Family dinners are often thought of as a sort of magical hour each night, where parents and children connect, laughing and talking about their day over steaming dishes of mashed potatoes and green beans. So, where does that leave (perhaps the majority of) families for which this illusive ideal doesn’t quite become daily reality? Past research has suggested that regular family dinners do have many positive outcomes in kids’ lives, but new work by Ann Meier and Kelly Musick suggests the relationship may not simply be a straightforward case of cause and effect. Writing in The New York Times, Meier and Musick wonder:
[D]oes eating together really make for better-adjusted kids? Or is it just that families that can pull off a regular dinner also tend to have other things (perhaps more money, or more time) that themselves improve child well-being?
Our research, published last month in the peer-reviewed Journal of Marriage and Family, shows that the benefits of family dinners aren’t as strong or as lasting as previous studies suggest.
They did find that kids who had regular family dinners exhibited less depressive symptoms, drug and alcohol use, and delinquency. However, the relationship significantly weakened after accounting for factors like the quality of their family relationships, other activities they do with their parents, how their parents monitor them, or their family’s income. Additionally, Meier and Musick didn’t find lasting effects of family dinners when they analyzed data collected years later, when the kids were young adults.
What, then, should you think about dinnertime? Though we are more cautious than other researchers about the unique benefits of family dinners, we don’t dismiss the possibility that they can matter for child well-being. Given that eating is universal and routine, family meals offer a natural opportunity for parental influence: there are few other contexts in family life that provide a regular window of focused time together…
But our findings suggest that the effects of family dinners on children depend on the extent to which parents use the time to engage with their children and learn about their day-to-day lives. So if you aren’t able to make the family meal happen on a regular basis, don’t beat yourself up: just find another way to connect with your kids.
Comments 2
Letta Page — July 6, 2012
What a great piece - perfect example of sociologists talking to society about society! One thing that jumps out is that I would suspect what happens at dinner would affect the degree to which those dinners are helpful in childhood; the same way that the quality of an hour of school probably affects how much a kid gets out of that time. There are great, lively, conversant family dinners, but there are also required "dinnertimes" at which families sit in stony, staring silence.
Only tangentially related: I read the book "Coop" a while back and was charmed by something the author's family did to tie a happy occurrence in their house (family dinner) to a love of reading. They had a big crop of kids, most adopted, and family dinner was a given. At Sunday dinners, though, the routine was to have a big dinner of popcorn (as I recall) which, yeah, not the world's best dinner (nutrition cops, stand down), but here's the really cool thing: at Sunday dinners, the kids were "allowed" to bring a book to the table. Setting up reading as a big, big treat, the parents encouraged the kids to spend all day picking which book to bring to dinner that night, and the kids delighted in it. The author clearly relished sharing the experience and, as an author, likely got something great out of it.
I'd be interested to hear from other readers about the family rituals that served the same purposes of the vaunted "family dinner" in their home. In mine, it *was* the plain old raucous family dinner every night, but also the annual "holiday celebration" we had on Christmas eve to tie together all of the winter holidays. I recall knowing one kid for whom it was Saturday family tennis, and I know one adult for whom that family quality time came in working side-by-side together in carnivals from the time the kids were old enough through adulthood.
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