The changing family meal experience
Across our country and others, families sit down together to enjoy a family dinner together. It can be joyful or even argumentative. It has changed through the years from being a reserved dining experience to a time for families to express themselves (Griffin, 2016). In the past, it was considered a tradition. It was a time where the family became unified. Do the majority of families still eat together? Do they eat away from home more? Do they consume more take-out food rather than home cooked meals? Is this tradition fading? Has technology and hectic lifestyles brought us away from this tradition? Does this affect our children and our futures? Having family dinners is more important today than in the past because there are so many more distractions such as technology and a variety of activities to chose from outside of the home. We meet and interact with many different types of people during the day and our children are learning about the world from various places without input or filters from parents. Family meals can provide a secure place to discuss ideas, current events, and daily happenings. These meals provide opportunities to parents to be role models for communication and manners, give children a sense of security, monitor their emotional, educational, and even spiritual growth, prevent destructive behaviors, nourish and expand their worlds one food at a time, and save money (Hand, 2005). They provide children with structure and routine and can improve overall well being and language and literacy development. There have been several large studies that have shown that regular family meals are highly associated with increased eating of fruits, vegetables, grains and other healthy food choices and linked to lesser consumption of fried or fatty foods, soft drinks or other less healthy food choices (NDSU, 2009). Shared family mealtimes can benefit the family, the children, and our health (NDSU, 2009). While some people think this tradition is becoming lost, that does not seem to be true. There were two different studies that showed that 79 percent of teenagers stated that they enjoyed eating meals with their families. There was also 64 percent of the teens that said eating at least one meal a day as a family was very important to them. Finally, there were 98 percent of parents who agreed that having their family eat together at least once a day was very important (NDSU, 2009). The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University recently reported on a national phone survey of 1,000 teens and 829 parents of teens that eating dinner as a family helped kids in many ways such as helping them get better grades, and keeping them away from cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana, and more (Davis). CASA reported that teens who eat fewer than three family dinners per week in comparison to those who eat five to seven family dinners a week are two times as likely to use alcohol and tobacco and one and a half times more likely to use marijuana (Banschick, 2013). Another report from CASA, the Importance of the Family Dinner IV stated that 59% of families reported eating dinner together at least five times a week, which was an increase from only 47% in 1998 (Klein). A Pew Research Center report on family issues included information on the frequency of family meals, taken from a survey of adults in October 2010. Among parents of children under 18 years of age, half of them say they have dinner every day with some or all of their children, 34% say they have family meals a few times a week, 11% say they do so occasionally and 3% say they never do (Cohn, 2011). In the last ten years, the biggest change has been the movement of women’s work from their families to the paid labor market (Cohen, 2015) Family meals allow us to play catch up, return to our roots, and connect over food (Banschick, 2013). Before the late 18th century, dining rooms and dining tables were not used or thought of and it made it difficult for families to dine together regularly. Tables and rooms had multiple uses and families would sometimes eat in shifts. If there were not enough chairs, the men would sit and the women and children would stand (Griffin, 2016). The rise of American family dinners began in the late 1700’s. One of the first American homes to have a room specifically for dining was Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which was built in 1772. The dining room with the dining table at its center, began to become a part of wealthy homes across the country and eventually began coming into middle class homes (Griffin, 2016). With a designated space for family meals and enough seating, family meals had a set time and parents used this time to educate children about manners and religion. In 1943, the sociologist James H.S. Bossard wrote that “it is at the dining table, and particularly at dinner time, that the family is apt to be at its greatest ease.” (Griffin, 2016) In the same year, The Saturday Evening Post published Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, where a family is dining around a Thanksgiving table. It represented the strength of American values during World War II. The people in the painting not only have food, but are very happy, smiling at each other and the viewer (Griffin, 2016). Family dinners were shown on TV shows such as Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and Happy Days. There weren’t many TV shows that showed family mealtime with African Americans or minorities; except for Good Times which represented African American families, however you hardly ever saw the whole family sit at the table while eating their meal. Family mealtime is still important in our society. Research shows that family meals help nurture children’s social, cognitive, emotional, and nutritional development. The normal family mealtime has changed because of changes to the definition of what a family unit can be, the necessity for women to work outside of the home, or that the food is from a fast-food restaurant in front of the TV, or some other kind of distraction, due to the use of technology. Despite the changes, family mealtime is still a historic tradition.
References
Banschick, M. (2013, June 21). The Family Dinner.
Becky Hand, Licensed & Registered Dietician. (2005, June 11). The Benefits of Eating Together.
Cohen, P. N. (2015). The family: diversity, inequality, and social change. New York: Norton.
Cohn, D. (2011, April 08). Family Meals, Cohabitation and Divorce.
Davis, J. L. (n.d.). Family Dinners Are Important.
Griffin, M. (2016, February 16). ‘No Place For Discontent’: A History Of The Family Dinner In America.
- (2010, March 16). Interesting Statistics on Family Dinners.
Klein, S. (n.d.). Make Time for Family Dinner.
North Dakota State University. (2009).