I traveled with my family to Florida for spring break this year, and we successfully whiled the week away on the beach, soaking in the sun and relaxing in the breeze coming off the sparkling Gulf of Mexico. Every once in a while, we’d look up from our books to watch a smiling dad or mom chase their toddler, grabbing their hands as the child’s sandy toes skipped through the warm tropical tides.
Our daughters are 14 and 9 now, and as my wife and I watched these much younger parents with much younger kids, we talked about missing those days. For both of us, it just seemed like such a “simpler” time. We wouldn’t want to do it over, but we can’t help to remember fondly a calendar unfilled by what feels like 17 soccer practices a day.
Our family needed that little trip to Florida to catch our collective breath a bit. The 17 soccer practices a day can catch up with all of us. And as the world slowed down, we accomplished something else that’s very rare for us: The four of us sat down to dinner together every single night for an entire week. Often with grandparents, aunts and uncles as well, but with each other, too.
If you’re like us, family dinners are a casualty of the pace of activities that comes as kids get older. Add in demanding jobs, NJ Transit failures and the clogged local traffic that makes you wish you could take a helicopter from the north side to the south side during rush hour (we could take off from Nomahegan and land at Hillside – just sayin’), and it’s no wonder families need to get away on a three-hour flight to have multiple meals together in a week.
On Sunday May 19, you won’t have to catch a plane to have dinner as a family. The Cranford Municipal Alliance will be hosting our annual town-wide barbecue at the fire house, with our town police and fire grilling burgers and dogs for all of us. And while we love how the free eats bring the town out on a sunny (fingers crossed) spring afternoon, that’s not why we do it. We do it to emphasize how eating dinner together helps a family stay close – and how important that is in the Municipal Alliance’s mission to keep our kids alcohol- and drug-free.
Almost half of all parents say they eat dinner as a family less than they did when they were kids, and almost as many say they eat together as a family less than they did five years ago. From my own experience, I feel like it’s particularly hard where we live, with commutes what they are and opportunities for sports and other after-school activities so prevalent.
It’s understandable. Our intent on emphasizing the value of family dinners is not to make anyone feel guilty about not having them. It’s to underscore their value in raising healthy kids, and hopefully inspire families to make them an important part of the week – even if it’s just one night per week.
Research points to the benefits. Family dinners can:
Improve family communication and cohesiveness
Lead to higher academic performance
Improve kids’ eating habits
Boost motivation in school
Create a more positive outlook for kids
Help them avoid high-risk behaviors. For instance, teens who frequently eat with their families are half as likely to use marijuana than those who rarely have family dinners, according to researchers at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
Joseph A. Califano Jr., founder of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, says in the article I link to above that “the more often teens have dinner with their parents, the more likely they are to report talking to their parents about what’s going on in their lives. In today’s busy and overscheduled world, taking the time to come together for dinner really makes a difference in a child’s life.”
My family started our own family dinner night six or seven years ago, when I was commuting into the city and had to make a special effort to get home in time to eat at a time that worked for the kids. It started as a New Year’s Resolution for me, but we’ve kept it sacred since because we find it so valuable.
In case it helps you make it a mini-tradition in your own home, here are some of the ways we’ve made the most of it.
Scheduling
When we started, it was always Wednesday nights. Just felt like a good mid-week milestone. But now that the girls’ activities are what they are, we’re more flexible. We plan it every Sunday based on what’s going to work that week.
Chatting
We try very hard to have the questions get beyond ‘How was your day?’ Some of our favorite sparks are to have everyone talk about two things that went well in our day and one thing we wish had gone better. ‘What’s your favorite _______?’ is also popular, as is ‘Would you rather _______ or ________?’ Whatever it takes to have the kind of open and comfortable conversation we always want the girls to feel like they can have with us.
Eating
We don’t make an effort to have certain types of meals on family dinner nights. Whatever is on the table is fine. But our best family dinners tend to be the ones with an easier prep and a quick cleanup, leading to easier breathing around mealtime. Along these lines, we recently tried out Hello Fresh, a meal delivery service that has been great the first few weeks we’ve used it, with easy-to-prepare dinners we all like. Also, for my wife’s birthday in late March, my older daughter got her a cookbook that featured meals they could make together because she wants to help in the kitchen more.
Enjoying
Our family dinners are often followed by other fun that brings us together. It might be as simple as watching Jeopardy!, grabbing an episode The Goldbergs off the DVR or playing a quick family game. The night, not just the dinner, invariably becomes something special for us.
My older daughter starts at Cranford High next fall, and my younger will be in fifth grade. Life will only get crazier and more complicated, with stress and social pressures growing as we go. As it does, maybe when we see toddlers on the beach we actually will want to turn back time.
But I’m hopeful. It might make me sound naïve, but I’m hopeful that we’ll do just fine, thanks to the communication dynamic our family dinners have helped us create.
No matter what life dishes up.