Eating as a family offers one of the easiest way to bring rituals of comfort and pleasure into daily life — after all, we all need to eat every day. Yet often, this is a missed opportunity Makeshift meals and irregular mealtimes can become the default in hectic lives. Here are some great reasons to reap the benefits of family dinner at the table, and some ideas and tips to inspire you.
No wonder so many Western cultures have become overfed and undernourished. Serving fresh food that’s been prepared with love (or at least a good attitude) and seasoned with camaraderie is a simple formula for nourishing both body and spirit on a daily basis. Let’s reconsider the endangered ritual of enjoying the evening meal together at the table.
Benefits of family dinner at the table
With work schedules, lessons, and sports practices pulling family members in all directions just as the day should be winding down, it’s no wonder fewer families are finding the time to eat together. Yet, at the same time, it’s encouraging to know that many others are making a great effort to keep this ritual alive.
“One of the primary ways we connect with each other is by eating together . . . Much of our fundamental well-being comes from the basic reassurance that there is a place for us at the table. We belong here. Here we are served and we serve others. Here we give and receive sustenance. No small matter.” (Edward Espe Brown, Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings)
Studies have been done comparing children and teens who have regular family dinners at home with those who don’t. The results are consistent, and striking. Teens from families who eat dinner together are less likely to use illegal drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes than teenagers who rarely eat dinner with their parents.
Another practical (if predictable) perk is that children who have regular, at-home dinners eat meals that are healthier and include more vegetables. Children start developing their taste for certain foods early in life. Starting them off with nourishing evening meals can set the tone for better lifelong choices.
In addition, it seems that children who have regular family dinners fare better in school. Few daily rituals offer better opportunity to connect, converse, share, and feel nourished.
Make the Kitchen a Welcoming Place
What’s on the table and how it’s presented speaks volumes about our willingness to give mealtime rituals the place they so richly deserve in daily life. Don’t buy into the myth that it’s too time consuming to put a decent dinner on the table regularly. Still, meals aren’t only about the food on the table. The setting, atmosphere, stories, and conversations that accompany the food all contribute to making even the most ordinary meal memorable. Consider:
Is your kitchen the heart of the home, or the center of the cyclone? Because of its central location in most homes and apartments, kitchens often become repositories for mail, bills, school notices, homework, recent purchases, newspapers, unfinished projects, toys, and more.
Make sure your kitchen suggests food and comfort, not clutter and chaos. It’s more the attitude one brings to the kitchen than its decor that matters; it can become, to some degree, a sacred space. The kitchen should be comfortable, functional, and as clutter free as possible. Give it some sensuous elements, plus some hint of the season.
Bonding over meals
How do partners make meals significant? If your meals are primarily shared with a partner, how do the two of you make them significant? Are you using them as a time to connect after a busy day and catch up with one another, or do you chow down over email or scrolling on you phones? Couples who spend long days apart might consider how they can create regular mealtimes that aren’t merely a time to eat, but a way to reconnect.
Do you bond over food regularly with extended family and/or friends? Plenty of families still hold to the tradition of a weekly Sabbath meal — the Friday night Shabbat dinner of the Jewish faith, the after-church Sunday dinner practiced by Christians. Yet others enjoy regular extended family meals as a matter of course, without the structure of faith. Our family bonded over our shared commitment to veganism, for example.
Casting a wide net of family connection with food as the common denominator is one of the most time-honored ways to connect, and an ideal way to have cousins grow up together, to see aunts and uncles, siblings, and grandparents without having to make separate plans.
Have you begun any mealtime traditions for your children? These will foster warm memories and a healthy relationship with food for your children as they grow up? Hopefully, they won’t leave home only with recollections of the take-out menu drawer and cereal cabinet!
“Of all the rooms in our lives, the kitchen can feed the soul and become a comforting place to be at any time of day. I think of the kitchen as a gathering place, a place for shared comforts, for mutual efforts at preparing good meals with loving care.” (Alexandra Stoddard, Living a Beautiful Life)
Making the Table a Welcoming Place
Set the table, set the tone: It takes little effort to make the table look welcoming with dishes and utensils that you and your family enjoy using. This may not seem like a major point, but like the three bowls used at Buddhist monasteries, they are an intrinsic part of the experience.
The tableware you use should be both functional and interesting: ceramic dishes that lend an earthy flair to the table, jazzy colorful plates, or vintage dishes that belonged to your grandmother.
Maybe your little ones can have their own special plates—small, colorful dishes might help them enjoy the dinner ritual that much more. Some families use certain dishes or a special candlestick only when all are able to be present at the table.
Fresh flowers, a seasonal centerpiece, colorful napkins—all these little touches help bring attention to what is before us. From a young age, children can set the dinner table. Allow them some creative freedom, within reason, and encourage them to include personal and seasonal touches. A little whimsy adds to the spirit of a shared meal.
Candles at the table: Candles are often saved for special occasions, though their soothing glow provides an easy way to elevate the nightly meal. The simple act of lighting candles gives the meal a definite beginning; older children enjoy this task. Dinner is over when the candles are blown out—the perfect “job” for little ones.
Candles are most welcome during the dark days of the year. For casual daily meals, try short, chunky candles or colorful tapers in ceramic holders.
It’s also fun to set a tiny tea light at everyone’s place. Send a long, safe candle around so everyone can light their individual candle. When the meal is over, everyone blows out their own candle. While hardly a revolutionary idea, candles can sharpen the focus of a family dinner, while softening the atmosphere.
Have a beginning and ending: A signal that the meal is about to begin, such as lighting candles or reciting a blessing, helps create a framework for the experience. Teach your kids to respect the cook by waiting to take the first bite until he or she is seated.
As soon as it’s realistic to do so, get children into the habit of sitting through the meal until everyone is done, but be flexible. Better to let your little ones go off and play rather than get restless at the table; likewise, if your adolescents are inundated with schoolwork, don’t require them to sit for undue time at the table.
The end of the meal can be signaled by thanking the cook and cleaning up together. Make sure that everyone participates in cleanup; even those who left the table earlier should come back and pitch in.
Engage the senses: By engaging the senses, even ordinary meals can be memorable.Rounding up the family and putting a nourishing meal on the table daily is challenging enough, to be sure. But once you establish a comfortable routine, you can begin to transform dinner from routine to ritual.
The beauty of candles or flowers at the table, the colors and crunch of a raw vegetable platter, the surprising flavor of a fruit salsa or chutney on the plate, the scent of fresh bread, the touch of hands joined around the table for a moment of gratitude—these are but a few ways to add to the pleasure of eating with a few easy nods to the senses.
Sit and chat: Ideally, of course, the dinner table should be a place for conversation and connection. The reality is that by the time we sit down to the evening meal, many of us (especially if younger children are involved) feel too weary for sparkling repartee.
And the tendency to watch something on TV or look at one’s electronic devices doesn’t make matters easier. It helps to provide a common thread from day to day, such as going around the table and having everyone talk about the highlight of their day. Dinnertime is for checking in, exchanging news, and enjoying good food and one another’s company.
Having a set of prompts in mind works well to spark conversation. Discuss an interesting news story or community event, or have everyone talk about the high point of their day. You can occasionally celebrate or commemorate something that happened on that date — a significant historic event, or the birthday of a person we admire. Many web sites have such listings.
If you want to keep conversation light, try “conversation-in-a-jar,” suggested by Meg Cox in The Book of New Family Traditions. Prepare a container to be set on the table, containing strips of paper marked with open-ended statements such as “The strangest thing that happened to me today was . . .”
Explore blessings: Many families enjoy starting the meal with some sort of blessing; others find this feels rather awkward. Some report that saying a blessing can at first feel forced, but after a while, it becomes a calming way to begin a meal.
If you’d like to explore this idea in a less conventional way, consider going outside your personal tradition with blessings from other cultures. Chinese, Indian, Native American, Tibetan, Irish, and others have lovely blessings that can be adopted—or adapted!
A few lines from a favorite poem can also be an offbeat way to open your meal. Saying Grace: Blessings for the Family Table (edited by Sarah McElwain) is a little book filled with ideas from world religious traditions, great poets, Rumi, Aesop …
Be flexible and realistic: If your family’s schedule simply won’t allow for dinner at the table every night, try to carve out the time for at least some meals together. If it’s only twice a week, so be it; make the most of those meals together. Families of all denominations appoint the Sabbath as the regular meal to come together for, and this creates a lovely container for this ritual.
In truth, it’s unrealistic to expect relaxing family meals with toddlers, babies, and tired young children. Up until they were school age, I often fed my kids dinner early so that my husband and I could enjoy a quiet meal.
We kept revisiting the concept of eating as a family at regular intervals as they grew up. Gradually, a full-fledged family dinner evolved. Generally, kids are ready for the dinner ritual once they are school age. Remember, rigid food rituals are hardly better than no rituals at all.
Further reading
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