Remember the days of Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show, when families used to gather around the table for dinner together every night? A lot has changed since then: soccer practice, dance rehearsals, piano lessons, play auditions, et al., making it seemingly impossible for many families to eat together one night of the week, much less seven.
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And when families do sit down together for a meal, their attention is increasingly divided between the TV, smart phones, and other electronic gadgets.
This is a big problem. Study after study shows a direct correlation between the frequency of family dinners and the likelihood that a child will be emotionally healthy and well-behaved – i.e., the more often a family eats together the better off the kids will be. One family dinner each week is better than none. But three is better than one, and six is better than three.
The experts aren’t sure if family dinners create healthy kids or if healthy families like to eat dinner together. It’s probably a little of both. But one thing is clear to me: regularly having dinner as a family must be a high priority. It is easy to think that the best thing we can do for our kids is keep them involved in as many activities as possible. It turns out that less is more.
So here is the challenge: add one more family dinner to your weekly schedule. That might push your weekly total to one, but you have to start somewhere. Bon appetit.