The Magic of the Family Meal

[Guest guest]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200760-1,00.html

 

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

 

 

By Nancy Gibbs

 

Time

 

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200760-1,00.html

 

 

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.

 

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.