Until recently, families that routinely sat down together for meals were the norm. But for several decades family meals have become increasingly rare as life’s pace and pressures have become increasingly frenetic. Two-career households, kids with a bewildering array of activities and distractions, plus the ease and availability of fast food, seemed poised to plunge the family meal – regularly eating together, not just for special occasions or holidays – to the verge of extinction.
But in the 1980s researchers studying familial sociological trends and patterns began finding something extraordinarily beneficial about family meals, especially for children. In fact, regular family meals seem almost a magic bullet: Children whose families routinely eat together are substantially more likely to do better in school and have healthier diets. They’re far less likely to smoke, do drugs, have sex prematurely, fall victim to depression or eating disorders such as bulimia, anorexia, or obesity or consider suicide.
Regular family meals were clearly beneficial. Less clear was why. Are families who routinely eat together inherently more stable, making family meals an effect rather than a cause? It made sense. Researchers speculated that children who regularly eat familial meals have less unsupervised time, thus fewer opportunities for trouble.
University of Minnesota researchers tried answering the cause-and-effect question by looking at “family connectedness,” a sociological term describing a family’s psychological health. Their 2004 study published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine concluded that whether the family was troubled was less important than whether the family ate together regularly. Even after controlling for family connectedness, children participating in seven or more family meals weekly were far less likely to smoke, or use drugs or alcohol, than those who had one or none.
In 2005, Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse published a decade-long study of family eating patterns. Confirming previous findings, researchers also noted that family meals get better with practice. The less a family eats together, the less extensive the benefits. If a family eats together less than three times a week, the food isn’t as healthy and, subjects report, there isn’t much conversation. Kids from those families are more than twice as likely as kids participating in more frequent family meals to say there’s a lot of tension among family members. They’re also less likely to think their parents are proud of them.
Does having regular family meals necessitate returning to “Father Knows Best” – mom in dress, pearls and an apron serving dinner to a waiting table of polite children and a husband in suit and tie? Apparently not. In fact, according to a University of Minnesota study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, it doesn’t even matter much if the family eats together around the TV. Families did eat somewhat healthier meals sans TV, but not nearly as much as researchers expected. The biggest enemy of children eating healthy was children eating alone. They consume more soft drinks and snack/fast foods, less fruits, vegetables and calcium-rich foods. But when families eat together – even just takeout pizza – they’re often also making salads or even just setting out carrots and celery sticks for munching. Watching TV can actually be beneficial if it brings together sullen teenagers and parents or quarreling family members, giving them a common focus beyond their immediate grievances. Enlisting kids to help prepare and clean up provides valuable lessons, building self-esteem and a sense of shared responsibility. And children are more likely to eat food that they’ve helped prepare.
Family meals don’t even have to be dinner. Families with evening work or commitments may be able to eat breakfast together instead. That was the case with the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley, whose father, a boarding-school headmaster, had to be at the school for lunch and dinner. Breakfasts, Yardley wrote in 2005, “were the regular, routine occasions at which we gathered as a family and functioned as a family, exchanging the trivial news of our lives.”
In a June, 2006, Time article, Rutgers University anthropologist Robin Fox says: “A meal is about civilizing children. It’s about teaching them to be a member of their culture.” Fox believes that something precious was lost when cooking came to be seen as drudgery and meals as discretionary. He argues that “making food is a sacred event. It’s so absolutely central.… Because food is so easy and cheap, we’ve lost the realization of its importance. When people had to grow their own food and battle against weather and predators, meals were an occasion for gratitude – perhaps even why the custom of saying grace before a meal originated.”
It doesn’t have to be a radical transformation. Says Minnesota researcher Dr. Dianne Neumark-Sztainer: “I would put the emphasis on just looking at where your family is now and seeing what you can do to improve.”
Julianne Glatz of Springfield, a mother and grandmother, writes the weekly food column for Illinois Times.
This article appears in Capital City Parent October 2013.
