The incredible reappearing family dinner

Don't sell the dinner table — family meals are making a comeback. There is even a book about their surprising power.

Fifty years ago, in an era left behind by the growth of mega-cities, globalization and the two-income family, there was a daily ritual called the evening meal. At 5 o'clock or five-thirty, dad locked his office drawer, put on his jacket and took the train home to where mom had a nutritious dinner cooking and the kids ready to sit down with their parents and eat. Not just eat, but also report on the day, listen to the others and deepen family ties.

Fantasy? The family as it should have been but seldom was? Perhaps. It is true that even 50 years ago there were shift workers, longer-haul commuters and some working mothers. There were professionals who had to work late and dads who went to the pub before making it home—also late. Conversation at the table may often have consisted largely of fights between the kids and exhortations from parents to "mind your manners" and "eat what's in front of you". Everyone, at times, might have been relieved when they could escape the company of their nearest and dearest and pursue their own hobbies—although not before doing their allotted chores.

All the same, the myth of the family dinner as a time of bonding and harmony—hilariously and charmingly captured in an Australian film called The Castle—is persistent enough to give those who have lost touch with the reality, pause. Does it not contain an essential truth about family life and individual well-being that we tend to underestimate in our 24/7, individualistic, wired world?

Especially good for teenagers
It was this sort of question New England journalist Miriam Weinstein stumbled on when she was researching topics about food, and that led her to write The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier. This is a title that makes big claims—claims that depend not on memory and myth, however, but on scientific research. Much of the research concerns adolescents.

Take, for example, the study that kicked off Weinstein's project. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, known as CASA, tries to keep young people from destructive behavior (the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco, as well as schoolgirl pregnancies). In 1996 they ran a study to see what, if anything, distinguished the kids who engaged in these actions from those who did not. They were surprised to find that, when it came to predicting behavior, eating dinner with family was more important than church attendance or grades at school.

CASA has run variations on this survey every year since. In 2003 it showed that, compared with teens who dine with the family only twice a week, those who have family dinners five or more times are more likely to report that they have never tried cigarettes (85 per cent compared vs 65 per cent), alcohol (68 per cent vs 47 per cent) or marijuana (88 per cent vs 71 per cent). They are also less likely to suffer high stress and boredom, and are more likely to receive A's in school.

Similar findings have come from research by Marla E Eisenberg and others at the University of Minnesota, who in 1998-99 collected data from 4767 adolescents from diverse neighborhoods. Last year they reported that regular family meals also protected young people—especially girls—against depression and suicide. Even when teenagers reported a sense of "family connectedness", negative psychological and behavioral effects of missing family meals persisted, as they did when the parents' marital status, school level, race and socio-economic status were taken into account. The researchers say that "family meals may… provide a formal or informal 'check-in' time during which parents can tune in to the emotional well-being of their teens, particularly girls".  

Only about a quarter of young people in the Minnesota study reported eating seven or more meals with their family in the past week, and one third reported eating family meals only once or twice a week, or never. But there are signs of improvement: the 2003 CASA survey showed an increase in teens having dinner with their family at least five times a week—61 per cent compared with 47 per cent in 1998.

A daily ritual
If family meals did no more than protect teenagers against substance abuse, they would be worth the effort. But, of course, they do much more. They protect kids because they have already performed a more fundamental task. As Weinstein puts it, "These meals give children dependable access to their parents, and parents access to their kids. They connect us with our religious, ethnic and family heritage."

Dependability is essentially what Weinstein means when she uses the word "ritual" to describe the family meal. It is not something contrived, that has to be reinvented every day, that we have to strain ourselves to make into "quality time". Rather, it is something pretty much anyone can do. "It takes advantage of basic biological and social needs, for nutrition and socialibility. It allows us to act out what it means to be a family: we nurture each other. We enjoy things together. We travel through life together." This natural togetherness then sets the stage for "quality" to emerge. "Researchers find that our most meaningful childhood memories are not the big ticket items—the shows or the sports events—but rather the ongoing sense of caring, of sharing, of spending our time together," says Weinstein.

But "ritual" in its more religious sense is not out of place in discussions of the family meal, as generations who grew up saying grace before and after meals learned, and Weinstein, with her Jewish background, is not afraid to evoke this sense. "Making time for each other, making our kitchen table what one woman I interviewed called 'a little holy place' creates a shelter in a hectic world," she says. We could go further and say with James Stenson of Parent Leadership that family meals are a "sacred time together—where we call down God's blessing on the family and treat each other with cordial respect".

A school of manners and much more
Stenson makes this comment in the context of table manners, a subject that is coming back into vogue as parents who grew up in the anything-goes era of the 1960s and 70s find themselves without the skills to prepare their children for social life. Schools of etiquette are springing up where children are drilled in everything from shaking hands with an adult to drinking soup. Some working mothers say they do not have the time to teach their children everything they would like—presumably because family meals are infrequent or rushed.

A meal that the whole family sits down to—and that is not sabotaged by television (53 per cent of teenagers in a Minnesota pilot study reported frequent TV viewing during meals), phone calls, text messages and early departures to meetings, the internet and computer games—is clearly the ideal setting for learning table etiquette. From their early years children will learn from their parents' example and gradually form the habit of good manners (or bad!).

They will learn, as Weinstein points out, such fundamental things as what constitutes a reasonable portion or a balanced meal, to limit snacking so that everyone is hungry at the same time, to alternate consumption with conversation and so avoid over-eating (it takes 20 minutes for our bodies to register satiety) and finickyness. In this way they will be protected from obesity and girls, in particular, from extreme dieting and other eating disorders.

The family meal also teaches kids how to converse in a social setting—to listen and to tell a story—and, apparently, gives them the lion's share of their vocabulary. In a study by professors from the Harvard School of Education, over a thousand new words in preschoolers' vocabulary had been learned at the dinner table, while only 143 came from being read to.

More importantly, mealtimes are a natural setting for acquiring family history, family values and awareness of how these values can be applied to everyday life and to problems and opportunities in their society. Most of these values can be turned into virtues around the meal table itself—attentiveness to the needs of others, lifting the mood with a funny anecdote, generosity in leaving the biggest serving of dessert for someone else—or immediately before and after. When kids help with meal preparation and cleaning up they are learning how to serve others and also look after themselves.

Just add willpower
With all this and much more going for it, why has the family meal declined? Perhaps decay set in with the TV dinner that made its appearance 50-odd years ago and proved the perfect accompaniment to family fare like "I Love Lucy" and "The Bob Hope Show". Since then, competition from the fast-food industry and electronic distractions have hugely multiplied, creating strong pull factors.

Among the push factors are working mothers (the Minnesota study showed a link between family dinners and mothers not working outside the home); overtime work (especially amongst dads); overscheduled kids (the school team practice, the swimming and music lessons); and separated or single mothers.

But, with the exception of the single mom (a dad who is alive somewhere but never at the table is a permanent psychological as well as practical obstacle to family dining), are not most of the reasons for not dining as a family, in the end, excuses?

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, New York publisher Cameron Stracher pinpointed one rarely-acknowledged reason for the decline in shared mealtimes: Parents don't want to eat with their children. He wrote: "Arlie Russell Hochschild noted in The Time Bind (1997) that as home becomes more like work, and work becomes more like home, there are fewer reasons to rush back home in time for dinner. Most men say that, if given a choice between time or money, the would choose the former; in fact, they choose the latter. After all, who wants to deal with a six-year-old having a temper tantrum because there is green stuff on her pasta? Much easier to stay at the office, order in, drink a beer and trudge home when the kids are asleep. Even in families where both parents are at home, they often wait until the kids are in bed to eat. As one mother told me: 'It's just not fun to eat with them'."

Here we approach the root of the problem: Why is home more like work now? How come the six-year-old is still having temper tantrums? Who said dining with the children had to be fun? On the other hand, whose fault is it if it's torture? Clearly there are issues about domestic roles and parenting to be addressed -- and they do not all fall into the lap of women.

Stracher, for his part, has resolved to pitch in. While struggling with questions about his 50-minute commute, he has instituted "dinners with dad", a commitment to make dinner with his wife and two children at least five nights a week for a solid year. And "make" means more than just be there. You can follow this saga at his blog where he writes eloquently of pizzas, bread and black bean burritos, and of side issues like school fixtures, friendship and extended family—and where other dads are making free with advice.

No one should make light of the pressures that splinter the family today and turn members into flatmates who eat alone and find their community elsewhere. Nor is the family meal the whole story when it comes to family togetherness and the wellbeing of younger members. But it clearly is part of the story and, as Weinstein suggests, the most do-able part. Just add willpower and the family dinner should reclaim its place in the home.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.