By Ljudmila Petrovic
Photos by Vaikunthe Banarjee
The importance of family dinners.
Like most families these days, mine was a busy one: both my parents worked full time as I was growing up, and I had a string of after-school activities that took up most of our evenings and weekends. Yet through my entire childhood and adolescence, the family dinner was a constant. Sometimes we cooked meals together, sometimes we would take turns, and sometimes we got Chinese take-out, but we always ate our meals at the family table, and used the opportunity to talk about any problems family members had, make any announcements, or just talk about any topic under the sun. As a child, I was dependent on my parents and saw them often, but as I grew older, these family dinners became the only time that I spent with my family.
Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) recently reported that family dinners have a huge effect on adolescents: on average, they get higher grades, are healthier, and feel less stress. They are also significantly less likely to engage in substance abuse, or to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes at a young age. This is very likely linked to the family closeness that the study also reports: adolescents that have frequent family dinners were between one-and-a-half and two times likelier to report having excellent relationships with their parents and siblings. I definitely felt this kind of closeness to my family, as did most of the people I talked to that had regular dinners with their families growing up. In some cases, this tradition simply does not happen. Marchel says that his parents were often working when he was growing up, and so they rarely had dinners together. “It definitely affected me negatively,” he confirms. “I felt less connected to the family, and more dependent on my caretakers.”
What can be deduced from these findings is that families that eat together on a regular basis have more insight into what’s going on in each other’s lives — a rarity between parents and their teenagers — and also have more control over developing healthy eating habits. By eating home-cooked meals instead of whatever-you-can-grab-on-the-go, children and adolescents are taught a certain relationship with food: one of enjoyment, warmth, and nourishment. All one needs to do is look at any women’s magazine to see the rise of unhealthy eating — be it overeating junk food, or under-eating and dieting. There is a growing need — especially among young girls and women but increasingly among males as well — to see food in a healthy way: as a source of nutrition, but also as culturally important in developing bonds between people. “We had dinner basically every single night,” says Alice of her family’s habits. “It totally affected the way I think of food and eating, as well as the kind of family values I hold.”
As our lives get busier and busier, cooking and eating together seems to be a dying ritual. In a society of TV dinners and constant notifications, we rarely get to spend time with our loved ones. We are so obsessed with to-do lists that we lose ourselves in a flurry of tasks, goals and deadlines. In my experience at least, these frequent dinners have been an antidote for all of our daily problems. Not only do you spend face-to-face time with family, it is also an opportunity to learn about them. It was always over dinner that my parents would pass on an oral history of my ancestors to me, and it aided in the growth of my personal identity — another sensitive part of adolescence.
For most of my teen years, I was quite a handful. Many of our dinners ended with me sulking, rolling my eyes, or storming into my room screaming some variation of “You don’t understand me!” but they were family dinners nonetheless. Despite those moments, there were many nights where we would talk about our days, and my teen angst would be lulled for a few hours. There were moments where I saw beyond the hormones and realized that maybe my parents did understand. In fact, the rare moments when I would tell my parents what was going on in my life were exclusive to the dinner table. In the long run, our family dinners proved invaluable to my relationship with my family, and despite everything else, I think I turned out okay.
In a world of fast food, vending machines, and constant multi-tasking, it’s tough to see meals as being their own occasion. Save for special occasions, families seem to be drifting away from the tradition of daily communal meals, but the facts are there: it affects children and adolescents much more than we tend to think, and it is invaluable in their development. Life moves pretty fast; always make time to stop and smell the pig roast.
