Table talk

Last week our guests for the Thanksgiving dinner included the German exchange student who stayed in our home six years ago. As she helped set the table she said, “Your family is one of two I’ve met in the U.S. that actually sits down to the table to eat.”
“What do the rest do?” I asked.
“They grab food and eat around the house, wherever. In one house we fixed all this food and then put it on the counter. I don’t know why they bothered” she added.
Her comment so intrigued me that I did a bit of research on family dinners on the Internet and discovered that while family dinners are on the decline, family dinners provide a simple way for not only fighting obesity, they also improve communication skills, raise the level of children’s school performance, lower the delinquency rate and help teenagers successfully through the turmoil of adolescence.
So many benefits from one activity when done at least four or five times a week. Everyone has to eat; we just need to do it together.
Of course, it is best if it isn’t a meal of drive-through hamburgers. Yes, it takes time to prepare a meal – sometimes about as much time as does to wait in the line at the drive-through. However, meals served at the table tend to include more fruits and vegetables. Have you ever seen a side dish of hot green beans on the menu at your favorite fast food joint? It’s just not a happening thing and yet it takes so little time to prepare canned or frozen vegetables. With less food eaten on the run, it is easier to keep the weight down and the intake up on essential vitamins, minerals and fiber.
Besides the food intake, the benefits of eating together compound like daily interest at the bank – if your television and telephone are turned off – that is. Sitting down at the family dining table provides a half hour or so of uninterrupted conversation which is better than vitamins for all ages.
For young children, table talk stimulates their linguistic skills and gives them something to think about outside of the sand box. Plus, “a 1996 study conducted by Catherine Snow, professor of education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, concluded that family dinners offered more opportunities for children to learn vocabulary-building words that help them read well when they reached third or fourth grade,” according to a report on Howard Scripps News Service.
Older children from homes serving family dinners appear to have an edge in the classroom. A 1994 Louis Harris and Associates survey of 2,000 high school seniors’ academic abilities along with their family eating habits concluded that those who ate dinner with their families four or more times a week scored better than those who ate family dinners three or fewer times a week. These results crossed racial lines, poverty indexes and included children from one and two parent families – even when both parents worked.
It only gets better according to all the research I was reading last week. Eating dinners together five days a week increases family bonding and the likelihood that the child will be more motivated, have better relationships, less depression and be less likely to do drugs. When all is said and done, family dinners are the best thing since sliced bread.
Break bread together this week with your children and enjoy the benefits for years to come.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)