Thanks Sheryl Sandberg for Taking Family Dinner "Out of the Closet"

Family dinner has come up again in the news, this time thanks to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, who has come out publicly to declare that "Yes," she makes time for family dinner.  It is interesting that she said she's been doing it for years, both when she was at Google and now at Facebook, but has only recently "come out" for family dinner publicly. What a powerful statement! First, that you would have to "come out" to say that you leave the office at 5:30pm so you can have family dinner (and that it is big news with over 1,000 shares on Huffington Post). And second, that one of the leading business people in America can say that finding regular time for your family is important and priceless, and that it is important for women, and men, to agree to do it.

Sheryl Sandberg: Leaving Work At 5:30pm

I often get distinct reactions when I talk about family dinner. Some people treat my advice to try family dinner as something akin to suggesting they build a spaceship and take it to the moon -- it just seems like an impossible task! Other people whisper to me in hushed tones, "We have family dinner most nights a week, but I never really talk about it. It's great that you are actually talking about it." Their tone suggests that they are slightly embarrassed about making family dinner a priority and actually pulling it off regularly. There is a (genuine) concern that if you are committed to family dinner you must be

• hopelessly old-fashioned, 
• willing to commit career suicide, 
• have live-in help, 
• have a lot of time on your hands. 
• Or maybe all of the above.

I know from talking with dual-income working families across the country that family dinner is a way of life for many and not rocket science. But in certain circles, family dinner is totally "in the closet" and is some kind of mystery that men and women are reluctant to even discuss. I'm glad Sheryl Sandberg's statements are bringing out more discussion on family dinner so we can talk about the hows and whys to make it a reality. (Some of my own tips are here and Blog for Family Dinner is a great resource for stories about how real families are making it work.)

I applaud Sheryl Sandberg for coming out for family dinner. Will you? The first step to making family dinner a reality is the commitment. Talk with your family about what small steps you could take. Can you try for family dinner 2 or more nights a week? Can you build up from wherever you start? What would it take to put that together? Talking to your boss, doing more meal planning, reducing out some after school or evening commitments? Make the commitment and follow through. Just like you do at work everyday.

Family Dinner Survey, Take 2

Family Dinner Survey

So far, hundreds of respondents have told us what they think about family dinner. Already, some very interesting trends have emerged (see post here).  I would like to get many hundreds more responses as well as a wide range of opinions about family dinner.  Results would be boring if we all agreed, right? Really, if you hate the concept of family dinner, tell me what you think. (But please answer truthfully!)

I have added a link to the Survey as a permanent feature on the top navigation bar. Please share the survey with your online friends and contacts. Send me an email me if you work directly with families on promoting healthy eating and lifestyles. For qualifying organizations, I'm happy to provide a FREE paper copy of the survey for you to use in your work.

Thank you!

Link to Family Dinner Survey 

About Us
At eatdinner.org, we believe in the health and social benefits of family dinner and provide research, education and resources for families, policymakers and educators. The Family Dinner Survey is designed to provide information about real families and their dinner habits, so that we can learn more about the challenges as well as personal benefits of family dinner.

All the survey information is confidential and aggregated so that no one person's responses can be identified. Please take the survey only once. Paper surveys are available to qualifying organizations upon request.

Family Dinner Survey: Some Early Results

Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed thus far to our Family Dinner Survey. The response has been great. (You can still take the survey if you missed it!)

One of my goals with the survey is to gain more insight into the challenges that people face in trying to accomplish family dinner on a nightly basis. I also hope to better understand why people value family dinner and what they see as its most important benefits.  I hope to get a wide range of experience from respondents: families that find family dinner impossible and those who are more successful at it. We can learn from all kinds of experiences about the best strategies to help families.

Usually research surveys unfold over months, and this effort is barely a week old, so these are preliminary results. Still, some interesting ideas are emerging from the survey responses.

1. Family dinner time is the time to connect, and eat healthy foods.
Overwhelmingly, the most often stated reason that family dinner is important is "family dinners give us a time to connect and be together." The next most popular response, thus far, is that "family dinner makes it easier to make sure my children are eating healthy food." Somewhat surprisingly, parents were less likely to report that "keeping kids off drugs" or "doing well in school" were their most important reasons for family dinner. This is interesting because much of the academic research community pushes these benefits as the most salient to parents.

The message here is that, for many people, family dinner is about creating connections with partners and children TODAY. Family dinner is about getting kids to eat healthy foods NOW. Forward projections of how it might benefit kids many years down the road may not be foremost on the minds of busy parents. Family dinner can build a great foundation for kids as they grow up, and thus can keep them focused on school and off drugs, but the results and benefits of family dinner can be seen immediately among these respondents.

2. The Best Strategy for Having Family Dinner: Make the Commitment.
The vast majority of respondents said the most helpful strategy for accomplishing family dinner was making a conscious decision to commit to it. This beat out every other reason, although knowing how to cook quick meals at home was another very popular choice. This mirrors my personal experience. There have been times when family dinner just seemed too hard, especially when the kids were little and demanding work schedules pulled at all of us. As a family, though, we decided that family dinner was too important to let slip by; we compromised and found a way to make it work. We eat late; we share the cooking and the clean up; we found a way. Merely taking the step and deciding that family dinner has value for you and your kids turns out to be critical.

3. Family Dinner is "Extremely Important" even for those who manage it 2 or less nights a week.
This is a "family dinner" survey, so most of the people who are motivated to take the survey had  high opinions of family dinner. Not a surprise, really. What surprised me, though, was that the respondents who rarely had family dinner (that is 1 or 2 nights a week, or never) still felt like it was "extremely important." Honestly I was expecting a little backlash! To me, this indicates that families want HELP making dinner, and family time, happen. This is something that parents want to do. Families could use  more support and less blame as we promote healthy eating and healthy habits for kids. This is an important message for educators, policymakers and researchers.

More to come....
I am just scratching the surface of the data here. There is a lot more in the survey to learn from and to share, and I hope to keep collecting data. So many people were interested in learning about the results, though, I wanted to give a hint at some preliminary findings. Keep checking back for more analysis.

A Note on the Survey Sample:
For the record, this survey is not scientific because the sample selection was not randomized. In fact, outreach was biased due to the nature of the data collection. Surveys were administered in person at school health fairs and workshops dedicated to healthy eating. The survey was also administrated online, with promotion through agents who are expressly interested in food, parenting or healthy behavior. The results were analyzed qualitatively to assess individual opinions about family dinner, and any cited statistics are not representative of the population at large. To date, the survey has been administered in Brooklyn, NY, in South Dakota, and online.

So why even do this survey, if it's not scientific or randomized? Well, I think that we have to get information about family dinner and its challenges from real parents who are on the "frontlines" of making healthy choices for their kids. Even in a biased sample, we can learn lessons about people's experiences that are valid and important; we just have to be careful not to generalize.

We will keep the survey open and available on the Eatdinner.org website and here. Please feel free to add your own experience and share the link with others!

Survey Says: What do you Think About Family Dinner?

Click here to take The Family Dinner Survey

One of the goals of eatdinner.org is to understand the challenges of families coming together at the table and to provide resources to help and support them. Our Family Dinner Survey has just been launched and is designed to collect information from parents, and anyone else who takes the time to sit down at the table for dinner, about the biggest challenges they face to making dinner happen. The survey also collects information on why family dinner is important and the best strategies that people use to accomplish it night after night. We know, family dinner is an accomplishment!

The survey is available online and I'm also collecting data at several family workshops held in New York City. Thanks to friends like Time at the Table, we are able to gather information from workshops being held throughout the country. Please let me know if you'd like a copy of the Family Dinner survey to share at your own workshop or meetings. Since the survey brings up topics of healthy eating, daily family challenges and positive strategies like menu planning and cooking, it's a great starting off point to get people thinking about issues that might be relevant to your workshop.

Please feel free to share this survey widely (share this link http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GBR78C5) or contact me offline to discuss using a paper survey in your work (Email me: grace [at] eatdinner [dot] org). Thank you!

The survey is completely confidential and the data will be aggregated to show trends in opinions, not any one person's opinion or experience. 

Fight Childhood Obesity? School Lunch Reform AND Family Dinner

Childhood obesity must be addressed on many fronts; I believe that family dinner is one of them. Tomorrow I'm attending a conference at the New York Academy of Sciences called Super-Sized World, and I'm looking forward to learning more about latest research and policy initiatives to combat the worldwide obesity epidemic.

Recently, U.S. school lunch reform has been one of the big topics in the food community and there is great hope that can help address obesity in school children. I am a big proponent of school lunch reform, and I am thrilled that CNR finally passed last week. It is great to have a little more money in the budget and a little more direction on nutrition in the hope of providing healthy meals to kids. School lunch and breakfast programs are essential, but healthy meals belong at home too.

If you are really going to fight childhood obesity and improve nutrition, you must engage parents and support family meals at home. I was recently interviewed for a magazine that is directed to Title I school administrators. (Title I* is a designation for schools with a high percentage of students from very low income families and these schools receive extra federal funding through the  Title 1 program). The theme of the article was parent engagement and how to encourage families to have dinner together. The research is clear: students who have dinner with their families are more likely to get As and Bs at school, and better grades are related to less drug and alcohol use, less truancy and behavioral problems. So, family dinner (at home) is actually something that school administrators, and policymakers, should care about.

This is one reason why the effort to cut food stamps in order to pay for school lunch was so infuriating. If anything, low income families need more support in order to be able to purchase and serve healthy food to their families. Family dinner is not a middle class value, and I believe that it is a key intervention to help ground families and their children (those Title I students) and help them succeed. There's research backing that up, too.

While you can't "legislate" family dinner, and that is not at all what I'm suggesting, I do think that social, economic, and policy supports matter as people make choices that affect their health. So let's keep up the pressure to improve school food without losing sight that family meals at home matter too.

Childhood Obesity Resources:
RWJF Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity
PreventObesity.net If you work on this issue, join the Network!
Yale Rudd Center for Policy Policy and Obesity
House Passes Child Nutrition Legislation: Cause for Celebration or Concern? One Hungry Mama on The Family Kitchen Blog, 12.2.10

*Full disclosure: Two of my children go to Title I schools. In New York City, there are top performing schools that have very low income kids; that's the facts. My high school student goes to Brooklyn Technical High School which you have to test into by scoring well on a highly competitive test.  I do lunch duty at my youngest child's school and believe it or not, they serve a pretty healthy lunch. But no one should confuse these chaotic lunchrooms, regardless of what food is served, for the type of connection that you can establish around family meals at home.

Post-Thanksgiving family dinner blues

A new study, released just in time for Thanksgiving, shows that 89% of American families have dinner together on Thanksgiving. The catch is that just half of the families surveyed eat dinner together regularly. One in six families (14%) never ate family dinner together! This is not shocking news, but it does show that we are willing to take great lengths for a once-a-year tradition, but not commit to a daily routine of eating dinner together. Eatdinner.org is all about promoting family dinner on a regular basis, not just special occasions.

So how can you transform warm feelings of Thanksgiving through this week, and the next, and the next?

The first step is making a commitment to family dinner. The next steps include identifying your personal roadblocks to family dinner and figuring out how to fix them.

Are you a single or divorced parent, or one partner can't be home consistently at dinner time? 
Make family dinner with the kids anyway. Family dinner can happen if all the people who are at home are sitting together and eating, ideally the same meal with the TV off. Acting like a short-order chef for the kids doesn't count. You have to sit down and eat too.

Are you unsure of your cooking skills? 
Cooking skills will last a lifetime and are worth an investment in time. Start with a basic cookbook and a good attitude. (Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything is super easy and supplies all the basics. He even has an phone app and a weekly newsletter with recipes). Don't expect yourself to be an overnight gourmet chef, just keep working and practicing. You would be surprised how kids like and remember the simplest meals.

There's just no room in the schedule!
Schedule in dinner like it's an appointment, at least a few nights a week. Dinner with your family is just as important as soccer practice and PTA meetings. Eat dinner late if you have to. Talk to your boss, the coach or your child's teacher if you have to make special arrangements. Develop meals that can be made in minutes, quickly defrosted or served from a crockpot.

One final thought: think of family dinner as your own food revolution.

What's the best way to start a food revolution in your own home? Learn to cook.
Jamie Oliver via Family Bites blog

 Just a few ideas to help make family dinner a reality. Any other ideas to add? Feel free to comment.

Friday Family Dinner Fan Club: Happy Anniversary, eatdinner.org!

I just realized that my blog's anniversary is coming up, so I'm giving myself "Friday Fan Club"! I have been writing about and promoting family dinner on eatdinner.org for three years this Thanksgiving (my first blog post here). Just like when your babies get older, it's hard to imagine where the time has gone. Looking back, there have been some bumps in the road, but I'm proud to say that my goals have pretty much stayed the same: to promote family dinner by posting practical ideas, research, and resources for parents.

In May 2010, I rededicated myself to the cause of family dinner and, in recent months, have happily found a community of like-minded bloggers and tweeple on twitter (@eatdinner). The family dinner meme finally seems to be catching a buzz, thanks most recently to Laurie David's new book The Family Dinner Cookbook. This year has also shown that some companies in the corporate food world can responsibly support family dinner. Some examples include Stouffer's Let's Fix Dinner campaign partnership with CASA (my post here) and the Smuckers' The Power of Family Meals website that features Miriam Weinstein, who wrote  the "bible" of family dinner, The Surprising Power of Family Meals (my Friday Fan post here). Barilla also has lots of family dinner resources under its Share the Table website. Offline, I recently meet with Time at the Table, a new organization that is promoting family dinner, and we hope to collaborate as our organizations move forward.

Part of my mission is to promote great ideas that can help families commit to family dinner. So if you write a blog or books, do research, or publicize in the media on the wide-range of issues that can relate to family health and family dinner, please contact me in the comments or grace [at] eatdinner [dot] org.

Let's think about how we can all work together to promote family dinner as good for each family and as a broad social good, too.

PS For my anniversary, please "like" this page or share the link with a friend! Many thanks!

Sharing Stories about Family Dinner

One of the initiatives I'm working on at eatdinner.org is to collect personal stories about family dinner. Whenever I mention that I work on family dinner, I get wonderful feedback about what a difference family dinner makes. (I also get knee-jerk guilty apologies, which are totally unnecessary!)  Sometimes the driving force behind family dinner is a health problem, such as the child has a food allergy or the father was diagnosed with high cholesterol. Sometimes one or both parents just believe in it and jump through all the necessary hoops to make it happen, several nights a week. Always I hear that it is worth the effort in terms of staying connected with your partner and you kids,

Much of public health research is all about the numbers:

• How many calories are consumed with an average school lunch?  What are proportions of fat, sodium etc?
• How many people are obese? 
• What is the percentage of kids who have tried drugs or alcohol, and at what age?

But narrative stories are important too and can be studied systematically. Qualitative research can often lend the interesting details and point out true themes and rationales behind health choices that the statistics miss.

• Are people eating family dinner more because of the recession?

A statistic may tell you yes or no, but only narrative stories can tell us what family are getting out of eating dinner together more often and whether it is a temporary solution or potentially a more long-lasting trend. The stories may help us understand what exactly it is about family dinner (or breakfast or lunch, for that matter) that provides the protective glue within a family.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be developing a structured interview to share family dinner stories. I hope you'll add your voice to help us create a rich narrative of family dinner. In the meantime, please visit the eatdinner.org Facebook page (Like us!) and add your thoughts under the Discussion section. Or feel free to add in the comments below. Thank you!

Family Dinner Beneficial to Low Income Urban Youth

Research: This study followed a large sample of urban, racially-diverse youth from low-income families from middle school age to the beginning of high school (3.5 years on average, n=4,750) and found that kid's perceptions of parent-child communication and frequency of family dinner was positively associated. That is, the more these kids ate family dinners together, the more likely they were to view their ability to communicate with parents in a positive light.

Although the frequency of family dinners declined as the kids got older, the study suggests that teens can benefit from family dinner and that eating family dinner at middle school age has enduring positive effects, at least 2 years later. Journal of Family Psychology June 2010

Reality: The positive effects of family dinner are NOT just a middle class phenomenon. It is never too late to start family dinner, but it seems important to set a routine by the time your kids are in middle school. Teens will not be as available for family dinner, due to their independence and other time commitments, as are younger children, but having family dinner as a regular option is beneficial to them as well.

Mothers and Meals: Attitude Makes a Difference

Research finding: Mom's attitude towards family dinner makes a difference. When mothers care about family meals, and take time to plan, shop and prepare for them, older kids and teens care about family meals too and are more likely to participate. Appetite, Sept 2010

Reality Check: Mom can set the priority, but she doesn't have to do all the work. Get Dad involved in the cooking or shopping and get the kids to help prep, cook, or clean up.

A common negative attitude was the time pressure associated with making family meals. More planning and organization can help ease this pressure and make family meals easier to accomplish. Easier said than done, of course (!), but try weekly menu planning so that nightly dinner is a less of a scramble.

Strength of Family Ties: Results from CASA Family Dinner Study 2010

Teens want to eat dinner with their families and family dinner strengthens ties among parents and teens, according to CASA's most recent study. All this makes sense: family dinner gives us the time and space as parents to connect to our kids and listen to them. It helps to have family time be something teens can "count on" rather than a random event. As much as teens want "their own lives," they both need and want to be connected. Family dinner is a way to do it, and it's never too late to start!

Here are some key findings from CASA's national adolescent survey.

• 60% of teens have dinner with their family 5  or more times a week. This statistic has been steady from most of the past decade.
• 75% of teens talk to their parents at dinner about their lives.
• 80% of parents agree that dinner helps them learn more about their teen's life.
• Teens who frequently have dinner with their families (5 or more nights a week) are twice as likely to talk to their parents about their lives than are teens who infrequently have dinner with family (2 or less nights a week).
• Most teens (60%) want to have dinner with their families more often.
• 72% of teens think family dinner is important.
• Kids who frequently have dinner with their parents are less likely to use drugs, smoke, or drink alcohol. Of these kids, 70% reply that one reason is that they know their parents would be upset.

Family Dinner Contributes to the Strength of Family Ties. This year CASA added a new dimension to the survey to measure the strength of family ties and how that was related to illegal drug and alcohol use among teens. Stronger family ties resulted in less likelihood to use drugs, alcohol, or tobacco. Family dinner contributed to stronger family ties independently and by influencing two other component of the scale, as noted below.

• Teens who had frequent family dinners were 3x more likely to report an excellent relationship with both mom and dad. 
• Teens who had frequent family dinners were 2x more likely to report that their parents were good at listening to them.

Source: CASA, The Importance of Family Dinners, IV, September 2010. Full Report available by pdf.

Translating Family Dinner Research into Action

One of the things that I aspire to do with my work on this eatdinner blog/twitter/facebook page is to help translate research on family dinner into action. The statistics on the benefits of family dinner shouldn't just be empty slogans or exhortations of guilt directed toward busy families. The personal benefits of family dinner for you and your kids are important, but from a public health perspective, the societal benefits are even greater. Less kids doing drugs and drinking, more kids doing well in school, less childhood obesity: these positive outcomes affect the whole community and the whole country.

I know from experience that the academic research community puts a lot of effort into studying problems and identifying determinants of health, but often gives short shrift to actually developing and implementing solutions.  I just read a recent literature review in the Journal of American Dietetic Association that found that only a quarter of the studies on Weight Loss Management had any mention of real-world adoption or maintenance of the weight-loss strategies studied. The authors concluded that it was unknown what popular strategies could actually work becuase real-world adoption was not effectively considered. If you are not thinking about real-world adoption, especially in an area like weight-loss, why study these strategies at all?

Many research studies that mention family dinner end with a statement like "Family dinner is important and this message should be shared with the public." Gee, thanks. Can we get a little more detail please? I think the research community should go to the next level. The identification of key elements of family dinner success and the persistent barriers to family meal times would be a good start. There is also important work to be done assessing how public information and education on family dinner should be tailored regionally or by socioeconomic or cultural group.

Perhaps it's only fair to expect community-based organizations or policymakers to take up where the researchers have left off. CASA, a national research center, has done an amazing job with their annual Family Day campaign and getting key statistics out to the media. But one day is not enough; family dinners require a concerted commitment and attention throughout the year.

The best support for family dinner at this point has been from the social community of the Internet, with blog/twitter/facebook commentators weighing in on everything from menu planning to easy weeknight recipes to parenting support. To Malcolm Gladwell, I say, don't undestimate the power of weak ties and social networks. Spreading information and collaboration can do more than you think to change the world, though it may not be as dramatic as sit-ins during the civil rights movement.

Let's use the power of this social network to collaborate and learn from each other. What ideas do you have to help families make the commitment to family dinner?

Lessons from Research: Who's Working on Family Dinner

The researchers who work on family dinner are a varied sort. They come from nutrition and food science schools, from medical schools, from schools of public health and schools of nursing, and from a wide range of programs in social work, sociology, and psychology. Each of these disciplines come at the research from a different perspective, but findings are surprisingly similar. Family dinner offers a protective effect for kids and teenagers, be it less risk-taking activities, like smoking and underage drinking, more positive actions like improved eating habits and better grades, or just improved general well-being.

The next frontier of research, I think, is to bring the detailed findings of these studies out from inside the ivory tower. Let's figure out how to translate the research into action that goes beyond the occasional pep talk. We need to find out how to both encourage and support families who are trying to create a family dinner routine for their families. Do they need more information about healthy choices at the grocery stores and navigating the choices among prepared foods?  Advice on 20-minute meals cooked at home and menu planning? Do they need help with their family relationships so that everyone chips in? Do they simply need more time? More time might mean flexible and supportive work environments that allow them to go home by 5 or 6pm at night. Probably, all of the above.

Health education campaigns sound so easy, but effective campaigns to change individual health behaviors are notoriously difficult to craft.  It can be also hard to measure their effectiveness or translate what works in one community to another. Nevertheless, the benefits of family dinner are well worth a concerted effort to better promote them.

Select List of Academic Research Centers Working on Family Dinner
The National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), Columbia University,
Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Chairman
Founders of National Family Day
Report on The Important of Family Dinner

University of Minnesota, School of Public Health
Project EAT. Principal Investigator: Diane Neumark-Sztainer, PhD, MPH, RD
Other Research Projects

Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity
Eat Healthy New Haven
Other Research Projects

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Pampered Chef Family Resiliency Program Center,  Barbara Fiese, Ph.D., Director

Harvard Pilgrim Heath Care Institute, Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Obesity Prevention Program


International Association of the Study of Obesity (iaso), Europe
The ENERGY Project

Cornell Food Lab
Food Psychology and How, Why, When and How Much We Eat, Brian Wansink, Ph.D., Director

Baylor College of Medicine
Children's Nutrition Research Center, Dennis Bier, MD., Director

Lessons from Research: Parenting Style and Family Dinner

Parents who are afraid to put their foot down usually have children who step on their toes. ~Chinese Proverb @AskDrVicki, RT@eatingarainbow

 A newly released study from The University of Minnesota's Project EAT (Eating Among Teens) hones in on an important aspect of successful family dinners: parenting style. Parents who were "authoritative" meaning understanding of their children, but able to set clear rules and expectations were more successful at creating and maintaining family dinner routines among their teens, both initially and 5 years later.

Parents (maternal and paternal) were classified as authoritative, authoritarian, permissive or neglectful based on the teens' answers to a battery of questions about their parents. (I'd like to see this list of questions! :) ) Authoritative parents were "empathic and respectful," but maintain clear expectations and rules in the household. Authoritarian parents were strict disciplinarians that showed little warmth. The permissive style was empathic but with few rules or expectations, and the neglectful style...well, as you can guess, cold, no rules, not showing care or attention. (Sigh, one hopes this was rare, but they are teenage perceptions.)

Using multivariate analysis, parenting style was matched up with how often the teens ate dinner with their families, in addition to other social behaviors. Both boys and girls in the study (over 1600 middle school and 3000 high school students) ate dinner with their families more often if they considered their parents to be authoritative. 

Many parents today strive to be "authoritative," even if they never thought of it that way. We want to listen to our kids and be understanding of their needs, but at the end of the day, rules and routines are important to make family life run more smoothly. When the balance tips more in favor to the child's individual desires and wants, and less toward family rules and standards, the parent heads towards the permissive zone. Parents today have been chided in the media, sometimes unfairly, for excessive permissiveness. The lean toward permissiveness may be a reaction to the authoritarian or neglectful parenting styles of the past, or it could be a result of less family support and structure and more frazzled parents who are working more and have less family time. Most would agreed, though, that there is hell to pay for "giving in" to our kids too often, both on a day-to-day basis and in the long run. As all parents in the trenches know, it can be hard to strike the right balance.

The big lesson of this study for me, and I think parents need to hear it loud and clear: it is OK to have rules and routines. In fact, it is better. You are not necessarily squashing your child's individuality or creativity or self-esteem by setting some household rules to live by. Dinner time, while it can be a struggle in terms of time and commitment, is the perfect way to establish not only an important routine, but a model of rules that your family lives by. These rules might include: we are respectful to each other, we listen and talk together and take turns, we are grateful for the food on the table and the effort it embodies (and we don't ask for something different or demand plain pasta every night). It sounds so simple, but it can be so hard in practice. Never fear mom and dads, if you can get and keep your kids at the table, especially as they age into teens, it is well worth it.

Journal of the American Dietetic Association, July 2010
Project EAT additional Resources
Update: Just found a great blog post by littlestomaks.com breaking down parenting style as it can affect family dinner dynamics

Latest links and news on family dinner

I've been posting a lot of interesting news, research and tips about family dinner on my Facebook fan page (Eat Dinner.org) and Twitter (eatdinner). Here's a few recent links. Happy reading!

New Kids Mag: Chop Chop: Getting Kids in Kitchen always a good idea!

Miriam Weinstein's book "The Surprising Power of Family Meals" is a favorite; now a blog and family meal website

Family dinner pep talk. Great, non-judgmental advice for starting family dinners

Journal of Pediatrics study: Structured family meals help kids eat veggies and have good body weight

10 pitfalls to avoid for picky eaters, no.8 is the best. bring that baby to the table!

University of Minnesota Study on Parenting Styles and Family Dinner: Authoritative Style (set rules and routine, but also empathetic and listening) did best with family dinner. Picked up by Babble Editors and many others. Official press release here.

What is it about family dinner? Tips from research

"The moral seemed to be 'Eat dinner, read early.'" Dr. David Dickinson

Thanks to a throw-away comment in Working Moms Break, I found a NPR interview from 2008 (Family Dinner Reconstructed by Alix Spiegel) that was a goldmine of info on family dinner. The radio interview profiled 3 researchers (David Dickinson, Vanderbilt University, Barbara Fiese, Syracuse University and University of Illinois, and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer of University of Minnesota) who initially were studying different topics, but all came to the conclusion: family dinner matters.

The big research question with family dinner is a bit of a chicken and egg dilemma of "which came first?" To use the public health research terms, do highly "functional" families have their act together enough to make family dinner, and thus the "functional" nature of their family leads to better outcomes? Or is there a clear, added benefit of family dinner? If all families are equally "functional," do the ones that have family dinner together still have better outcomes? The research seems to indicate that the latter is true: family dinner helps all families do better.

"Even in families where relationships are difficult, family meals can predict better outcomes." Dr. Neumark-Sztainer.

The next question is why? What is it about family dinner? There seem to be a few themes that emerged from from their disparate research, which ranged from early childhood literacy development (Dickinson) to families with asthmatic children (Fiese) to adolescents at risk of eating disorders (Neumark-Sztainer).

Three Key Elements of Family Dinner
1) content and quality of dinner conversation, 
2) a set routine where meals have a beginning and an end, 
3) empathy and genuine concern about the participants and their daily activities. 

Dickinson found that the content of dinner table discussion was of key importance. The quality of conversations at mealtime was the strongest predictor of later development of children's language and literacy development. This trumped even the amount of book reading that was done with a child. Eating dinner together lead to having complex conversations, telling stories of the day, explaining unfamiliar words to young child and this, in turn, led to better literacy and language development. This is backed by research that the sheer number of words a child is exposed to at an early age varies greatly among and is positively related to reading and language development. Fiese found that family dinner led a decreased number of emergency room visits for children with asthma.

It begs the question whether all families can achieve this high level of involvement and positive interaction during dinner or other meal times. But I think that the best way to do family dinner is to just start. Try to set out a routine a few times a week.  You don't have to be prefect; it's not rocket science. Some days are going to be better than others. I think the real-life benefits become apparent pretty quickly and that fosters more communication and positive role-modeling for everyone. 

"There's one solid certainty about dinner. It is one of the few times in modern life when families can sit down together, speak face to face, build relationships, monitor behavior --all things that simply can't hurt." Alix Spiegel, paraphrasing Dr. Dickinson

Family dinner as public health intervention: we need to know more

Is family breakfast as good as family dinner? Warning: This is a research question.

Family dinner is important, almost everyone agrees. There are many "feel-good" stories about family dinner scattered through cyberspace as well as hard-boiled facts about how kids who eat with their families fare better on a variety of measures. I, and others, even argue that family dinner can be good for the parents and significant others involved, too. All this, true. But is that all there is to it?

Lately, I've been trying to think about family dinner more like a social scientist or public health researcher. (That's my background, after all.) If you drill down into the concept of family dinner, you can think of eating dinner together as an intervention. Studies show that the "intervention" of family dinner does indeed contribute to better outcomes on a wide variety of measures, including lower engagement in risky behaviors like underage drinking, better relationships with parents and siblings, and reduced risk of suicide (data here). This is an important message to promote, but why does family dinner work? How does it work? Can we decipher what aspects of family dinner are critical to its overall success? Can breakfast count too?

The National Children's Health Survey collects data on how often children eat together with their families as well as a variety of outcome measures. Several university research centers (CASA, University of Minnesota, Harvard, to name a few) focus on the topic of family nutrition, family dynamics, and family dinner as related to specific behaviors. There is some great research out there, but the specifics rarely make it to the general audiences of parents struggling to get meals to the table or to make mealtime enjoyable, not just a battle.

I personally believe that family dinner is an answer to many critical issues we experience personally and that we experience as a society. I know it is difficult for busy families to pull it off, but I feel the effort is well worth it. Family dinner doesn't really lend itself to policy change, but it is connected to positive health behavior. Basically, I'm arguing that this is a topic that is worthy of more in-depth research, study, and discussion on a broad level. We need to figure out why family dinner works, how it works, and how best to support families of all income levels in creating mealtime traditions that support growth and development for kids, parents, and families overall. 

Child Trends Data Bank on Family Meals
Family Meals Matter Facebook Fan Group