have many opportunities to make millions of choices. But we would also have to live with the consequences of those choices, so she hoped we would make wise choices and use discernment.

She would tell us that choosing is what separates us from every other living thing. You can choose how you’re going to let something affect your life, for both good and bad. You may not be able to change your life overnight, but you can choose to take a small step today and then take another tomorrow.

She would rarely say: “I’m so proud of you.” Instead she would say: “Aren’t you proud of yourself? Don’t you feel good about your accomplishment?” She validated our feelings, our opinions, and our perspectives, and, in the bigger picture, our individual spirits.

As much as my mother loved technology and the fast-forward advances in communicating electronically (she was one of the first people I knew who owned a personal computer in the early 1980s, long before it was common), I think she would have felt sadness for this generation of children because of our current reliance on technology. Many of us seem to depend on staying in touch with the world by always having a cell phone in our hand or nearby. My mother would often say, “You have so much stress with everything that you have to keep up with now: your businesses, your touring and speaking schedules, trying to oversee Children’s Miracle Network, and everyone expecting an instant answer to every question by e-mail. On top of that, being a mother. I can’t imagine how you do it all.”

I don’t think we can “do it all” well. We may be staying in touch with the world, but are we losing touch in our homes?

My cell phone is many things to me. It’s my movable office, my link to any news I might need, my GPS in the car, my way to listen to recordings I’m working on, and mostly my connection to my older kids and friends. So I admit that I feel uncomfortable without it nearby. Between texting, updating social media, checking in on the hundreds of e-mails I get every day, calendar notifications, and reminders, it seems like I’m always looking down at the phone in my hand. I know I’m not alone in this because almost all of the women around me are doing the same thing, even if they are using an app to keep track of what they need at the store. As much as the technology has simplified our adult lives, I believe it has started to complicate and even damage our relationships with our children.

I’m a woman who is a mega-multitasker, because I have to be one. The “to-do” list of my life every day is longer than what could possibly get done in the hours of that day. Like many other women I know, I’ve evolved to the point where I can combine tasks and still keep track of it all. I really am capable of hearing what my child is saying to me even while I’m answering a text from a producer and packing for a concert tour or press trip. I can almost always repeat back to my child what he or she has been telling me. However, just because I can doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do. I know that multitasking is not how my children feel my love for them. I’ve come to realize that children need eye-to-eye contact with their parents, just like we do as adults with one another. Think about
it: We don’t go see movies about people staring down at a text message or gazing for two hours at a computer screen. We want to watch their eye contact and dialogue, the emotion of human interaction. It’s true with children, too.

A business associate told me about a day she was doing some online banking on her smartphone while her preschool-age son was playing a game on the floor nearby. It was her only time to catch up on household matters, and she felt under constant pressure to keep current with everything. When her little son said, “Watch this, Mommy,” she would glance over at him and smile and then try to finish her banking transaction. She said she didn’t even realize that her child was frustrated until he appeared at her elbow and took her face in his small hands and pleaded, “Play with me with your eyes, Mommy.”

It broke her heart. From then on, after she left work for the day, she put the phone away until after she had tucked her son into bed for the night. His happiness and calmness increased by leaps and bounds. She told me that her own sense of well-being and self-worth as a mother increased, as well.

When my daughter Brianna was two years old, I was driving to the TV studio to work and multitasking by returning phone calls as the car sat in traffic on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles. This was before it became illegal to drive and talk on a handheld cell phone.

Brianna kept reaching from her car seat in the back and whimpering for me to give her the phone as I inched along, bumper to bumper. Finally, the traffic started to move and pick up speed, so I finished my last call and I reached back to hand
Brianna the phone to let her pretend to talk on it. But she didn’t want to play with the phone; she wanted to get rid of it. In the rearview mirror, I caught my daughter’s one swift move as she launched the phone out the open window. It crashed to the asphalt in the next lane to be immediately run over by an approaching car.

I couldn’t believe it! (And this was 1999, when a cell phone was still around six hundred dollars!) But it opened my eyes that day. And my ears. Now when the kids are in the car with me, I try to put the phone down and use the time to talk with them. It’s a great way to have personal time with each child, and being in a car together provides a good atmosphere for listening. It’s not always easy, because—let’s be real—hearing the play-by-play of what happened during volleyball in gym class, or a detailed description of the progression and number of times Justin Bieber has changed his hairstyle in the last six months, can be enough to make my eyes glaze over (I feel for the mothers in the past who had to hear about Donny nonstop), but the contentment on my kids’ faces makes it worthwhile. Usually after the events of the day are discussed, the topic will turn to something of more substance. If I am quiet and listen, they will eventually come around to talking about the concerns that are making them worry or the hopes of their hearts.

My mom and I had some of our most profound mother-daughter talks when we were riding in tour buses from show to show. I would tell her everything that was going on for me; she would comfort my insecurities and encourage my dreams. I’m sure
she would have appreciated having that time to put her head back and rest for a while, but that rarely happened. She was always checking in with one of her children.

I often think of how many other demands there were on my mother’s time.

It must have been challenging for her to have to be our teacher, not only of values and life skills, but also our correspondence lessons. She had to figure out ways to teach us on tour buses, airplanes, vans, and hotel rooms or in cramped quarters backstage and even make it fun to learn. For example, she wrote in a journal from 1975:
“Jimmy and I sat together on the bus going back to Brussels and worked on memorizing a few more of the states by association. ‘Calls a fawn into the ark…California. Calls a rat a doe…Colorado. The doe cut his toe and had to connect it…Connecticut.
’”

After an exhausting day of doing two shows, pressing and repairing costumes, packing bags, and figuring out how to keep us all healthy on the road, I’m sure making up a game for a nine-year-old to learn the states wasn’t something she felt like doing. But she did it. And I’m betting that my brother Jimmy can still recite all of the associations she created to remember each state, because my mother made it feel like special time.

We were often in situations like press events, TV show tapings, or backstage where we weren’t supposed to talk or make noise. From the time we were very young, my mother started a secret code with us. She would squeeze our hands or our arms three times to represent the words “I love you.” It was a physical reminder of her constant presence and affection for each of
us. Until two days before she passed away, she was still able to move her hand enough to squeeze mine three times. Words were not necessary. The message was there, as it always had been. I’ve passed this code along to my children, who now squeeze my hand three times.

My mother was the person everyone could count on to listen. It wasn’t only her own children who would tell her their joys and concerns; she received letters from sad and confused teenagers from around the world who would refer to her as “Mother Osmond.” She would write back to them about everything from a simple suggestion of how to act on a first date to the most complicated of emotional situations, like living with a neglectful or alcoholic parent. Over the course of my life, especially the past ten years, I’ve had countless numbers of women and men come up to me to say that having “Mother Osmond” in their lives was what got them through their adolescence. Many of them kept a correspondence going with my mother until she passed away. She would keep files of their letters and always loved to get photos in the mail of their graduations, marriages, babies, and lives. She called them all her “other” children, and they were the reason she started her M.O.M. (Mother Osmond’s Memo), the newsletter she mailed around the world to hundreds of fans. When the Internet came along, she was ecstatic that she could e-mail her letters to so many more; her subscriber base grew into the thousands. Even then, she always wrote the newsletters in the same style, as if she were talking to a loved one, updating people on marriages and births in the Osmond family, sharing great ideas, inspirational
stories, and insights she wanted to pass along. She had a lifelong interest in any ideas that would give people more happiness, hope, and peace of mind. She was a New Age thinker long before the term even became popular. She had a natural understanding of what is now known as the power of quantum physics: that even the smallest thought or action creates a momentum of energy. It supported her steadfast quest to teach us to always apply positive thinking to every situation. She was only interested in thoughts to move us forward.