"Teenagers who eat with their families less than three times a week are more likely to turn to alcohol, tobacco and drugs than those who dine with their families five times a week."
"Like breastfeeding and Baby Mozart tapes, family dinner has become a red-hot item on the good-parent scorecard."
"But as parents go to ever more breathless effort, or feel ever more guilt-ridden, are we becoming too literal-minded about 'family dinner'?"
"'To say that family dinners are associated with good outcomes is not the same as saying that family dinners cause good outcomes,' wrote Dr. Cowan, who has studied families."
I thought it was interesting that teenagers are less likely to turn to drugs and alcohol if they have regular family dinners. I have not found that to be the case (my family has dinners together regularly, and my siblings...)
But it makes sense that if teens don't get that family, that sense of belonging, that they would turn to something else. I've always heard this was true in terms of why some teens turn to gangs. That sense of belonging. I think it's important that not only as future parents we address this, but as future teachers. Give your students a place to belong so they don't need to turn elsewhere.
in my family, often if we eat together that's the only time all five us are in the same place. with my sister and I both in college and my brother so active with sports, it's really hard to get together like that. In high school we rarely ate together. we grew up eating in front of the tv (the simpsons always came on at dinner time, 6pm.) eventually, my dad got sick of it and took the tv out of the living room so we had to sit at the table. even now, my sister still vouches for eating alone in her room in front of the tv. my mom usually can't eat after she cooks (I know the feeling...) but she'll usually sit with me and my dad at dinner. my brother mostly eats in front of the computer which is in the next room over. So when I visit my family, it's generally my dad and I eating in the dining room and my mom talking with us. I just feel like I owe it to my dad to sit down and eat with him. He works so hard and even if he is reading a history book of the paper during dinner, it still makes me feel better that he's not sitting alone.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if the family dinners affected the drug and alcohol use of my siblings and I during our high school years. I think it was bound to happen though with our groups of friends. Mine being the punk rock stoners.. and my sister the smart kids who liked to party.. and my brother with the "gangstas"
ReplyDeleteeven now when I'm at the house and I tell my mom I'm going out at dinner time I feel bad because she always cooks something fabulous. She loves to cook, and I know there's always leftovers. But sometimes I'm leaving just before dinner is done and I know I'll probably grab something less satisfying at around 9 or 10pm. Or maybe even skip dinner all together but end up going to a drive thru around 2am.
I agree with you Jean, that there are a lot of reasons why this makes sense, but no statistical trend makes something "true" - unless its something like 100% of people who are alive are alive until they aren't." Even that one is subject to interpretation - thinking about Cammy's site and the folks who try to commit suicide and end up in "vegetative states." But, I digress.
ReplyDeleteFamily dinners: when my boys were young, we always ate together. As they got older we kept that up - then my oldest went to college, and 2 years after that my youngest went to Germany for a year as an exchange student, and when he came back family dinner time sort of fell apart. I really missed it - my son did not. But now, when we all get together (my youngest is in his 2nd year of college) we really relish those times... and even all work together in the preparation... but like you noted in your blog, those early family dinners did not keep my boys from experimentation with outside distractions. i suppose I might say that if we hadn't had that as a regularity in our lives for so long who knows what might have happened, but I think there are other factors that seriously impacted our family lives and the kinds of choices they were making at that time.
Well in this article, they said that families might be taking the whole "family dinner" thing too literally. The woman who eats with her boys at Sonic felt guilty because she wasn't cooking, but she was spending time with them. It's more about just making sure you have time as a family. Dinner's just the easiest time to spend together.
ReplyDeleteI know I always really like my family after being on vacation with them on neutral ground. And then once we're back in our house, they all separate and go to friends' houses and their rooms. And I go back to not knowing them. It's really hard.
because much of my time growing up was just me and my mom, i always treated "family dinners" at friends' homes with brothers and sisters and two parents a little bit like social science experiments. i (sneaky-style) paid close attention to how it was different/the same as my nightly dinners with my mom: different foods (this was a big one for me, what different families ate at "family dinner"), milk/water with dinner, served at the table or full plates brought from the kitchen, topics of conversation, etc, etc. it's a really intimate window into a family, the traditional family dinner, and everyone does it differently. it's interesting that it (like beth suggested) could be considered standardized/uniform enough that it would be a statistical pivot point.
ReplyDeleteanyway. INTERESTING.