Importance Of Family Dinners

The Importance of Family Dinners

Do you remember watching television sitcoms such as "The Brady Bunch", "The Partridge Family" or even "The Wonder Years"? In those television shows families would gather together around the dinner table every night and talk about the adventures of their day. This dinner ritual is about more than providing your body with required sustenance. It gives families a time to reconnect with the people closest to them and opens the doors of communication. Studies have also shown that teens in families that eat dinner together are less likely to use drugs, alcohol and cigarettes than teens that don't eat dinner with their parents.

With today's hectic schedules, it can be nearly impossible to fit family dinners among practices, lessons, and work hours. A woman's role in society has changed. Millions of women have entered the workforce due to the necessity of having two incomes to support a family in these times. Women are no longer just homemakers and many don't have the time to prepare elaborate meals every night. According to the article "The Erosion of Family Dinners and Family Time" research by the University of Minnesota has shown that "In the past twenty years, there has been a thirty three percent decline in the number of families who eat dinner together regularly". "Only fifty percent of American families eat dinner together every night" and "thirty four percent of these meals come from fast food restaurants". Family dinners have been endangered for some time and will soon become extinct unless we can make an effort to preserve this tradition.

Communication is opened up between family members around the dinner table. Parents can talk to their children about important topics, such as, school performance, problems within the home and about their child's daily activities. Children have an opportunity to share problems such as peer pressure, trouble in school or ask questions they may have on their minds. This opening of communication will allow children to feel comfortable expressing themselves and allow them to develop the skills needed for future social interactions. With us spending less time together as a family and more time in work, school, or other activities dinner can be the best time to catch up with everyone's lives. It also offers a time to reconnect. Families can sit around the table and have face-to-face time with their loved ones. These days we mostly see family members in passing, on the way out to work, school and other activities. At dinner we have the chance get to know each other again and bond.

Another important benefit of having family dinners is preventing your children from using drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. In an article entitled "Start a Revolution-Eat Dinner With Your Family" we are given the results of a study done in 2003 by the National Center on Addiction and substance abuse at Columbia University. It found that teens from families that eat dinner together are less likely to use illegal drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Teens who rarely eat dinner with their families are more likely to use these substances. This study compared teens that have family dinner twice a week or less with teens who have dinner with their families five nights or more per week. The researchers found that the teens who ate five or more family meals a week were 32 percent likelier never to have tried cigarettes, 45 percent likelier never to have tried alcohol and 24 percent likelier never to have smoked marijuana. With families busier than ever, dinners offer a predictable routine and an opportunity for parents to monitor their children's behavior.

In the story "The Best Christmas present Ever" written by Warren Kliewer, we are transported to Uncle Pete's farmhouse on Christmas day. Kliewer's immediate and extended family is gathered there for a Christmas feast. "The festivities began just after noon with the feast - an enormous array of beans and corn and mashed potatoes and bread and rolls and relishes and pumpkin pie surrounding this shank of a pig that two or three months earlier had walked around its pen some fifty yards from the kitchen" (237-238). In this story Kliewer makes us feel the warmth and comfort of his family. We get the feeling that they are supportive and encouraging. His family is so large they have to eat in two shifts. "Because the gathered clan was much too large for Uncle Pete and Aunt Anna's modest dining room table, the grown-ups ate at the first seating. We children waited. When the grown-ups were finished, the table was reset for us, and we were joined by Aunt Anna, who had been the presiding cook and now became the