What's So Important About Family Meals?
Family Meals
Why does everyone make such a big deal about sitting down to eat together. Well, regular family mealtimes…
• Strengthen the family by providing opportunities for communications and building relationships. 1
• Enable children to have longer conversations with parents, which can increase their linguistic abilities giving them an edge in the classroom. 2
• Are seen as a marker for other positive family attributes and play an important role in helping teens cope with the stresses of adolescence. 3
• Lead to better nutrition as you have more control over quality and quantity of the family's food choices. 4
• Enable children to adopt their parents attitudes to food and acceptable table manners. 5
• Foster family traditions and help shape and give meaning to cultural heritage. 6
In her 2008 'In praise of Panel Surveys' essay, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge Jacqueline Scott says: 'Parents who spend more time with their teenage children, including shared meal times, can strongly (and positively) affect young people’s attitudes and behaviour. In particular, the more frequent family meals, the less chance there is of young people being involved in vandalism, truancy or wanting to leave school as early as possible. Family meal-times perhaps reflect strong family values and/or family cohesion.'7
Children value the contact time. When Oprah Winfrey conducted a 'Family Dinner Experiment' in 1993, five families volunteered to eat dinner together every night for a month, staying at the table for a half-hour each time. At first, sharing meals was a chore for many families and the time dragged on. But, by the end of the month, the families were happy and planned to continue dining together most evenings, if not every night. The greatest surprise for parents was how much their children treasured the dependable time with their parents at the table.
Sources
1. Focus Group Report by Nancy Lee, Nutrition Education Network of Washington July 1996.
2. 'Using 'rare' words at mealtime can enlarge children's vocabulary' by Carolyn Sanford
3. Suppers on! Adolescent adjustment and frequency of family mealtimes by Bowden and Zeisz 1997)
4. Harvard study pub. March 2000 Archives of Family Medicine
5 Is Family Mealtime Important? by Leah Davies, www.kellybear.com
6. Family Mealtime by Elaine Bowen, West Virginia University Extension Service
7. Scott, J. and Choudhary, C. (2003) Beating the odds: youth and family disadvantage. Leicester: The National Youth Agency.
