It’s not that I want to break up with you. I just think we should take a break, maybe see other people, and spend a little less time together. That was the news I delivered to my kids after learning from the first large-scale longitudinal study on the subject that “the sheer amount of time parents spend with their kids between the ages of 3 and 11 has virtually no relationship to how children turn out.” According to the researchers, it’s the quality of time we spend together, not the quantity. Maybe our obsessiveness with creating perfect children has always been more about us than them. I’m not sure how my kids reacted to the prospect of spending less time with me because each of their expressions was blocked by the back on an iPad.