Set the Tone (and the table)
Of course, the dinner table isn't always a sea of calm, what with picky eaters, raging hormones, and garden-variety familial dramas. "So be it," says Robert E. Emery, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of The Truth About Children and Divorce. "Children learn both good manners and emotional regulation when you say, 'Will you please try to get along and just enjoy dinner?' " (Parents might want to remember this, too.)
At least we know what constructive family dinners look like: The TV is off. Everyone is accounted for. Adults eat sensible portions of healthy food so the kids can learn to do the same. But only one study, commissioned by the television channels TV Land and Nick at Nite, demonstrates how busy families manage to achieve this: Two-thirds of respondents said they eat prepared foods. Ironically, convenience food—the very thing that initially pulled us away from the table—is now steering us back, this time with a family-centric result.
Good-for-You Fast Food
According to a 2006 CASA study, the number of families eating together has increased from 47 percent to 58 percent over the last eight years. It's no surprise that this rise has coincided with the new breed of feel-good fast food—from grab-and-go supermarket dinners to boxes of organic mac-and-cheese. Skyrocketing Crock-Pot sales and the success of seemingly improbable businesses like Dream Dinners (which lets shoppers assemble weeks' worth of freezable meals in a couple of hours) also exemplify a society ready to reclaim family dining (click here for full testimonial). Families are even hiring chefs—not private ones employed by well-to-do households, but personal chefs who prepare meals for multiple clients and freeze them for future dinnertimes (click here for full testimonial). Candy Wallace, founder of the American Personal Chef Association, says her industry has jumped from next to nothing 10 years ago to 8,000 personal chefs serving some 70,000 people in 2005. "Many of our clients are two-income families, some of which have never turned on their stoves," she says.
Commit to it ... and skip soccer
Creative solutions like these make shared meals—plus a liberal approach to dining out—possible for today's busy families. But yet another hurdle for those with school-age kids is finding ways to carve out time from the extracurricular rat race. Jill Geyer, in Winston-Salem, keeps dinner in mind when she's signing her three daughters up for after-school activities. "We try to limit it to one sport per child," she says (click here for full testimonial).
Miriam Weinstein realizes her advice touches a raw nerve. "Parents are led to believe that if they drag their children around to more activities, the kids will be better off. But the evidence does not support this," she says. "When you talk to the kids separate from their parents, they really would rather be with their families." And frankly, Weinstein adds, few of our kids are going to turn out to be professional soccer players or concert flutists. "Most, however, will have families of their own."
