Betsy Shaw
posted in Mom Stories
Last I heard, family dinner was the best way to keep your teenager from flunking out of high school, engaging in promiscuous sex or smoking crack. Apparently there’s no guarantee.
A recent study, discussed in the Sunday New York Times suggests that the benefits of family dinners may be overstated and overrated.
After consulting the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, the studies’ two authors, Ann Meier and Kelly Musick, analyzed associations between the frequency of family dinners and measures of well being, including delinquency, drug and alcohol abuse and depressive symptoms. Initially, the results seemed to line up with previous research. But then they began to dig deeper:
“But the associations were far less striking after we accounted, with the help of the data, for the ways in which families who did and didn’t eat together tended to differ: for instance, in the quality of family relationships, in activities with a parent (a tally of things like moviegoing and helping with schoolwork), in parental monitoring (things like curfews and approving clothing) and in family resources (things like income and whether both parents were in the household).
In a nutshell, it might not be so much the sitting down for a family meal that leads to less rebellious teens, but how parents take advantage of that fleeting together time and use it to engage and connect with their children.
Not to be too cynical, but I suspect anyone who has ever sat down to dinner with a teenager might have a few things to say about this. In my family, the surest way to indigestion was often when my mom or dad tried to engage me or another of my siblings in any kind of inquisitive, “Tell me about your day” or “How is school?” type of conversation. Easier said than done.
That said, I think that maintaining a strict family dinner policy might be the only way for some families to reconnect each day. While it might not turn out to be the magic elixir to a seamless adolescence, it would be a shame for families to just forget it altogether.
My kids won’t let me forget family dinner. A lot of times, when Ian was away, I got lazy and fed the kids finger foods in front of a movie in lieu of dinner. More often than not, Esther would come into the kitchen after the movie was over and say, “When’s dinner?” When I explained that she had already had it, the look of disappointment on her face seared my guilt-ridden heart.
How about your family? Is family dinner a priority? Does hearing that there is more a cohesive family than family dinner make you feel somewhat relieved?
Read more from source:“babycenter-com-baby”
new family dinner study lets guilty parents off hook
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