The Family Dinner Makes a Comeback

Making a priority of having meals together sends the message that family matters. (Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock)

Commentary

In his January 1989 farewell address to the nation, then-President Ronald Reagan said: “All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins.”

There was a time in America when the hours between roughly 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. were untouchable. No children’s sporting events, no dad staying late at the office, no teenager rushing out the door to another extracurricular event. It was a time when families gathered together after a long day to discuss the matters of the day, enjoy a meal together, and bond together.

I cannot help but think of the scene in the classic 1944 movie “Meet Me in St. Louis,” with the entire family gathered around the dinner table and the concern that the suitor of one of the daughters would call her from the East Coast and interrupt the family meal. Family dinners were deemed to be so important that no outside interruption dared interfere with them.

But when President Reagan made his remarks, the family dinner that was celebrated in that film was on a definite downswing, especially among lower-income/less-educated families in which both parents needed to work to make ends meet.

According to Robert Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids,” using data from the DDB Needham Life Style Survey, the percentage of these families that shared an evening meal together dropped from a little more than 80 percent in 1980 to less than 70 percent by the year 2000. Other research done by Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute, citing a December 2021 American National Family Life survey, reported that 74 percent of those older than 50 without a college education remembered having daily family meals, compared with just 38 percent of younger Americans without a college diploma.

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This decline is lamentable because multigenerational conversations around the dinner table are an essential part of a child’s well-being. As Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University, noted in her book “What Children Need,” “Youths who ate dinner with their parents at least five times a week did better across a range of outcomes: they were less likely to smoke, to drink, to have used marijuana, to have been in a serious fight, to have had sex ... or to have been suspended from school.”

Other academics agree. Stanford Medicine cites numerous reasons why eating together as a family is important for a child’s emotional and physical health.

For example, children learn how to communicate with each other and with their parents in a healthy, productive, and respectful manner as they review each other’s day over a meal. Secondly, it gives parents an opportunity to teach by example things such as proper table manners and personal responsibility to prepare dinner and then clean up afterward. Thirdly, children tend to eat nutritionally better meals. Finally, it is a chance to build self-esteem and character in children through parents’ listening to what is going on in their lives.

Thus, family dinners have become another dividing line that separates those who succeed in life from those who struggle.

Thankfully, for some, family dinners are on the increase. According to an American Time Use Survey, more than 65 percent of families with highly educated families (post-graduates) have regular family dinners. Unfortunately, after an initial rise resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the percentage of families with parents with a high school education or less that have regular family dinners has dropped to about 55 percent.

Thus, it looks like the family dinner, at least among more highly educated families, is making a comeback, which is good for children in those families. However, the percentage of lower-income families eating together continues to decline—resulting in decreasing opportunities for those children to enjoy meals with their parents and siblings.

If we, as adults, want to see our children and grandchildren grow and thrive, especially those in families that already struggle to put food on the table, perhaps we need to reprioritize family dinners. That is when, in the words of President Reagan, “great change” can start to occur—change that can make a positive difference not just for their present but for their future as well.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.