What Kids Learn During Dinner

Of everything I'll discuss on Half Full, having dinner as a family is one of the most important things. Think of it as concentrated dose of nurture and nourishment, two of the greatest and most fundamental human needs.

The powerful effects of family mealtimes come from two things:

1) Modeling: the dinner table is a place where kids learn important social and emotional skills that they might not have the opportunity to learn elsewhere.

2) Ritual: A family mealtime is a routine rich with meaning that combines the basic human needs of emotional nurturance and physical nutrition.

Last week's video and this posting take a look at the benefits of dinnertime and what it is we should model during dinner. Next week's video, and the posting that will follow, are about some important family rituals we can establish during dinner.

I know that this is a tough topic for families today, who often think about time together the same way starving people think about food. Even if you are managing to feed your kids a reasonably healthy dinner, few of the benefits of family mealtimes are transmitted when parents eat separately from their children, or when we eat in front of the TV.

The Benefits

Kids who eat dinner with their families regularly are more emotionally stable and are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. They get better grades. They have fewer depressive symptoms, particularly among adolescent girls. And they are less likely to become obese or have an eating disorder. Family dinners even trump reading to your kids in terms of preparing them for school. And these associations hold even after researchers control for family connectedness, which means that the benefits of family meals go above and beyond being close-knit as a family.

Why is dinnertime such a powerful tool for raising happy kids? How can we as parents get the most out of it?

Reason #1: Adults model important things during dinner, like…

…Healthy Eating
The most obvious thing that we grown-ups should be modeling during family mealtimes is healthy eating. Eating a VARIETY of foods is important for health-and physical health is very important for happiness. Unfortunately my kids would prefer to eat mac n' cheese (specifically the shells with white cheddar) 3 meals a day. To say that they resist new foods would be a gross understatement. I read once that this hearty resistance to new foods is an evolutionary trait designed to keep our young from eating anything green or unripe. Which makes it up to us parents to train our children to eat lots of different kinds of foods.

Here's how: Research shows that kids learn to like new foods by watching adults and other kids eating them. Here's the bad news: it's all about repetition. Meaning your kid needs to watch you eat the food, uh, a lot-maybe daily, maybe for years.

Paul Rozin, an anthropologist, traced how kids in Mexico learned to eat spicy foods. Most Mexican babies and toddlers hate spicy foods, but they grow up watching adults eating it and around the time they are 5 or 6 years old they begin enjoying what we Americans would think of as "adult food." What I think is funny about this study is that the family dogs that hang out near the table also learn to eat spicy foods through their owners' modeling-stray dogs that never eat with families but have equal access to spicy foods can't be trained to eat them.

I talk a good game about rarely serving my kids something separate than what the adults are eating, but walking the talk is less of a strength. "My kids eat anything, don't fix them something different!" I say blithely when we're over at friends' houses. Molly gets that adults love kids who eat anything, and when faced with a plate of "new" food, she'll pretend to take a bite and then will declare with gusto, "I LOVE CUCUMBER RAVIOLIS!" to which all the adults ooo and ahh and say things like, "Golly, I wish Jack would eat spinach pudding!" Nine times out of 10 Molly hasn't even tasted anything.