What Families Gain at the Dinner Table

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Commentary

One of America’s long-standing cultural institutions is in decline. According to the Survey Center on American Life, only 38 percent of Gen Z Americans who are now adults report eating regularly with family at the dinner table. This is in contrast with 74 percent of Americans aged 50 and older who report having regular family dinners. This problem is especially present across educational boundaries.

The survey reports that only 38 percent of young Americans who didn’t go to college have family meals together every day. In contrast, 54 percent of college graduates have those daily family meals.

Eating family meals together correlates with all sorts of positive trends. For example, the 2025 World Happiness Report states that meal-sharing is linked with social connectedness and subjective well-being. Furthermore, children of families who eat together tend to have fewer behavioral problems and higher literacy rates.

According to research from Jane Waldfogel highlighted by the American Enterprise Institute, “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.”

To be fair, it’s hard to pull apart causation and correlation here. After all, it could be that there is something else about families that results in both fewer family meals and worse outcomes.

But more family dinners could theoretically cause better outcomes. Social interaction with parents in a friendly environment helps students learn to socialize in more hostile environments.

Furthermore, while many kids likely eat lunch with their friends at school, most of a person’s life experiences will involve eating with adults, not kids. Learning how to socialize with peers is important, but for most of a person’s life, peers will not be children. Finally, the bond formed by spending time with family may provide children with the confidence and security they need to succeed elsewhere.

Most importantly, family is the central example of an informal institution. Economists have long recognized the importance of institutions for human flourishing. Adam Smith first recognized that governments needed to pursue peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice for countries to grow wealthy.

In 2024, Daron Acemoglu and co-authors Simon Johnson and James Robinson won the Nobel Prize in part for their work highlighting the importance of good institutions for the success of countries.

Institutions are essentially groups of rules for behavior. While many often think of formal institutions such as government or private business, informal institutions such as families are perhaps even more important. Ultimately, the most important socializing institution in the lives of an overwhelming majority of the population is the family. Family communicates culture, language, and attitude toward formal institutions.

The influence of the family is easy to understand. Outside of school, children are generally at home, and parents are generally there with them. However, Americans may be trending away from that. Increasingly, ideas and communications from strangers enter the American home through screens.

Insofar as eating at the table is good because of social interaction, the presence of phones and other mobile devices will decrease this socialization, thereby decreasing the benefits.

A UK survey indicates that a majority of UK children are on their devices during mealtimes, despite the fact that more than 80 percent of those surveyed said they’d like the meal table to be a conversation space for parents and kids.

Interestingly, these survey results indicate a kind of coordination problem. Everyone at the table wants to be part of a conversation, but it’s costly to try to convince everyone else to get off their phones and start the conversation.

It’s hard to imagine that things are much different in the United States in terms of screen presence at the table. Things get more concerning when you consider what the internet brings to the table. If family is valuable for socialization because it provides a gentle place in which to teach important rules, how does the internet stack up?

Well, as anyone who spends time on the internet will tell you, the norms on the internet are not compatible with learning proper in-person socialization. Anonymity often leads internet users to act differently than they would at work or even in person among friends. One of the things that makes family such a strong institution is the fact that it deals with repeated interactions between people who get to know each other very well. The internet, being nearly the opposite in many cases, is likely a poor substitute.

The difficulty with informal institutions is that they often need to be changed from the ground up. In other words, there’s no easy fix. It’s both dangerous and silly to think that the government should pass a law banning phones at a table in your house, but it seems that a behavioral change would be good nonetheless. Culturally, it’s time for a new generation of parents to recognize the danger of replacing family socialization with screens.

Many were caught off-guard by how quickly the internet could fit into your pocket and change your brain, but now that parents understand the power of screens, they can set healthy rules to return the family to table conversation. As trust in institutions continues to fall, parents can be the first line of defense for children by giving them an institution they can trust. Protect table time from atomizing demands of events, clubs, video games, and technology. Your kids will thank you when they’re older.

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.