I know there are many families that eat several of their meals out of the home each week. The majority of American families have both parents working and finding time to cook dinner and eat together around the dinner table is difficult. With children’s extracurricular activities during the week, it makes eating dinner together at home even more difficult. But there are rewards to taking the time to eat dinner together at home as a family. In fact, several Harvard research studies indicate the importance of eating dinner at home as a family. In The Washington Post a September 1981 article written by Anne Fishel indicates that the most important thing you can do with your children is to eat dinner with them. In this article, Ms. Fishel (who is an associate clinical professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School) states that among other things, dinner time conversation boosts vocabulary. This article also reported that family dinners result in more fruits, vegetables, vitamins and micro-nutrients being consumed. The research also indicated that regular family dinners lower the likelihood of drug use, binge drinking and other detrimental behaviors. I think the best thing about the research is it found that dinnertime was the time that children are most likely to talk to their parents.
Over the years my wife, Lisa, has done an excellent job of preparing dinners for our family. If you looked on our family calendars from ten years ago, you would find the main course that was planned for each day. The regular planned dinners placed a priority among our family members of coming together for a meal each evening.
Dinnertime was the time we would share our stories, our successes and our struggles with the entire family. The dinner table was the place where we prayed together and laughed together. It was a place we caught up on what each of us was doing in the family. Reflecting
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back on this time, I believe it was one of the times each day when the children’s self-esteem was heightened, because they had a voice at the table and could be praised or given encouragement.
Dinners around our kitchen table were given extra emphasis when we took in a young man from our community who was a friend of our daughter, Kaitlyn. He was 17-years old at the time and had a much larger appetite than our daughter’s appetite.
So Lisa made a special effort to ensure dinners that he enjoyed were prepared each weekday evening. She even bought some new recipe books and implemented some new meals that were scheduled routinely on our calendars for the year and a half he lived with us. I fondly look back on this time because having an additional person around the dinner table resulted in more lively conversation, and since now there was another male at the table, new dinner discussions evolved about sports, politics and other issues that were not previously big discussion topics in our house.
As I have discussed, the research indicates there are many reasons to gather together nightly around the dinner table. Perhaps that is one of the best things you can do as a family. For those that are more accustomed to eating out regularly, please remember that creative ways to eat as a family at home do exist. A great way to still have a dinner at home—even if there isn’t time for cooking—is to leave something cooking in the crockpot all day. In our family we have done this with pork roast, with ribs, with chili, and many types of soup. There are other meals that can be prepared that are not as elaborate such as paninis, or a fancy breakfast served at dinnertime or something prepared on the grill. Other ideas can be found in books at grocery store checkout lines with titles like Meals in Less than 30 Minutes and the like. Based on the wealth of research on the topic indicating the
multitude of benefits, investing time in cooking and eating at home is well worth the effort expended.