Requiring family dinners together is the greatest gift you can give your children.
It’s also likely to be the best gift you give yourself at least in hindsight. When you’re harried, trying to prepare a healthy meal, tripping over clutter to set the table, helping with homework and worried that the dog hasn’t been walked, family dinner feels more chore than gift.
The data is unequivocal though; children who regularly dine with their parents are less likely to smoke, drink, do drugs and engage in early sex. A recent 2012 survey by Columbia University’s National Center On Alcohol and Drug Abuse (CASA) shows that youth who do not have regular family dinners are three times more likely to drink, and twice as likely to smoke and use illegal drugs. Adolescent girls who participate in family dinners are far less likely to develop eating disorders too.
“If I could wave a magic wand, I would make sure that every child in America had dinner with his or her parents at least five times a week,” says Joseph A. Califano, Jr., CASA Founder and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. “Dinner serves as an ideal time to strengthen the quality of family relationships and helps kids grow up healthy.” If mothers could wave a magic wand, home cooked food would appear on a beautifully set table, no one would ever spill, kids would never fight, and the dog wouldn’t get sick from the food our spouses surreptitiously feed him—despite their promises not to do so.
Intriguingly, growing up with regular family dinners is also the single most common denominator in high achieving adults—including National Merit Scholarship winners and CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies. A Harvard study claimed that family dinners are more important than play, story time and other family events in young children’s vocabulary development.
At a recent gathering of the Make It Better Preschool Council, leading early childhood development experts affirmed their support for family dinners. The children who originally squirm and complain will eventually grow to love the traditions, stories and sense of connection these meals evoke.
Just think about how liberating these statistics can be for your family life! The surest road to success lies not in an extreme extracurricular schedule, lots of expensive tutors or achieving Eagle Scout status. Rather it lies with simple participation in a family mealtime ritual.
Writing on the familydinnerproject.org, Anne Fishel, an associate clinical professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School, says, “Over the past 15 years researchers have confirmed what parents have known for a long time: sharing a family meal is good for the spirit, the brain and the health of all family members. Recent studies link regular family dinners with many behaviors that parents pray for: lower rates of substance abuse, teen pregnancy and depression, as well as higher grade-point averages and self-esteem.”
For the mothers working so hard to bring those family dinners to life, the old adage that you get back what you put out in life—holds true. There is usually at least one moment during each family dinner where you can look at everyone gathered around the table and feel satisfaction, love, joy. It’s shortly before or long after the belching, bodily function talk, spilled milk and fights between siblings.
And when those empty nest days eventually arrive, you will look back on a tradition of family dinners as the best gift that you gave yourself.
