In November 2025, the UAE designated 2026 the Year of the Family, a national theme announced by President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to advance the National Family Growth Agenda 2031. It places family wellbeing at the centre of national life, and it is meant for everyone who calls the country home — residents as much as citizens.
That is the headline. Here is the part that stays with me.
It is a Tuesday. It is 6pm. The light over Marina has gone gold and a little tired, the way it does before maghrib. My daughter has finished most of her homework and is standing in the doorway of the kitchen asking, in the particular voice children save for this exact negotiation, whether she can have the iPad. And I am cooking, and I am answering emails on my phone, and I say yes. I say yes more often than I would like to admit in writing.
That small surrender — multiplied across a city, across a year — is, I think, the real thing the Year of the Family is asking about. Not policy. Not agendas. The 6pm decision.
What a national year actually asks of an ordinary week
It is easy to read a national theme and feel it belongs to someone else. To government. To campaigns. To people with a remit and a budget. But raising children in the UAE happens in much smaller rooms than that. It happens at dinner, in the car on Sheikh Zayed Road, in the ten minutes before bed when a child decides, for no reason, to tell you everything.
Family wellbeing, when you hold it up close, is not a grand gesture. It is a stack of very small, repeated, unglamorous practices. Presence over programming. Slowness over scheduling. The willingness to be bored together.
And here is the uncomfortable truth for those of us raising children in Dubai: this is harder here, not easier. Not because the city lacks for things. Because it overflows with them.
The Dubai problem is abundance
I have a friend whose seven-year-old has a schedule I could not survive. Football, coding, swimming, Mandarin, an art class on Saturdays that runs into a music class she added because there was a gap. She is not a careless mother. She is the opposite. The schedule is the love. We fill the calendar because we can, because the city makes it possible, because somewhere we have absorbed the idea that a good childhood is a full one.
I have done versions of this myself. We once planned a weekend around the mall and a movie — the default, the easy yes. Then it fell through, and we ended up doing almost nothing. We stayed in. The children built something out of cushions that I was not allowed to understand the rules of. Nobody asked for a screen for almost three hours. I remember being faintly ashamed that the better day was the accidental one. The one I had not bought.
There is a particular guilt that comes with parenting in a place this generous. You can always be doing more. There is always another experience, another camp, another thing other parents are posting. And the more I chase it, the further I get from the only thing my children seem to actually want, which is my unhurried attention, freely given, with the phone in another room.
Family stretched across time zones
The other thing the Year of the Family surfaces for me is that family here is rarely all in one place. Most of us are raising children far from where we grew up. My parents are six hours away by plane and three by phone call. My daughter knows her grandmother mostly as a face on a screen, propped against the fruit bowl at breakfast, narrating her morning from another country.
I used to feel that as a lack. I have started to feel it differently. Those video calls are not a lesser version of family. They are family doing what it has always done — reaching across distance, keeping the thread intact. A national year that celebrates strong family ties has to mean this version too. The stretched one. The one held together across time zones by people who refuse to let the thread go slack.
What a herb pot taught me about patience
A couple of weeks ago my daughter came home from a session with a small terrarium and, separately, we planted some mint on the kitchen windowsill. The mint nearly died twice. She over-watered it, then forgot it, then panicked. I kept wanting to fix it for her. I mostly didn't.
It survived. It is, against the odds, thriving. And the lesson was not really about mint. It was that some things answer slowly and on their own time, and a child who learns to wait for them — to check, to notice, to adjust — is learning something a screen will never ask of her. Seeds do not hurry. Neither, it turns out, does attention. You have to practise it.
That is the whole argument, really. The Year of the Family is not asking us to do something enormous. It is asking us to do something small, and then do it again tomorrow.
One small way we try to do this ourselves
This is the thinking SAGA was built around, long before the year had a name. SAGA Club runs small-group, unhurried sessions for children aged 5–15 in Dubai Marina — terrarium-building, herbology, heritage stories, young yogis, photography, bookclub, chanting and Souk, a trading game that teaches the bones of financial literacy. Ten to twelve children. Sixty to ninety minutes. Hands in soil, not on a tablet. Every child takes something home.
We do not run them because a national theme made us. We run them because we are parents too, losing the same 6pm negotiations, and we wanted a room where slowness was the point and not the exception. It is one small way we try to do this ourselves. That is all it is, and that feels like enough.
A few questions, answered
What does the Year of the Family 2026 mean for residents, not just citizens? The initiative is explicitly inclusive of everyone living in the UAE. The national messaging frames family wellbeing, cohesion and strong intergenerational ties as a shared priority across the whole community — citizens and residents alike.
What does screen-free practice actually look like at home? Smaller than you would expect. One unhurried hour. A plant on a windowsill that a child is responsible for. A weekend afternoon with nothing bought and nothing scheduled. It is repetition, not grand gestures, that does the work.
Isn't structured activity good for children? Often, yes. The caution is only about volume — about filling every gap until there is no room left for the boredom and slowness where a lot of childhood actually happens. Presence is not another thing to schedule. It is what is left when you stop.
If children are already this overscheduled, why add SAGA to the pile? A fair question, and one we sit with. The honest answer is that SAGA is meant to replace something, not stack on top of it. If a circle becomes one more box in an overfull week, we have failed at the thing we set out to do. We cap groups at ten to twelve, keep sessions engaging and send children home with something slow to tend rather than another certificate. The aim is not to fill a gap in the calendar. It is to be the kind of hour that makes the rest of the calendar feel a little less necessary.
Where does SAGA Club run, and how do I find the dates? In Dubai Marina, for ages 5–15, in small groups. The September season calendar will be announced on Instagram at @sagastudio_uae.
To book or enquire, message us on WhatsApp or write to care@mysaga.co.
There is a small thing we give every child at the end of a session — a journal. It is not a record of what they made. It is a set of quiet questions to sit with over the weeks that follow. What has changed. What needs attention. What you noticed today that you did not notice yesterday.
I have come to think that journal is the smallest possible version of what a whole country has set out to do this year. Notice what is in front of you. Then keep noticing it tomorrow.