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December 2005
Together for Dinner
Dear Friends,
December is that time of year when we take stock in our lives. Harvest is wrapped up. We begin planning for the holidays. And families all over the nation are getting ready to sit down together for holiday meals.
Twenty years ago, families dining together on days other than Thanksgiving and Christmas was really nothing unusual or even worthy of debate or study. Most families, especially in rural America, dined together not just a few evenings each week, but often three times a day (or more if you were a member of our family and enjoyed taking mid-morning or late afternoon lunches between the main meals).
But times have changed, so much so, that in 1996 the National Pork Board took the initiative to promote family dinners again as a way of not only sitting down together, but turning off the TV and bonding as a family.
Wow! What a concept that was? They were actually proposing that we as families sat down and communicated with each other. They called their campaign National Eat Dinner Together week. The nation celebrated the 10th anniversary of this special campaign this past September.
Over the years, the Pork Board had some solid research to back up their promotion. A Washington State University study thankfully found that most families did take time four or five evenings each week to eat together, but half of them watched TV during their meal. Around 10 percent of those families surveyed eat together two or fewer days each week.
For those families who didn’t dine much together, they cited scheduling conflicts, lack of time to cook, lack of knowledge about cooking a meal and a preference to watch TV instead as reasons to trash the idea of family mealtime.
Over the ten years of the campaign, things for family diners have gotten better. Five percent more people eat meals four or five evenings a week together now. Ten percent fewer people cite scheduling as a problem, but maybe that’s because we’re getting better at time management or we have made family time a greater priority.
The WSU study found that students who ate regularly with their families scored better academically, were well adjusted and ate more healthy meals.
Not surprisingly, families with young children like my own eat together more often than families with teenagers. The WSU study found that young children learn language skills faster when their families eat together regularly.
But keeping young children sitting down at the table is often nearly as much of a struggle for parents as finding time to sit down to eat with your teenagers. My wife and I tried placing a TV in the kitchen with my daughters’ favorite Sesame Street or Barney video playing, to get them to stay at the table.
The problem with that strategy was the same thing that the study found. The kids weren’t interested in eating or talking with Mom and Dad. They wanted Barney. Dinnertime became an even bigger challenge.
So the TV went back to the living room where it belongs and my children became more interested in eating and talking about their day with my wife and I. In that one move, we took meal time away from Barney (no offense to the purple dinosaur) and gave it back to our family.
So mealtime together pays big dividends for the family. We should thank the folks at the Pork Board for bringing something we should have known all along back into the limelight. If you want to read more about National Eat Dinner Together week, would like great recipes or fun activities you can try at dinner time for your family, visit their website – www.togetherfordinner.com.
Now if you don’t mind, it’s dinnertime.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
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