The Family Dinner Project says "Researchers find that families who eat dinner together five nights a week reap great benefits" so we're already way behind. Of course, they also say "Dinner is a time to relax, recharge, laugh, tell stories and catch up on the day’s ups and downs, while developing a sense of who we are as a family" so they have apparently never eaten with a cranky 5 year old who had to wait to eat until papa came home and a wiggly 16 month old who is just plain PO'ed that he has been strapped into a high chair and would have preferred to have eaten his dinner at around 4pm.
So do you sit down together as a family every night and eat the same meal across the board? How do you manage it? P. and Bo would prefer to have the early bird special but the mister doesn't get home until around 7pm on many nights. If I give them a snack, they don't want to eat anything else and so then just getting them to sit down is rough. Rougher, even, when you consider that 7pm is half an hour past Bo's bedtime and half an hour before P.'s.
Right now my feeling is that when the little ones are older we'll make more of an effort, but right now at least three of us have breakfast together a couple of times a week. To me it seems more valuable to have a few fun breakfasts missing the mister than to torture my kids by making them eat way too late just in case someone ever offers them meth.
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We try. However, when M is running late, we will often eat without him. We are probably too informal about matters, because dinner was A. Very. Stressful. Occasion. in my family of origin (someone always left the table in tears) and we're swinging the other way.
ReplyDeleteThinking about it: we probably eat more meals out together than we do at home, where things are casual and there are distractions. We have also discussed--given Pea's tendency to not like anything I cook--feeding her separately. M's idea, not mine. (I just tell her that her comments are not polite, not interesting, and she should keep them to herself. She has to wait until everyone else is done before she can leave the table.)
I like the breakfast idea--we do this on weekends, but it would be nice to try during one weekday to see how it goes.
Do try breakfasts! It does say on the site I mention in my post that it doesn't HAVE to be dinner - just some shared mealtimes. So in that sense, we do have SOME shared mealtimes :)
Delete(And I'm glad someone else's little one doesn't like anything they make!)
We ate a s a family every night as my boys were growing up. They are all moved out but will come over on sundays for dinner.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of times I wish we could, but that also means wishing my mister got home earlier.
DeleteWe almost never eat a real family dinner. Even if everyone is eating the same thing at the same time the kids eat at the kid-sized table and the grown ups eat...on the couch. It's terrible. It's horrible. I am very very ashamed of it. But my husband doesn't make it home for dinner (or even before bedtime) 6 out of 7 nights, the kids don't eat half the stuff I make, and having the fight over sitting at the dining room table (which is usually covered in junk anyways) for 20 minutes together takes more energy than I have by the end of the day. My GOAL is to move to family dinners after both kids are in school, since we'll be apart most of the day and it will be a good way to catch up, instead of just ANOTHER chance to annoy each other after longs days of togetherness.
ReplyDeleteWe did family dinners almost every night growing up, so I don't have a good excuse for not doing it for my own family. I know my mother would be ashamed if she saw me eating on the couch every night, but really, TV makes a better dining companion than a 4 year old.
I think it does become more important as kids get older and they're spending more time doing their own thing. And as they become better dining companions!
DeleteMy mom was pretty huge on the whole FAMILY DINNER concept, but that didn't really kick in until later on. When we were younger, the way the household was set up (long, very boring explanation here) kids and adults ate in different rooms at different times. So, for the first 5-6 years of my life there weren't family dinners. Or breakfasts. Or lunches. We lived with my grandparents after my mom divorced my dad (bizarrely, they were HIS parents, not my mom's), and they didn't want to eat dinner with a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old (even incredibly well-behaved ones like us; we sat at a different table in restaurants as well, by ourselves), so no Family Dinner there. When did it start? When I was 9, and my sister 7. From there until literally the day I went to college, we ate every single dinner as a family. No exceptions. Every. Single. DAY. And, you have to realize that the impact of that is waaaaaaay bigger than if you put a huge amount of effort into making sure your wee kids who won't even really remember eating these dinners just a few years later all eat together "as a family." When I look back at my life, I remember eating as a family a LOT better than not eating as one, because it happened when I was older and able to really process that kind of info. So, screw it. Eat however it works for you now, and when you're ready to start the Family Night, do that.
ReplyDeleteHello there! I'm Krysta from fairytalecomesalive.blogspot.com ...Nice to 'meet' you! Glad I found your blog! I'm having fun reading some of your posts!
ReplyDeleteUntil Nereus was 1.5 we were having all our meals together. Dad wasjoining us if possible. A year has passed and we eat together when we can. It's really hard with our crazy working schedules. It's definitely gonna be different when the kids will be older!