The Catholic Standard and Times

Family dinner:
More important than you think

By Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent

The next time you sit down to dinner with your family, take a good look around.

Who’s sitting next to who? Who does all the talking and who does all the eating? Are those juicy slices of turkey laid out on that favorite meat platter of yours, the one Aunt Libby gave you on your wedding day? And, isn’t this the place where you first heard all those great family legends, like the story about Uncle Harry’s “haunted” Mustang that mysteriously set itself on fire in the parking lot?

It might look like just another family dinner, but according to researchers, it is a lot more than that. The everyday ritual of eating dinner with our loved ones is where we learn some of the most important lessons of life.

In “The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes us Stronger, Smarter, Healthier and Happier,” the author and researcher Miriam Weinstein compiles an extensive amount of research on how the simple family ritual of eating together leads to better overall health for every person sitting at the table.

“Those simple actions that get repeated night after night become the road maps of our lives,” she writes. In fact, when family therapists are trying to understand the dynamics of a particular family, they sometimes look to their everyday rituals, such as their dinner habits, for clues.

“They call them snapshots of how families function,” Weinstein writes. “They can see who’s weak, who’s strong, who’s in, who’s out.”

It might seem like just an ordinary routine, but the ritual of the family meal is almost as complex as it is ancient.

Weinstein refers to the research of sociologist Margaret Visser, who said that the tradition began in the distant past with primitive hunters who would cut up their kill and carry it back to their camps, where they shared the food with the other members of their group.

According to Visser, those earliest shared meals “helped give rise to many basic human characteristics, such as kinship systems (who belongs with whom; which people eat together), language (for planning the acquisition of food, and deciding how to divide it out while preventing fights), technology (how to kill, cut, keep and carry), and morality (what is a just slice?).”

And because the family meal involves as much talking as it does eating, it is also the place where people are most likely to learn about another important aspect of their lives — their ancestry.

Marshall Duke, a clinical psychologist at Emory University, conducted a study on how to give children better coping skills for life. Duke found that the children who were the most resilient were also the ones who knew the most about their family background. Where were they the most likely to encounter family lore? At the dinner table.

Beginning in 2001, Duke and his colleagues studied the members of 42 middle-class families, each with a child between nine and 13 years of age. They put together a “do you know?” scale with which to quiz the children about their families, and also measured them according to several standardized psychological tests.

What they found surprised them. The more a child knew about his or her family, the better he or she measured up. Duke’s research found that common dinner table talk “encourages perspective-taking, critical thinking, theory-building, and relationship roles within the family.” It also helps children “find heroes in their own family,” Duke writes.

This kind of give-and-take can be crucial for children during times of crisis.

It teaches them that “terrible things have happened but we’re okay, the family survives,” Weinstein writes. “So those ridiculous stories, as well as the more serious ones, might actually have some value.”

The dinner table also provides a regular connection with parents, and has been found to be a powerful protective factor for children.

In 1996, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) talked to 1,200 teens, ages 12 to 17, and their parents to see why some teens engaged in destructive behavior such as drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and cigarettes, and why some did not.

The study found that children who had dinner with their families five or more nights a week, were “32 percent likelier never to have to have tried cigarettes, 45 percent likelier never to have tried alcohol, and 24 percent likelier to have never smoked pot.

In addition, “those who eat lots of family dinners are almost twice as likely to get As in school as their classmates who rarely eat as a family,” the study concluded. “The number [of teens] who have regular family dinners drops by 50 percent as their substance-abuse risk increases sevenfold.”

A 1995-96 study of 90,000 teens and 20,000 parents, conducted by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, found that adolescents are also protected from emotional distress by “parents being present at key times during the day (in the morning, after school, at dinner, and at bedtime).”

A Syracuse University study conducted in 2000 arrived at a similar conclusion. Rituals such as the family dinner, “correlated strongly with lower levels of anxiety ... Under conditions of multiple stressors, family rituals may offer one avenue for families to stabilize their lives and provide a sense of belonging.”

And yes, the family dinner table is also the best place to teach manners to our children. But even that practice has much broader implications than just teaching polite behavior.

Children learn by example, which is why manners are a “cut-to-the-chase way of teaching important life lessons,” Weinstein writes. “When you say, ‘Don’t grab, let your brother go first, you are teaching reciprocity and empathy. When you tell your kid to sit up and quit squirming, to keep his hands to himself, you are letting him know that dinner is a particular time set aside for a particular function (eating accompanied by sociability).”

Weinstein calls manners a “shorthand way of being sensitive to our surroundings. They teach consequences, highlight relationships, confirm the person’s place in community. They both mold and express character.”

Unfortunately, our rapidly accelerating lifestyles are leaving less and less time for the family meal. Many families eat in the car on the way to soccer games or in front of the television or computer. Researchers believe those erratic meal practices are contributing to increased rates of obesity and other eating disorders in children.

Ellyn Satter, a dietician, therapist and author, reminds parents: “Whether your family numbers one or 10, meals are as essential for nurturing as they are for nutrition. Meals provide us all with reliable access to food, and they provide children with dependable access to their parents and to caring. Without meals, a home is just a place to stay.”

If your family could use a little more “family time,” considering making a nightly meal a regular part of your day.

“Family supper may not be a panacea,” Weinstein writes, “but it sure looks like a relatively painless fix.”

Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615.