Posted on 11/22/2021
Recovering from the various ways that the pandemic has affected your family - and your children, in particular - won't happen overnight. But it will be more likely to happen when you realize that it's been a traumatic time and take the kinds of steps that have been shown to help children recover from adverse experiences. This will start with naming and discussing difficult emotions (see Part 1) and will absolutely require quality time and intentional conversations with you as a parent. That quality time is most likely to occur amid a quantity of time, as we discussed in our last post, and a great way to make that happen is through family dinners. While it might seem like an overly simple suggestion, it can be quite powerful.
Recognizing Benefits of Family Dinners
Anne Fishel, part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive director of the Family Dinner Project, has become an advocate for families wanting to overcome hurdles to spending this important daily time together. She explains why she's so passionate about this topic: "because so many of the things that I try to do in family therapy actually get accomplished by regular dinners. There have been more than 20 years of dozens of studies that document that family dinners are great for the body, the physical health, the brains and academic performance, and the spirit or the mental health.... Then the mental health benefits are just incredible. Regular family dinners are associated with lower rates of depression, and anxiety, and substance abuse, and eating disorders, and tobacco use, and early teenage pregnancy, and higher rates of resilience and higher self esteem."
Recognizing the Hurdles to Family Dinners
The decline in families having dinner together permeates our culture and is an issue in every region of our country, regardless of socioeconomic background. What's the common thread, you might wonder? "We hear that families are too busy, it's too much work to make dinner night after night, once they make it their kids or their partners are too picky. So what's the point? There's too much conflict at the table, families are distracted by technology, teenagers seem not to want to eat with their parents."
Another hurdle can relate to preparation of food itself, along with picky eaters. Sometimes parents who haven't grown up in a relational household don't know where to start having more intentional interaction with their kids. To help with such obstacles, the Family Dinner Project released its first book in 2019. Eat, Laugh, Talk: The Family Dinner Playbook includes recipes, conversation starters, and games which families can easily play around the table, and more.
Keeping the Routine Simple
No matter what great recipes or activities you have available, you still need to carve out time to actually implement family dinners. It will mean having definite parameters around your paid work as well as your child's extracurricular activities. After a year of increased working from home and further blurring of the lines between work and personal time as well as missing out on many extracurricular activities and events, maybe your family schedule needs some revamping. Years down the road, you won't wish you'd spent more time on your phone or at work. And your children probably won't wish for more time with teammates or practicing a sport. But the time you spend together as a family around the dinner table can become an anchor with a lasting legacy of relational and emotional benefits.
Continue reading with Part 6 (coming soon!).
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