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The Magic of the Family Meal
The statistics are clear:
kids who dine with the folks are
healthier, happier and better students,
which is why a dying tradition is coming back
TIME: By NANCY GIBBS, Jun 4, 2006
Close your eyes and picture Family Dinner. June Cleaver is
in an apron and pearls, Ward in a sweater and tie. The napkins are linen,
the children are scrubbed, steam rises from the green-bean casserole, and
even the dog listens intently to what is being said. This is where the tribe
comes to transmit wisdom, embed expectations, confess, conspire, forgive,
repair. The idealized version is as close to a regular worship service, with
its litanies and lessons and blessings, as a family gets outside a
sanctuary.
That ideal runs so strong and so deep in our culture and psyche that when
experts talk about the value of family dinners, they may leave aside the
clutter of contradictions. Just because we eat together does not mean we eat
right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day. Just
because we are sitting together doesn't mean we have anything to say:
children bicker and fidget and daydream; parents stew over the remains of
the day. Often the richest conversations, the moments of genuine intimacy,
take place somewhere else, in the car, say, on the way back from soccer at
dusk, when the low light and lack of eye contact allow secrets to surface.
Yet for all that, there is something about a shared meal--not some holiday
blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably--that anchors a family
even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has
someplace else they'd rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is
right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored
in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a
glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such
communion acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of
harm.
In fact, it's the experts in adolescent development who wax most emphatic
about the value of family meals, for it's in the teenage years that this
daily investment pays some of its biggest dividends. Studies show that the
more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink,
do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and
the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their
vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use. "If it were just
about food, we would squirt it into their mouths with a tube," says Robin
Fox, an anthropologist who teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey,
about the mysterious way that family dinner engraves our souls. "A meal is
about civilizing children. It's about teaching them to be a member of their
culture."
The most probing study of family eating patterns was published last year by
the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia
University and reflects nearly a decade's worth of data gathering. The
researchers found essentially that family dinner gets better with practice;
the less often a family eats together, the worse the experience is likely to
be, the less healthy the food and the more meager the talk. Among those who
eat together three or fewer times a week, 45% say the TV is on during meals
(as opposed to 37% of all households), and nearly one-third say there isn't
much conversation. Such kids are also more than twice as likely as those who
have frequent family meals to say there is a great deal of tension among
family members, and they are much less likely to think their parents are
proud of them.
The older that kids are, the more they may need this protected time
together, but the less likely they are to get it. Although a majority of
12-year-olds in the CASA study said they had dinner with a parent seven
nights a week, only a quarter of 17-year-olds did. Researchers have found
all kinds of intriguing educational and ethnic patterns. The families with
the least educated parents, for example, eat together the most; parents with
less than a high school education share more meals with their kids than do
parents with high school diplomas or college degrees. That may end up acting
as a generational corrective; kids who eat most often with their parents are
40% more likely to say they get mainly A's and B's in school than kids who
have two or fewer family dinners a week. Foreign-born kids are much more
likely to eat with their parents. When researchers looked at ethnic and
racial breakdowns, they found that more than half of Hispanic teens ate with
a parent at least six times a week, in contrast to 40% of black teens and
39% of whites.
Back in the really olden days, dinner was seldom a ceremonial event for U.S.
families. Only the very wealthy had a separate dining room. For most, meals
were informal, a kind of rolling refueling; often only the men sat down. Not
until the mid--19th century did the day acquire its middle-class rhythms and
rituals; a proper dining room became a Victorian aspiration. When children
were 8 or 9, they were allowed to join the adults at the table for
instruction in proper etiquette. By the turn of the century, restaurants had
appeared to cater to clerical workers, and in time, eating out became a
recreational sport. Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold
by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.
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All kinds of social and economic and technological factors then conspired to
shred that tidy picture to the point that the frequency of family dining
fell about a third over the next 30 years. With both parents working and the
kids shuttling between sports practices or attached to their screens at
home, finding a time for everyone to sit around the same table, eating the
same food and listening to one another, became a quaint kind of luxury.
Meanwhile, the message embedded in the microwave was that time spent
standing in front of a stove was time wasted. But something precious was lost, anthropologist Fox argues, when cooking
came to be cast as drudgery and meals as discretionary. "Making food is a
sacred event," he says. "It's so absolutely central--far more central than
sex. You can keep a population going by having sex once a year, but you have
to eat three times a day." Food comes so easily to us now, he says, that we
have lost a sense of its significance. When we had to grow the corn and
fight off predators, meals included a serving of gratitude. "It's like the
American Indians. When they killed a deer, they said a prayer over it," says
Fox. "That is civilization. It is an act of politeness over food. Fast food
has killed this. We have reduced eating to sitting alone and shoveling it
in. There is no ceremony in it."
Or at least there wasn't for many families until researchers in the 1980s
began looking at the data and doing all kinds of regression analyses that
showed how a shared pot roast could contribute to kids' success and health.
What the studies could not prove was what is cause and what is effect.
Researchers speculate that maybe kids who eat a lot of family meals have
less unsupervised time and thus less chance to get into trouble. Families
who make meals a priority also tend to spend more time on reading for
pleasure and homework. A whole basket of values and habits, of which a
common mealtime is only one, may work together to ground kids. But it's a
bellwether, and baby boomers who won't listen to their instincts will often
listen to the experts: the 2005 CASA study found that the number of
adolescents eating with their family most nights has increased 23% since
1998.
That rise may also reflect a deliberate public-education campaign, including
public-service announcements on TV Land and Nick at Nite that are designed
to convince families that it's worth some inconvenience or compromise to
make meals together a priority. The enemies here are laziness and leniency:
"We're talking about a contemporary style of parenting, particularly in the
middle class, that is overindulgent of children," argues William Doherty, a
professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota at
Minneapolis and author of The Intentional Family: Simple Rituals to
Strengthen Family Ties. "It treats them as customers who need to be
pleased." By that, he means the willingness of parents to let dinner be an
individual improvisation--no routine, no rules, leave the television on,
everyone eats what they want, teenagers take a plate to their room so they
can keep IMing their friends.
The food-court mentality--Johnny eats a burrito, Dad has a burger, and Mom
picks pasta--comes at a cost. Little humans often resist new tastes; they
need some nudging away from the salt and fat and toward the fruits and
fiber. A study in the Archives of Family Medicine found that more family
meals tends to mean less soda and fried food and far more fruits and
vegetables.
Beyond promoting balance and variety in kids' diets, meals together send the
message that citizenship in a family entails certain standards beyond
individual whims. This is where a family builds its identity and culture.
Legends are passed down, jokes rendered, eventually the wider world examined
through the lens of a family's values. In addition, younger kids pick up
vocabulary and a sense of how conversation is structured. They hear how a
problem is solved, learn to listen to other people's concerns and respect
their tastes. "A meal is about sharing," says Doherty. "I see this trend
where parents are preparing different meals for each kid, and it takes away
from that. The sharing is the compromise. Not everyone gets their ideal menu
every night."
Doherty heard from a YMCA camp counselor about the number of kids who arrive
with a list of foods they won't eat and who require basic instruction from
counselors on how to share a meal. "They have to teach them how to pass food
around and serve each other. The kids have to learn how to eat what's there.
And they have to learn how to remain seated until everyone else is done."
The University of Kansas and Michigan State offer students coaching on how
to handle a business lunch, including what to do about food they don't like
("Eat it anyway") and how to pass the salt and pepper ("They're married.
They never take separate vacations").
When parents say their older kids are too busy or resistant to come to the
table the way they did when they were 7, the dinner evangelists produce
evidence to the contrary. The CASA study found that a majority of teens who
ate three or fewer meals a week with their families wished they did so more
often. Parents sometimes seem a little too eager to be rejected by their
teenage sons and daughters, suggests Miriam Weinstein, a freelance
journalist who wrote The Surprising Power of Family Meals. "We've sold
ourselves on the idea that teenagers are obviously sick of their families,
that they're bonded to their peer group," she says. "We've taken it to an
extreme. We've taken it to mean that a teenager has no need for his family.
And that's just not true." She scolds parents who blame their kids for
undermining mealtime when the adults are co-conspirators. "It's become a
badge of honor to say, 'I have no time. I am so busy,'" she says. "But we
make a lot of choices, and we have a lot more discretion than we give
ourselves credit for," she says. Parents may be undervaluing themselves when
they conclude that sending kids off to every conceivable extracurricular
activity is a better use of time than an hour spent around a table, just
talking to Mom and Dad.
The family-meal crusaders offer lots of advice to parents seeking to
recenter their household on the dinner table. Groups like Ready, Set,
Relax!, based in Ridgewood, N.J., have dispensed hundreds of kits to towns
from Kentucky to California, coaching communities on how to fight
overscheduling and carve out family downtime. More schools are offering
basic cooking instruction. It turns out that when kids help prepare a meal,
they are much more likely to eat it, and it's a useful skill that seems to
build self-esteem. Research on family meals does not explore whether it
makes a difference if dinner is with two parents or one or even whether the
meal needs to be dinner. For families whose schedules make evenings together
a challenge, breakfast or lunch may have the same value. So pull up some
chairs. Lose the TV. Let the phone go unanswered. And see where the moment
takes you.
With reporting by Reported by Carolina A. Miranda/New York
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