It’s Not About the Dinner, It’s About the Family

Worry your children will grow badly? Here’s a simple solution: have dinner together regularly.

Laurie David, the Oscar-winning producer of An Inconvenient Truth and the author of The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time, said, “When you start to look at the research, which is staggering, you realize all  the things you worry about as a parent can be improved just by sitting down to regular dinners.”

In The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Tell Your Family History, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More, Bruce Feiler wrote,

A recent wave of research shows that children who eat dinner with their families are less likely to drink, smoke, do drugs, get pregnant, commit suicide, and develop eating disorders. Additional research found that children who enjoy family meals have larger vocabularies, better manners, healthier diets, and higher self-esteem. The most comprehensive survey done on this topic, a University of Michigan report that examined how American children spent their time between 1981 and 1997, discovered that the amount of time children spent eating meals at home was the single biggest predictor of better academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems. Mealtime was more influential than time spent in school, studying, attending religious services, or playing sports.

• Can’t have dinner together every night? Aim for once a week.

• Aren’t home from work early enough? Gather everyone together at 8:00 P.M. for dessert, a bedtime snack, or just a chat about the day.

• Weekdays too busy? Aim for weekends.

• Don’t have time to cook? Try Leftover Mondays, Chinese Takeout Tuesdays, or breakfast for dinner.

“The point is, if you light a candle, or put a flower in a vase, or cover the table in craft paper and open up a box of crayons, you’re showing respect for that meal. I, for one, find parenting challenging. I spend a lot of time beating myself up over everything I do wrong. I decided some years ago that family dinner would be the one thing I could do right.”

• Do you know where your grandparents grew up?

• Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school?

• Do you know where your parents met?

• Do you know of an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family?

• Do you know what went on when you were being born?

10. Aim for ten minutes of quality talk per meal. A surprising amount of mealtime conversation is about getting everyone fed. “I know it’s hot. Just blow on it.” “Could I have some more chicken?” “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” Researchers have determined that each meal can yield about ten minutes of substantial conversation. As meager as that sounds, it’s also something of a relief. Even I can manage that!

50. Let your kids speak at least half the time. Adults do most of those ten minutes of quality talk, taking up around two-thirds of the conversation. That leaves only a third for all the children put together, or less than three and a half minutes per meal. Since a primary goal of family meals is socializing children, try to get the kids to do as much talking as possible.

1. Teach your kids one new word every meal. A large vocabulary is a great boost in life. Research shows that children with parents in the lowest income bracket hear 616 words in a typical hour, while children from parents at the opposite end hear 2,153 words. That’s a gap of eight million words a year. As Ellen Galinsky said, “The difference between knowing three thousand words and knowing fifteen thousand words when you arrive at kindergarten is enormous.” Once kids enroll in school, that importance only grows. A child in grades three through twelve is expected to learn around three thousand words a year.

The good news, Galinsky says, is that you can help. No matter your income level, start by speaking more like yourself to your kids. If anything, you should go out of your way to use words that are unfamiliar to them. When adults speak with babies, we naturally simplify our speech and elevate our pitch. This technique has been proven to be effective. But once your baby begins to speak, the same technique has the opposite effect.

The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Tell Your Family History, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More shows us that Tolstoy was right, even in this era. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s better to know how they are alike.