<p>I’ve read any number of articles touting the benefits of families eating meals together.</p>
<p>The vision - eyes light up at the well-balanced meal gracing the table; it’s everybody’s favorite! Mom tells a funny story from work that day, Junior responds enthusastically to Dad’s inquiry about his science project, and Sally takes this opportunity to ask everyone’s opinion on how to address a problem she’s having in school.</p>
<p>The reality - our family meals never work out this way.</p>
<p>Do you think family meals are an important ingredient to happy families?</p>
<p>There are many routes to a happy family–having times when the family is enjoying time together & communicating is one ingredient. If it happens around meals, great. If it happens elsewhere (like school/community events, sporting events), that’s also fine. There are so many ways to have good family time that it’s more important to have time together and good lines of communication than forcing any one-size-fits-all route to happy families.</p>
<p>When our kids were younger, we had more family meals then when they got very busy with sports & outside activities. I consider our family close & happy, but we don’t eat as many family meals as we used to, as times & needs evolve.</p>
<p>Although we have always tried to eat together as a family, it didn’t happen as much as I recall my family doing when I was a child. Of course, when I was a child, my mother didn’t work outside of the home except for a part time job here or there while we were in school. My dad worked at a factory and got home every day around 3:30 or 4:00, and we kids just didn’t have the numerous extra-curricular activities that so many kids today have.</p>
<p>Due to work schedules (me working nights at the hospital) when DD was young, her evening activities as she got older, and DH’s arrival home after 6:15 or 6:30 most evenings, we didn’t really have as many family meals together as I would have liked, but we are a very happy and very close-knit family. I don’t think it is quantity, but quality, that counts, and we have shared a LOT of quality time.</p>
I think family meals are GREAT, when you can have them. We currently have three girls involved in two musical theatre productions and two boys involved in XC and soccer, so we rarely get to have dinner all together.</p>
<p>To me, the “family meal” is a symbol which connotes family interaction, parents and kids talking and sharing facets of their lives with each other. Those are things which do not HAVE to occur around the dinner table. For us, those things occur constantly and in many settings: as I am cooking dinner, as I am driving kids to and from various activities, on a trip to the grocery store, and as we’re tucking kids in for the night. </p>
<p>We often have <em>SO</em> many people here for dinner (lots of friends practically live here ) that we cannot even FIT around the dinner table! Nevertheless, we are a close and happy family.</p>
<p>I kind of see the “family meal” dealio as I see the “apple a day” dealio…not to be taken literally necessarily, but as a symbol which conveys deeper meaning in terms of family communication and a commitment to make family a priority at times. </p>
<p>fendrock - our family meals never matched up with the Father Knows Best ideal either. Not to mention that they bore no resemblance to the reported Kennedy family motif of spirited discussions on issues of the day, philosophy, etc.</p>
<p>Still, I felt they were important and we did it most of the time all the way through DS’ high school. I still feel it’s important in retrospect and I’m asking myself why.</p>
<p>Not sure. Maybe something about it being an anchor, a touchpoint, a ritual marking the importance of the family as a unit. Maybe that it establishes that regular family gathering is as high a priority as pursuing individual hobbies, watching their own program on TV with a lap tray in separate rooms… Maybe that it establishes that mom and dad put priority on the family. Maybe it creates the memory that someone cared, every day, to provide the meal and the setting…</p>
<p>Cross posted with berurah and I think we both hit on the symbolic value of it. If it’s about family and berurah says it, it’s gotta be right :D.</p>
<p>I held the family dinner as sacred right through DS’s middle school years. Unless H was traveling, we had dinner together, more or less every night.</p>
<p>Once my kids got overinvolved in their activities, which happened for both the year that S went to high school, our dinners together have pretty much fallen apart, excecpt maybe twice a week. We do do the “favorite part of the day” thing, when we’re all together, and it is very nice, but nope…doesn’t happen every evening, not by a long shot. But I still make a real dinner most nights, even if only a couple of us are eating together, and the others eat from a warmed plate later. I still don’t want to become a Cheerios family (although we have resorted to that once or twice! :))</p>
<p>I want to be an extra kid at Berurah’s table though! It sounds fun!</p>
<p>I want to just be a metaphorical fly on the wall in Berurah’s household and see how things work with that many kids and guests!</p>
<p>We used to have very regular meals when my D and stepsons were younger (elementary school). We still had fairly regular weekend dinners when my stepsons were here on weekends. But once my D was heavily involved in her theater and dance activities, she was almost never here at weekday dinners from 7th-12th grades. She worked in high school on the weekends too. My husband and I used to go into the restaurant where she worked for dinner and she would wait on us. (A family dinner of another sort.)</p>
<p>The family gathered around the table together with flowing conversation (and modeling of manners!) is a very good influence on kids, I do believe. Both my stepsons later thanked me (in oblique fashion) for insisting on good table manners and trying to teach them proper ways of doing things.</p>
<p>I guess I am mainly wist ful about that “flowing conversation,” which we very seldom experience.</p>
<p>What one child eats, the other will not, so that makes it a challenge to even prepare a meal that all enjoy.</p>
<p>Also, one of my children is not especially chatty (never has been).</p>
<p>Add in an evening ballet class at least three times a week since the elder of the two was nine, and the result is a very spotty record of successful [ie, highly interactive] family meals.</p>
<p>The family meal died in our household when it became evident that “flowing conversation” was taking place only because the kids were trying to avoid doing their homework. (We had an ironclad rule that if you did not choose to do your homework in the afternoon, you MUST start immediately after dinner. Thus, the kids had a vested interest in making dinner last as long as possible.)</p>
<p>Also, the one and only food that all four members of my family will eat is provolone cheese, and you can get really sick of that really quickly. </p>
<p>I did try to do the family meal thing. Really I did. But it didn’t even last through elementary school.</p>
<p>Most of the meaningful conversations in our family have taken place in the car.</p>
<p>Yeah, most of our most meaningful conversations with S have taken place in the car, with both of us looking forward. The most meaningful conversations with D take place late at night, when she’s trying to stall about going to bed for whatever reason. She’s always been chattier than her brother. We have had some pretty meaningful conversations while driving in the car as well, but with S, that’s about the only time we have meaningful discussions, which might be an additional reason we get so little info from him now that he’s in college (never in long car rides together).</p>
<p>Marian, we can always tell when there are papers to write when the boys linger over dinner. We do have dinner together 9 times out of 10 and have ever since the boys were born. I grew up waiting for my father to come home (sometimes closer to 8pm than 7pm) and never thought about feeding the kids early. Some days we have conversations about black holes and modern biology and some days we eat and run.</p>
<p>My family always sits down together for meals, but we don’t talk much; for the most part we’re a miserable dysfunctional mess. I don’t think there’s a correlation.</p>
) that we cannot even FIT around the dinner table! Nevertheless, we are a close and happy family.</p>