Why Family Meals Matter…
Regular readers know that family dinners in my childhood home, due to my mother’s cooking explorations and my father’s intellectual nature, also functioned as history lessons and global food adventures. With siblings who were significantly older, particularly given the event filled nature of the 1960’s, it was also the place where I learned about civil discourse and family values.
This month, as we celebrate both our families of origin and our families of choice, we reached out to The Family Dinner Project and Dr. Anne Fishel for their thoughts.
Why Family Dinner Should Be on the Menu this Fall
At The Family Dinner Project, we believe eating dinner together is always important. That’s why we have spent the past decade providing families with food, fun and conversation resources to help them have more frequent and meaningful meals together. More than 20 years of research tell us that family dinner is a powerful tool: It’s a single, accessible action that most families can achieve in their own homes, without any special training or equipment, that has benefits for the health and well-being of the whole family. As our co-founder, Dr. Anne Fishel, puts it:
“As a family therapist, I often have the impulse to tell families to go home and have dinner together rather than spending an hour with me. It turns out that sitting down for a nightly meal is great for the brain, the body and the spirit. And that nightly dinner doesn’t have to be a gourmet meal that took three hours to cook, nor does it need to be made with organic arugula and heirloom parsnips.
In most industrialized countries, families don’t farm together, play musical instruments or stitch quilts on the porch. So dinner is the most reliable way for families to connect and find out what’s going on with each other. Of course, the real power of dinners lies in their interpersonal quality. If family members sit in stony silence, if parents yell at each other, or scold their kids, family dinner won’t confer positive benefits. Sharing a roast chicken won’t magically transform parent-child relationships. But, dinner may be the one time of the day when a parent and child can share a positive experience – a well-cooked meal, a joke, or a story – and these small moments can gain momentum to create stronger connections away from the table.”
Despite knowing that family dinners can offer benefits for mental, physical and emotional health, they’re not always a top priority for many of us. Families we’ve worked with over the years have told us about the common challenges, like lack of time to cook, busy schedules, picky eaters and family tension, that make it hard to have dinner together regularly. And for the past several months, the COVID-19 pandemic has added more stress to families’ plates. When families are in survival mode, trying to juggle jobs, isolated kids, and school arrangements or distance learning, sitting down together for a warm and positive home-cooked meal can feel like an overwhelming demand. But the longer the unique challenges of the pandemic linger, the more important it is to have rituals to help shape our days.
Dr. Anne Fishel says, “I believe that we’ve never needed rituals more than we need them right now. I’m not talking about rituals as elaborate religious ceremonies. I’m talking about the quirky ways that you come together as a family, like over a meal.
The big thing about rituals is that we feel terrible if they get disrupted. We count on them. Rituals provide an anchor when the seas are rough, and they remind us that we are part of a family when life feels topsy-turvy. Research shows that regular and dependable rituals can help families remain resilient during difficult times.
A really good ritual is flexible, so it can hold up during times of crisis like the current pandemic. When Monday feels like Tuesday which feels like Saturday, the sameness can be numbing. It’s even more important to have strong, flexible family rituals to give kids and adults something to look forward to.”
The good news is that recent research from the Guelph Family Health Study shows that 70% of families are cooking more during the pandemic than they have before, and 55% are eating with their children more frequently. Despite all the challenges of social distancing and figuring out what the school year will look like, lots of people are finding ways to create those important mealtime rituals! And it’s a great time to get kids involved, too. With so many extracurricular activities still on hold, and some schools embarking on distance or hybrid learning for the fall, kids who typically have full schedules may have more time to learn how to take responsibility for some dinner time tasks.
From the cooking to the conversation, your family dinners can become both a ritual to look forward to and a new opportunity for building responsibility and life skills this fall. We hope you’ll join us at The Family Dinner Project for food, fun and conversation ideas to help you build those rituals, as well as enjoying the recipes and tips from our friends at the Zen of Slow Cooking. Even in the midst of a pandemic, we’ll be sharing plenty of resources to help you find your family dinner Zen.
What else is on the menu for September?
In celebration of their work with underserved communities, we are donating 20 percent of all our sales on the Zen of Slow Cooking website. We’re also doing a kids cooking series featuring Jane’s daughter Connie McKay, simple weeknight recipes and 2 instagram giveaways. We would love to see your pictures please share them with the #familydinnerzen. As always reach out if you have questions on any of our recipes or need a should to lean on.
Zen Moment
In family relationships love is really spelled t-i-m-e.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
