Setting the table and eating family meals together is an important, if threatened family ritual. It is so important that last year a couple of Minneapolis families, with overflowing calendars of activities for their children, decided 10 days between family meals was too much.
The over-scheduled families formed a group called Family 1st. Family 1st is working to strike a balance between sports and family life. The group does two things: It encourages parents to not sign their children up for endless activities. And it offers its seal of approval to groups that refuse to schedule practices on holidays and pledge to cut children slack when they miss practice for family events.
It’s about time. I remember our children’s teen years of squeezing in meals around band activities, drama, church and part-time jobs. Somehow we managed to gather round the table several times a week, if only to growl at each other about our busy days. It wasn’t always easy, but the community worked with us.
Not every community is as accommodating: Relatives we were visiting told us that they would not be joining us for services on Sunday morning; they had to go play soccer. On Sunday morning? What activity for minors is so important that the organizers could not even give the players one day to go home, recuperate and regroup?
But hey, having a kid in sports impresses the neighbors. It isn’t easy to impress anyone when you say: “We always have supper together.” That pales against the tales of soccer moms and hockey dads. And it is usually a lot safer to sit down together at the table, than recent encounters between competitive dads watching their kids play hockey.
Our family used to eat together a lot: Breakfasts, weekend lunches and dinner every evening. When the kids were teen-agers we ate supper around jobs, activities, over-time work, evening classes and pure exhaustion. Now that I work full time, my husband moves things along by setting the table and asking what we are having. Recently my daughter insisted that those who had already eaten had to join us at the table anyway, if only to talk.
Training in the importance family meals began with helping set the table. I remember handing my son a wooden puzzle depicting a table place setting and saying, “fix the dishes like this.” He was young, but it worked: He placed the forks and napkins on the left of the plates with the knives and spoons on the right.
That son’s wife recently initiated her pre-school daughter into the art of setting the table. The little one called afterwards to say she had done it all by herself. She was so excited, my husband, who answered the phone, could not quite understand anything except her repeated, “all by myself!” He blindly cheered her on, “Wow! All by yourself.”
Only then did she breathlessly say she had put “four plates and four knives and four spoons and four glasses on the table, all by myself.” She had flown solo setting the table, thus joining the ranks of those working to insure the continuation of regular family meals. Not a bad idea as the folks at Family 1st decided.