You're
busy, and also your other family members and children. The "to-do"
list never seems to get completely checked off. If you're living to work
instead of working to live, it's time to reset your priorities and focus on
re-claiming quality family time. Here are a few strategies you
should follow to make dinner time occasions for nourishing not only the body
but the mind, heart, and soul as well.
How to Reclaim Family Dinner Time?
The shared family meal used
to be a given. While breakfast and lunch might be taken according to
individuals’ specific needs and schedules, supper time has for generations been
a family’s chance to sit down and break bread together while catching up on the
day. The centrality to family
life of a shared mealtime is reflected in its long history of being portrayed
on film, running the gamut from the idealized . . .
As the traditional family paradigm—with dad pulling a paycheck and
mom staying home—has become less of a norm, the practice of observing a regular
family mealtime has suffered. When there are two wage-earners, a lengthening
school day, and a heightened emphasis on keeping kids busy with multiple
extracurricular activities, finding an hour of the day when everyone is
simultaneously home and available has become increasingly difficult.
Yet studies, not to mention experience and common sense, show
numerous benefits to the family that shares a meal on a regular basis. As
outlined in The
Atlantic, when families routinely eat at home together,
children are less likely to be overweight and also do better in school. The
latter may have something to do with the fact that families who eat together
talk to one another more, increasing
children’s vocabulary and thinking skills. You don’t need a scientific
study to know that eating together as a family strengthens the bonds between
individual members, contributing to the overall emotional well-being not only
of the family unit but of the people in it.
7 WAYS TO RECLAIM QUALITY FAMILY TIME
Here are a few strategies you encourage to follow in our own
family over the years to make dinner time occasion for nourishing not only the
body but the mind, heart, and soul as well.
1. Have a Set Dinner Time
I know, you might be thinking about all of those extracurricular
activities you chauffer your kids to every week. Your dinner time doesn’t have
to be the same time every night – it can work with your schedule.
However, if you can have a set dinner time for each night
depending upon your schedule (e.g., 6 pm on Monday, 6:30 pm on Tuesday and
Wednesday, 7 pm on Thursday and 5:30 pm on Friday) you can get into a routine. It
can be on everyone’s calendars to be at the dinner table at that time on that
day. It may take a bit of getting used to, but scheduling is key.
2. Make a Dinner Time a Ritual
Develop a ritual, or pattern, for your family meals, and require
that everyone stay for the entire time. In our family we accomplish this with
prayer, praying not only at the beginning but at the end of the meal. Our
children, even the adult ones when they are home, don’t leave the table until
the closing prayer signals that the meal is over.
If you are not inclined to pray, prayer could be replaced with
some other kind of ritual, such as lighting a candle at the beginning of the
meal and blowing it out at the end. But if you’re not already in the habit of
doing so, I encourage you to give prayer a try.
3. Give Everyone a Job
At each meal, or perhaps weekly, assign specific jobs to everyone
who is old enough to help: table setter and clearer, dishwasher loader and
unloader, drink pourer, salad tosser, etc. When it’s time to eat, make clear
that everyone is expected to help in some way, not just show up at the last
minute to fill their plates.
For the meal itself, designate a table master and table server.
The master is boss of the meal, leading the prayer, granting permission to
those who wish to get up, and choosing the server. The server’s job is to tend
to diners’ needs throughout the meal, procuring needed items, refilling water
glasses, etc. The default server and master are mom and dad, but others, even
very young children, can be given these roles. Doing so provides opportunities
for children to take on more responsibility and turns serving into a privilege
rather than a burden.
4. Make Conversation
Make family mealtimes an opportunity to practice the art of
conversation. It can be easy for children to be overlooked, “seen and not
heard” during meals as mom and dad discuss family issues or the news of the
day. It can also be easy for the needs, wants, and behavior of the children to
totally take over the meal.
To impress upon those present that everyone is important and has a
contribution to make, set aside a time of orderly sharing during the meal. In
our family we tend to do this towards the end, before the closing prayer. Dad,
or the designated table master, goes around the table asking each person in
turn if he has something to share. The item shared might be a piece of news, an
observation, a joke, a compliment, a question, or something else. The point is
to make sure that at each meal everyone has the floor at least once to bring up
whatever is on his or her mind and to be heard by everyone else.
5. Protect the Time You Can Muster
The older the children in a family get, adding jobs into the
already crowded mix of activities and homework, the harder it can be to
maintain a schedule of regular family meals. But it’s important to try. The
strategies above may seem rather obvious and basic, but they are easily lost in
the blur that is an average day in the life of the modern American family.
6. Turn Off the TV
While we do watch TV during dinner now, it’s often something I
wonder whether we should cut back on. If our kids attended school and we only
had a few hours with them each night, I would turn off the TV so we’d have more
time to connect. When the TV is on, the conversation is really at a bare
minimum. If you’ve been apart all day, switch off the TV and switch on the
conversation. It’s a great time to learn more about what is going on in your
children’s lives.
7. No Technology at the Table
Even worse than TV are the smart phones and tablets at the dinner
table. Everyone is constantly connected to their phones – text messaging,
social media and more – it can all be so distracting! You can designate a basket
or a bucket where everyone places their cell phones and tablets before they’re
allowed to sit at the table. They should be on silent mode so it’s not a
distraction.
Then everyone can pick up their technology at the end of dinner,
after everything has been cleaned up. Your kids will work a lot faster to clear
the table and help with dishes if they don’t get their devices back until
they’re done!
It probably goes without saying that phones and other devices
should be left elsewhere. At family meals individual pursuits should stop and
people should come together and focus on one other until the last person has
finished eating and the closing prayer has been said. Then everyone can help
clean up!
Drawing a border around the family meal, setting it apart and
providing it with some rituals, marks it as something special and worth showing
up for. Even if you can only manage it three times a week, those three shared
mealtimes will do wonders for family communication and cohesion.
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