When I was growing up, dinner was eaten either in a rush before my family headed out the door or in the car on the way home from one of my myriad lessons, rehearsals, classes, and activities. As a highly scheduled child, I didn’t have a lot of downtime, and since my mom didn’t cook much and my dad was usually working, we didn’t share many family dinners beyond Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Well, add that to the list of ways in which my parents apparently screwed me up big time, because recent research has shown that carving out time for a family dinner is one of the most powerful indicators of healthy, happy, and well-adjusted kids.
The Family That Eats Together …
In the past few years, a host of studies have emerged claiming that eating dinner as a family can provide serious benefits for children. In 2005, research at Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) found that the number of children who report having dinner regularly with their families was on the rise—about 58 percent, up from 47 percent in 1998—and that children who experienced family meals were less likely to be tempted by marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs, and less likely to smoke cigarettes. A 2000 survey at Harvard Medical School revealed that nine- to fourteen-year-olds who ate dinner with their families usually consumed greater quantities of healthy fruits and vegetables, and less soda and fast food. They were also more likely to accept new foods their parents offered them and to make healthy food choices on their own. For girls in particular, eating dinner with parents has been shown to correlate with a reduced risk of crash dieting, having distorted body image, or using aggressive weight-loss methods.
The CASA study also found that kids who shared dinner with their families were 40 percent more likely to get good grades in school. Out of teenagers who dined with their parents and siblings fewer than three times per week, 20 percent got below-average or failing grades, compared with only 9 percent of their peers who ate family dinner regularly. Researchers at Vanderbilt University even found that dinner-table conversation among families was the best predictor of children’s linguistic and literary development: kids with advanced language abilities came from families who ate dinner together more often and whose conversations were full of questions, jokes, storytelling, and interaction.
