This article was originally written in April 2015. In 2022, after a comment from my daughter, my goal was to slow down. I noticed it was becoming harder to get my family together, so I invited an expert to give us insight for making family meals happen.
You'll find tons of helpful information above and below, including resources and links, a podcast episode, books, and more.
What to do if Family Mealtimes Stop Happening
The importance of family dinners is clear, however life happens. After four of my six children became adults and moved out, our routines gradually became less consistent. Add in the fact that my husband commutes to work. Family mealtimes weren't happening.
While frequent family meals is high on my priority list, the cold hard fact is that as kids grow into young adults, it's not always possible, our schedules were all over the place.
I reached out to FamilyDinnerProject.org for some tips.
Links Mentioned In Podcast
Benefits of Family Dinner for Adults (Empty Nesters, College Students, etc.) Family Breakfast Project - Activities with make ahead or quick breakfasts to get in some quality time Welcoming Table - A special series of resources for families with unique mealtime needs and challenges. Family members who are on the autism spectrum, or who have ADHD, learning disabilities, feeding disorders, or sensory processing issues need family dinner to be a safe and welcoming space.Technology at the Table - resources to help you decide what feels best for your family, along with fun ways to use devices to enhance family bonding, not distract from it.Youth Sports and Family Dinner - top tips and advice from a team of experts, as well as meal ideas that are perfect for busy athletes and their families. Use these tools as inspiration to keep family meals on the calendar, right alongside the big game.Eat, Laugh, Talk, The Family Dinner Playbook - 52 weeks of ideas for achievable family dinners with great food, fun and conversation. With tips to overcome common dinnertime obstacles, set goals and get closer as a family. Chapters on picky eating, screen time, tension at the table, busy schedules and more — plus hundreds of easy recipes and tons of ideas for engaging conversation and exciting dinner games.
Other Posts Mentioned in Podcast
Meet Bri DeRosa
Bri DeRosa is a freelance writer and communications consultant with a background in creative and dramatic writing, arts education, and service learning. She’s spent over a decade working in program development and creative initiatives, largely for non-profits and small businesses. Bri has been the Content Manager at The Family Dinner Project since 2014, has contributed to three cookbooks, and practices her family dinner skills every night at home with her husband and two teenage sons.
Here are two examples of newsletters from the Family Dinner Project that are applicable to this podcast episode.
Family Dinner with an Empty NestTeens at the Dinner Table
Rebecca: I actually reached out to you because I am struggling myself with this subject, and so I thought as much as I try. And as much as this means to me, if I'm struggling, there have to be people out there that are also in the same boat.
Rebecca: It's easy to think that, Oh, I'm the only one that has this problem. My life is so difficult and busy. But it's not true really.
Bri: No, I mean, it's. We hear from so many families that this is challenging, This is hard. Family meals have gotten more difficult over the years. The external pressures, the things that make family life what it is today are actually like, they pretty much work against family meal times, right?
Bri: And, and everybody has this sense that like, I'm supposed to be able to do it all. I'm supposed to be able to do it all and do it perfectly. And that is not the. So, no, you are not the only one who is struggling. I do this for a living and I sometimes find it difficult, so I think we all just need to own right up front.
Bri: It is hard. It is hard for everybody. There are no right answers. There are only things that might help. Right. That makes me feel so much better.
Bri: Can you introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about what you do at Family Dinner Project? Sure. So I'm Bri d Rosa, and I am the content manager for the Family Dinner Project. So I do our communications, our editorial, our website , our social media, you know, all the things as well as, you know, we're a small and nimble team, so I also help out on the partnership side and just kind of where many hats, , And I've been doing that for, gosh, over eight years, , since I officially joined the team.
Bri: And I was consulting with the team for a few years before that even. So I've, I've kind of been around the family dinner project almost since the beginning. , and just have, you know, so much love for the mission and for the whole idea of. Eating together as a family. It's something that was important to me growing up.
Bri: It's something that is important to me as a mom and as a wife and, and you know, just, I think that, it's one of those things that although it is really difficult for many of us to pull off, it is rewarding and important to try to keep it at the center of, of our practice and our philosophy as families.
Rebecca: Yes. And that actually leads me to my first question is I wanted you to reiterate for us, I mean, cuz I think a lot of us know that family dinners are important. It's important, especially when you have children, but even if you don't, But I think it's so important, but some of us maybe lose sight of exactly why it's important.
Rebecca: So can we start out with maybe telling us a few of the top benefits of family dinner?
Bri: Yeah, no, and it's a great question and there are so many, , , so it's hard to highlight,, what are the most important ones, but family dinners, research has shown over decades. Decades of research has shown that family dinners have benefits.
Bri: That are physical and emotional and social and academics. So family dinner is really the one single activity that we know of that actually confers a number of different benefits in all of these domains in one package, right? You can certainly get nutritional benefits in other ways. You can get mental health benefits in other ways, academic benefits in other ways, but we don't know of any one thing that brings them all together in the way that family dinner does.
Bri: Some of the things that people are surprised to know about, and I always like to highlight these because, it, it's like, Oh, I didn't even know that was a thing. For example, family dinners actually increase literacy. In young kids, so the act of having conversation at the dinner table. The way that we talk to each other with multiple ages and stages, parents talking to kids, talking to each other.
Bri: All of that actually increases kids' vocabulary, their sequencing skills in the way that we tell stories, their language skills, and those things roll up to increased literacy. They have better reading skills when they're older by like grade three, grade five, those kids who have dinner with their family more frequently actually are better readers and they're better storytellers than kids who don't eat with their families.
Bri: That's, to me, like a mind blowing statistic, and I always love to bring that out because it shows that family dinner, you know, we think of like, Oh, my kids will, you know, be healthier. They'll eat better. Yes, absolutely. There are health benefits, right? There are all these other sneaky ways in which family dinner makes us stronger, happier, healthier people who eat dinner with their families.
Bri: young parents or new parents tend to actually be more satisfied with their marriages if they're trying to keep family dinner on the schedule while their kids are little. , which is the most challenging time actually, in some ways. People are like, I, we can't eat together. We can't even. Sleep. We can't function.
Bri: But if you can actually eat together, you're going to possibly have a better, stronger relationship with your spouse. we find that kids who eat dinner with their families, bounce back more easily. From cyber bullying and from other, interpersonal challenges, we find that they have better friendship skills, better social skills, teenagers tend to have lower incidences of depression, anxiety, mental health issues, eating disorders.
Bri: there's a lower risk of drug use and misuse, lower risk of, pre unwanted pregnancy. All of these things that parents worry about tend to be lower in families where kids eat with their parents.
Rebecca: Wow. And that's just a few of the benefits. I mean,
Bri: that's just a few, right? Like I could go on forever. That's a whole podcast in, in and of itself. But yeah, for real, these are some of the big ones. Yeah, I can say that you will absolutely be communicating a connectedness of bonding and importance of family life and importance of them to you as human beings. Mm-hmm. that can be really protective. Yes. And really vital. Right. If you do spend the time to eat together.
Rebecca: Mm-hmm. , I really like the way you put that. It actually gave me cold chills, so I, I really feel that it is so important. But families often face these scheduling challenges. You know, where one parent works a lot of overtime, or like my husband commutes a long way to work. On the way there and back, so like hours in the car or kids are involved in a ton of sports or other activities, or maybe they have, you know, an after school job or whatever.
Rebecca: Are we too busy? I mean, what? What are the creative ideas and solutions that you have for highly active families or families that just have to do a lot to get by?
Bri: Right. Yeah. No, and I think, So there's two, there's multiple questions right there and,
