William RevilleThe family that eats together thrives together, writes Prof. William Reville
Most parents are very concerned to raise their children in the best possible way and many go to considerable trouble to identify the latest and most optimal methods of interacting with young people.
Luckily, this is not really such a complicated matter.
For example, there is copious evidence that sitting down together for a daily family meal in an open and friendly atmosphere has very positive effects on the brain, body and spirit.
Family meals are probably the simplest and most effective way that parents can involve themselves with their children’s lives.
This topic was reviewed by clinical psychologist Anne Fischel on The Conversation – a collaborative website between journalists and academics to provide informed news analysis (www.theconversation.com). Fischel cites extensive research studies that testify to the value to children and teenagers of eating meals regularly with the whole family.
Research has demonstrated that conversation around the family dinner table enlarges the vocabulary of young children even more than reading aloud to them, boosts their general knowledge and teaches them how to converse in culturally appropriate ways.
Children who have a good vocabulary read earlier and more easily, and researchers showed that young children learned 1,000 rare words at the dinner table compared to learning only 143 such words from parents reading story books aloud to them.
Predictor
For school-going children, regular family meals are a better predictor of high achievement scores than doing homework, playing sport or doing art. And teenage academic performance correlates with the family dinner frequency, with teenagers who eat family meals five to seven times a week twice as likely to get A’s in school as those who eat dinner with the family less than twice a week.
Children who eat regular family meals also eat better food, consuming more fruit, vegetables and minerals and eating less fried food, fizzy drinks, saturated fats and trans fats, and this pays off later also. Young adults who ate regular family meals as teenagers are less likely to be obese and more likely to eat well when they later live on their own.
The atmosphere at the dinner table is very important. Parents should be warm and open and engaging with their children and not controlling. TV should not be on during dinner. Several studies have shown that kindergarten-aged children who watch TV during dinner are more likely to be overweight by the time they reach third class.
Many studies have shown that regular family dinners correlate with a lower incidence of risky teenage behaviors – drinking, smoking, drug-use, violence, school problems, eating disorders and sexual activity – The Importance of Family Dinners IV (National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, 2007).
Teenagers who eat family meals five times a week are almost three times less likely to smoke than teenagers who eat with the family less than three times a week.
One large US study in Minnesota (Maria Eisenberg and others, JAMA Pediatrics Vol. 158, No. 8, 2004) concluded that regular family dinners are associated with lower rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. The frequency of whole-family meals is somewhat greater amongst higher socioeconomic groups and the positive effects of family meals are greater on average for girls than for boys.
It may have occurred to you that the positive effects that correlate with the frequency of family dinners is a secondary phenomenon – in other words how do we know that the positive effects are not primarily caused by a high level of family connectedness, because highly connected families will tend to have more frequent all-family meals?
The Minnesota study referenced above tried to disentangle the effects of frequency of family meals and degree of family connectedness and found that the shared family meal brought its own independent benefits.
Interpersonal relations suffer in modern industrialised countries. We are all far too preoccupied rushing about from pillar to post. Old fashioned inter-personal sharing through relaxed sitting and talking together has greatly declined.
We now have a vast range of technological devices for communicating with one another (text-messaging, email, Facebook, tweets, etc.) but they tend to atomise social interactions rather than knitting people together. These devices do have useful applications but they must not be allowed to substitute for the habit of frequently allocating generous amounts of time to talking to each other face to face.
Sitting together for 30 minutes or so around the dinner table in a good atmosphere allows parents and children to share positive experiences. Apart from enjoying a nice meal, news and stories are exchanged, jokes are told, children will share anxieties in a trusting atmosphere, and so on.
These regular small moments can be the seeds that will flower into stronger and broader connections away from the table.
*William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at UCC. http://understandingscience.ucc.ie