Every parent has experienced it. That mysterious dinner time “black hole” which opens up somewhere around 6.30pm and extends beyond any reasonable bed time, swallowing up the evening and leaving you scratching your head as you wonder how on earth the kids have managed to get to bed late AGAIN?! Endless Minecraft stories and bad kid jokes, not to mention that never-ending list of random questions, can be frustrating and exhausting for parents, especially at the end of a long day. But what if we saw these hours not as wasted or something to just “get through”, but rather as something precious which could have a profound and lasting impact on our child’s wellbeing? What if the most important thing we could do in our daily lives as parents was to embrace these evening hours and intentionally invest our time and attention to them? What if something as simple as eating a meal together could change their lives for the better?
For a number of years, researchers have shown that regular family mealtimes help children to learn language and prepare them for success at school. Researchers Catherine E Snow and Diane E Beals use studies from the 1970s to the present to explain how mealtime conversations help to develop language skills such as vocabulary, narrative structure and conversational skills.These language skills are strongly tied to the development of literacy skills and are a strong predictor of academic success.This happens naturally as we discuss the events of the day, plan activities for tomorrow, discuss questions and solve problems. These opportunities come up more often at the dinner table, where there is opportunity for extended conversation. One study showed that mealtime was even more helpful for developing vocabulary in young children than playing with toys or reading books together!
Mealtimes help older children at school too. An American study called “The Importance of Family Dinners IV” (Columbia University, 2007) showed that teenagers who have more than 5 family dinners a week are more than twice as likely to get As and Bs at school than those who have less than 3 family meals a week.
This research project is just one of a number of studies which also demonstrate that eating family meals decreases the risk of teenagers engaging in risky behaviours such as drinking, smoking and drug-taking.
Other researchers have demonstrated that eating family meals together also reduced the risk of depression and suicide (Eisenberg et al, 2004) and promoted positive emotions (Utter et al, 2013).
It’s clear that scheduling regular meals together is a win-win situation, but it’s important that we do it well in order to gain these benefits. That means we need to:
- Turn the TV off and put screens away
- Focus on each other
- Listen, ask questions and be genuinely interested
And above all, enjoy these precious moments – because that little person who is asking you the same question for the umpteenth time won’t be sharing a table with you forever!
