Tips on Making Family Dinner Work, #1

I know that making family dinner happen is not easy. I understand the challenges; I've been there. Here are some of my random thoughts on how to face one of the most typical challenges.

Challenge: Kids need to eat early; partner comes home too late for full family dinner

Suggestion: Let the kids have an early dinner, but make it a "real dinner" too.

Make it a "real dinner" with either the food or the tone (or both). Don't just serve out mac and cheese and stand over them while they eat it. Or clean up the kitchen, or the house, while they eat "kid dinner". Sit down with your kids. Talk to them. Eat some of what they are eating or a have a snack when they eat. You can have a "second dinner" with your partner later, or skip the later dinner and just sit to keep company with your spouse.

Of course, parenting is all about multi-tasking and it is "efficient" to clean up while they eat. But family dinner is not about efficient; it's about spending time together and paying attention to one another. Your kids being "picky" or refusing to eat what's served may be rooted in wanting more attention. Refusing to eat brings you to the table, doesn't it? Give them attention without focusing on the food. Try to think of "attention" as preventive medicine to avoid unwanted behaviors.

Ideally, you are only making one dinner (that's time efficient). So perhaps you are serving the kids from the communal pot and you'll eat the same with your partner when he or she comes home. Or you cook one sauce that goes over two separately cooked pots of pasta. (Get a hand-held pasta strainer, so that you can remove the pasta and save the hot water for another round of cooking.) If you must serve two dinners because of the time crunch, find ways to streamline the process.

One mom friend of mine told me that her kids eat early, but then they have dessert and talk with Dad once he gets home. They make that their time for all sitting together for a few minutes before bedtime. Another friend, whose partner can never make it to dinner because of work, told me that she tries to make dinner with her son special by lighting a small tea light candle when they are eating together. It sets a mood, and gets their attention that this is "family time." Anything can work: the idea is to create a family dinner ritual, be it with one parent or two, and to enjoy that time together every night.

Tip #9, Ten Tips Continued

9. Make only one meal—you are not a short-order chef.

It’s not really a family meal if everyone’s eating something different. And it is just too much work to create several meals a night. If you have really picky eaters, try to make a side dish that you know everyone will like. Serving plain pasta with butter on the side is OK; encourage your kid to try to main dish.

I love the blog Make Your Own Damn Dinner, in part because the writer, Badger, made a “selfish” choice that had unintended benefits for her family. In the summer of 2006, Badger decided that she didn’t want to play the short-order cook anymore and that she would make just one dinner for the family, take it or leave it. She decided that her kids (at 8 and 10 years old) were old enough to make themselves something else if they didn’t like what she was making. Read “How it all began” on the sidebar for her funny and inspiring story. Guess what? Dinner became easier and more fun for everyone. She lists loads of quick and easy meals, posting every week or so. For meal ideas and inspiration, and you can scan the links by food under “What’s Cooking?”

Here are more tips on picky eaters, but beware of conflicting advice. Follow you own judgment, but stay committed to reducing your own work load and anxiety around dinner!

The Family Meal—Who has the Time?

Many busy families have put the family meal down as an impossible goal, as a relic from olden times. The attitude is something like “It sounds so quaint—the family dinner. Sure it would be “nice,” but really who has time to cook these days?” But you can think of the problem a bit differently: You spend so much time already shopping, cleaning, getting food to the house one way or another. Shouldn’t you be getting something out of it? The family meal is actually one of the times you can reap some benefit from all the work you’ve been doing.

You have to eat anyway. Cooking a meal can take 20 minutes. Yes, there’s clean up and shopping time, but you usually have to do that anyway. Though I haven’t read the book, I love the Rachael Ray concept in her new cookbook Just in Time! which has recipes for 15 minute, 30 minute, and 60 minute meals. Love her or hate her, she has a point: Dinner can be a 15-minute quickie or something more in-depth depending on whatever else is going on in you life that night. There are “roasted chicken dinner” days and “tuna salad dinner” days. Both can be equally delicious and rewarding in their place.

Honestly, creating the family meal does take some time and commitment, but not really that much more time than re-heating and eating junk and cleaning up the dishes from multiple meals on the run. Make the family meal an important and valued part of your day.