Children who regularly sit down to a family dinner, parents are told, will be less likely to use drugs or develop eating disorders and more likely to be successful in school.
But getting a healthful meal on the table that kids actually will eat after a long day of work, school and extracurricular activities is anything but simple. With the pressure to eat together every night, the logistics of the family meal make dinner more daunting than desirable.
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“Some people have the skill set but can’t get out of their jobs in time to cook,” said Jenny Rosenstrach, author of “Dinner: A Love Story” (Harper Collins, $27.99) and the blog of the same name. “Other people have no idea how to cook and rely on store-bought things regularly, and feel bad about it. Other people feel so much pressure from the conversation about food that’s going on right now: It can’t just be dinner, everything has to be sourced and sustainable and local and organic. And some people have all three issues.
“It’s this perfect storm of problems and insecurities that shouldn’t be there.”
Exactly how do you get food on the table in a timely fashion? How do kids become adventurous, not picky, eaters? How can conversation be easy, and table manners and chores seem routine? What are the rules governing dessert? Here are suggestions to make dinner a meal you want to come home to:
Hatch a plan
The first obstacle is planning a meal and getting it on the table before your children turn into hunger-crazed monsters.
For Rosenstrach, the answer is to have a menu for the day or the week and prepare as much as possible ahead of time. She also suggests pushing dinner back until 7 p.m. or later in the evening (after fortifying the kids with a healthful snack, such as chips and salsa) so everyone can sit down together.
“Think about dinner in the morning, even if it’s just a couple of seconds to decide what you’re going to make, or chop an onion, or set a pot of water on the stove,” Rosenstrach said. “Just get the momentum going. Get all the ingredients out and put them on the counter. Somehow all those little things take five times as long at night, or at least it feels that way.”
Two years ago, Jennifer Folsom of Alexandria, Va., came up with a way to make the planning and preparation easier. She recruited three neighborhood moms, Carrie Van Brocklin, Gina Almeida and Ofa McGinley, to join her in what they call the “Bus Stop Meal Swap.”
Each mom takes one day a week and cooks for the four families (20 people in all). Then, when the four moms pick up their children at the bus stop in the afternoon, the day’s assigned cook distributes the food in reusable bags and containers.
“I only go to the store once a week and only cook once a week,” McGinley said. “It saves a lot of money, time and gas, and it’s less cleaning.”
Dave Stern, who lives in Chicago’s Old Irving neighborhood, said his family aims to have dinner together at least five days a week.
“The biggest thing we have done is to be as consistent as possible,” he said.
Stern, a stay-at-home dad who owns a small publishing company, tries to schedule his daughters’ after-school activities on the same days to leave more time for family dinners. Every day the routine is the same. After 10-year-old Lyla and 6-year-old twins Ehren and Julia come home from school, he feeds them a snack, helps them work on their homework and then he starts cooking, while letting them decompress in front of the television or computer.
“When mom comes home, they know it’s time to start eating,” he said.
Conquering picky eaters
Before Janice Newell Bissex and Liz Weiss, owners of the website Meal Makeover Moms, wrote “No Whine With Dinner” (M3 Press, $24.95), they did an informal survey to find out what parents thought was the top obstacle to having a pleasant family dinner. “Picky eaters” was the answer from 61 percent of the more than 600 responses.
It can be hard for parents to relax about food left on a plate, but forcing children to eat can turn dinnertime into a battle for control, several experts said.
“Often with a food they have rejected once or twice, after repeated exposure, they might be willing to try it if it’s not pushed on them, but modeled by a parent,” said Anne Fishel, an associate clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of the Family Dinner Project.
Parents also need to give children time to learn how to appreciate different foods, just as they would with any other developmental milestone, Weiss said.
“It takes time to learn to ride a bike, to potty train, to learn how to read,” Weiss said. “Teaching your kid to appreciate new flavors takes a long time too. You just have to go with it and look at it as a skill that kids need to acquire.”
Paula Ketcham, a lawyer and single mother from Evanston, said her 9-year-old son Jonas has been eating whatever she has been eating since he was a baby. It’s not like he doesn’t enjoy a good hot dog or slice of pizza, she said, but she has never bought “kid food” like chicken nuggets or fish sticks, and hot dogs and pizza are for weekends.
“I hate this idea of kids’ food and adult food,” Ketcham said. “The expectation in my house is that whatever is on the table is what is for dinner.”
A recent dinner included broccoli soup and an arugula salad with roasted squash and apples, and her son ate it with pleasure, she said.
Make it an orderly affair
Practice good table manners, but in moderation, Fishel said, so that it doesn’t take away from the positive aspects of sitting down together for a family meal. Fishel suggests focusing on one or two manners at a time, and picking something that is really important to your family.
“If the dinner table is too much about criticizing and evaluating and educating and critiquing, it can really take the fun out of the whole experience, and that kind of mood tends to shut things down,” Fishel said. “To the extent that parents can model good manners and can critique around those manners that are getting in the way of respectful listening and talking, those would be the manners I would highlight, rather than ‘get your elbows off the table.”’
For a younger child, putting her napkin on her lap and using silverware instead of hands is a good starting point. As children age, parents can focus on other skills, such as chewing with your mouth closed.
Dinner should be an electronics-free time: No television, but also no BlackBerrys, phones or iPods, for children and grown-ups alike. “It detracts from bonding, talking about your day and sharing,” Bissex said.
The Stern family rule is that once dinner starts, no one is to get up from the table — and if they do, dinner is over for them. “Parents aren’t supposed to make hollow threats, but this one is pretty hollow,” he said. “What it usually means is that they don’t get dessert.”
If the Stern kids get out of hand, the family plays what is called the “quiet game” with the quietest child getting an extra bit of dessert.
Sustain conversation
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Under the best of circumstances, kids can be stingy with the give-and-take of information about their day. Throw fatigue and low blood-sugar levels into the mix, and attempts at polite dinner conversation can be disastrous.
Rosenstrach offers her two girls, Phoebe, 10, and Abby, 8, a tortilla chip with salsa in exchange for a tidbit about their day while she is making dinner. The little snack during that witching hour can ease some of the crankiness, while the parent gains valuable intelligence about the goings-on at school.
Conversation is commonplace at the home of Flecia Thomas in Crystal Lake. That’s when she reconnects with Jayla, 12; Tavia, 8; and Akeira, 6. The girls have been living with Thomas since December and she is in the process of adopting them.
“The girls are much more excited for dinner than I am,” said Thomas, who is single and is dean of student development at McHenry County College. “As soon as I pick them up at the day care, it’s ‘Mom, what’s for dinner?’ And the other thing (they say) is, ‘Can I help with dinner?'”
The girls fill Thomas in on their day and go over upcoming plans and homework assignments. They play question-and-answer games and sometimes even sing.
“It’s a time we just really start to unwind and catch up and connect,” Thomas said.
It is also a time where the girls interact with each other.
“It’s their time to play and be silly … it’s also my time to snoop,” she said. “I can overhear things they wouldn’t necessarily tell me. … I find out different things I wouldn’t necessarily learn about.”
Dinnertime at the Gentile house in McHenry is important for the family, Tiffany Gentile said. Her husband, Mike, had been a stay-at-home dad until recently taking a full-time accounting job. Tiffany also works full time, as a legal administrative assistant at the McHenry County state’s attorney’s office. They still try to maintain the family tradition of having dinner at 6 p.m. each day.
They interact with their young children. They hear who 4-year-old Alex played with at preschool and listen to 2-year-old Taylor “talking up a storm.” And, mom and dad can catch up on their day too.
“It’s just fun,” she said. “It’s just something we do, and it kind of isn’t really an option.”
Enlist them in the effort
Simple chores such as setting and clearing the table and helping with the dishes get children involved in the dinner process and send a message that mealtime is the entire family’s responsibility. This also takes some of the burden off the parent who is in charge of putting dinner on the table.
“It’s not just about making dinner, it’s about making dinner happen,” Rosenstrach said. “If you’re the one who is solely responsible for dinner, that’s the quickest way for it to become a burden. It’s the whole family’s job — kids too. They can set the table and come up with ideas of what to eat. Then it becomes a family event that everyone gets into.”
Parents, including Andrea Clay, of the Washington, D.C., area, also say that when they have let their children plan, shop for and help prepare the meal, they are more invested and more likely to eat the food.
Even preschool-age children can help with menu-planning, putting things in the cart at the store and making simple meals such as canned soup.
Clay said her daughters plan, shop for and cook a few meals a month, and have been participating in meal prep of some form since they were 6 and 4 years old.
“We started this when they were younger, and it was a good lesson for them in fractions and budgeting.” Clay said.
Stern said that what he has noticed lately is if he lets them help prepare dinner, say stirring the ketchup sauce for meatloaf, they take ownership of the meal and are more likely to eat what’s on their plate: “At dinner, they say things like, ‘I made the sauce — how do you like the sauce?'”
Freelance reporters Amanda Marrazzo and Lisa Pevtzow contributed.
What is dinnertime like at your house? How do you get your kids to sit down and eat what is served? What rules are in place when the food is on the table? Do you take time to discuss your day or do you gobble down the food and move on to other activities? Please share your comments and advice with us at [email protected]. Include your name, address and phone number.