Until recently, routinely sitting down to meals with your family was the norm. But for the last several decades, the family meal has become increasingly rare, as the pace and pressures of modern life grow ever more frenetic. Two-career households, kids with a bewildering array of activities, and other distractions, coupled with the ease and availability of fast food, seemed poised to bring the family meal – sitting around the table together on a regular basis as opposed to a special occasion or holiday event – to the edge of extinction.
But in the 1980s researchers studying familial sociological trends and patterns began to realize that there’s something extraordinarily beneficial about the family meal, especially for children. Kids whose families eat together regularly are substantially more likely to do better in school and to have healthier diets. They’re far less likely to smoke, do drugs, become depressed, have sex prematurely, fall victim to eating disorders such as bulimia or anorexia, be obese or consider suicide.
The benefits of regular family meals were clear. But researchers’ findings were less conclusive about why they were so beneficial. Was it because families who ate together routinely were more stable anyway, so that family meals were an effect rather than a cause? Initially that seemed to be the logical answer; researchers speculated that children who regularly eat with their families probably have less unsupervised time and consequently fewer opportunities to get into trouble.
But it’s not that simple. University of Minnesota researchers tried to answer the cause-and-effect question by looking at “family connectedness,” a sociological term that describes a family’s psychological health. Their research concluded that whether the family was troubled was less important (in terms of the above benefits) than whether the family ate together regularly. A study published in 2004 in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine confirmed those results: Even after family connectedness was controlled for, children who sat down to seven or more family meals weekly were far less likely to smoke or use drugs or alcohol than were those who only had one or none.
In 2005, after almost a decade spent gathering data, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University published an in-depth study of family eating patterns. The Columbia researchers confirmed previous findings and also noted that family meals essentially get better with practice: The less often a family eats together, the less extensive the benefits. If a family eats together fewer than three times a week, the food isn’t as healthy and, subjects report, there isn’t much conversation. Kids from families that rarely eat together are more than twice as likely as those who sit down to regular family meals to say there’s a lot of tension among family members. They’re also much less likely to think that their parents are proud of them.
So does having regular family meals mean a return to a “Father Knows Best” scenario – mom in a dress, pearls, and an apron serving dinner to a waiting table of polite children and a husband in suit and tie? Not at all. In fact, according to a recent University of Minnesota study focused on healthy eating, 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 if they weren’t in front of the TV, but the difference wasn’t nearly as great as the researchers had expected.
The biggest enemy of children eating a healthy diet was whether and how much they ate alone. Kids who eat by themselves consume fewer fruits, vegetables and calcium-rich foods; and far more soft drinks and highly processed snack and fast foods. Even if the familial dinner is takeout pizza, the study’s authors found that when the family eats together, they’re more likely to also make a salad or just set out carrot and celery sticks to munch on.
Watching TV together during the meal can even be beneficial if it brings together sullen teenagers and parents or quarreling family members. It can give them a common focus – something to talk about beyond their immediate grievances.
A recent threat to the benefits of family meals is the use of cell phones – especially texting – at the table. It not only prevents conversation, it is just plain rude. Cindy Post Senning, who has a doctorate in education and is Emily Post’s great granddaughter, says in her book, Emily Post’s Table Manners for Kids, “Do NOT use your cell phone or any other electronic devices at the table.” That applies to adults as well as kids. In a 2009 New York Times article, she says “The family meal is a social event, not a food ingestion event.”
Involving kids to help prepare and clean up provides valuable lessons, too. Children are more likely to eat food that they’ve had a part in preparing; it also builds self-esteem and a sense of compromise and shared responsibility.
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 Jonathan Yardley, a Washington Post writer. Yardley’s father, a boarding-school headmaster, had to be in the school dining room for lunch and dinner. Breakfasts, Yardley wrote in a 2005 review, “were [the] regular, routine occasions at which we gathered as a family and functioned as a family: exchanging the trivial news of our lives, hearing tales about ancestors long since dead and relatives in faraway places, picking up bits and pieces of informal but invaluable education.”
In a June 2006 Time Magazine article, Robin Fox, a Rutgers University anthropologist 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 – 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.”
Fox believes that because so much of our food is so easy and so 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’s like the American Indians,” Fox says. “When they killed a deer, they said a prayer over it. 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.”
Weinstein believes that kids want the experience of eating together as a family. “We’ve sold ourselves on the idea that teenagers are obviously sick of their families, that they’re bonded to their peer group. We’ve taken it to an extreme,” she says. “We’ve taken it to mean that a teenager has no need for his family. And that’s just not true.” Weinstein feels that parents who hustle their kids off to a mind-numbing array of extracurricular activities may not understand that those activities are less valuable to children than time spent talking to Mom and Dad around the table. The authors of the Columbia study concurred, finding that most teens who ate three or fewer family meals per week wished that they did so more often.
It doesn’t have to be a radical transformation. “I would put the emphasis on just looking at where your family is now and seeing what you can do to improve,” said Dr. Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, one of the lead Minnesota researchers, in an October 2007 New York Times article. “I think many people just don’t realize how important the family meal really is.”
Contact Julianne Glatz at realcuisine.jg@gmail.com.
This article appears in Capital City Parent July 2012.
