Health
Feeding the family
by Linley Boniface
Shared meals may be one of the best ways for parents to improve children’s well-being.
There can be few families who have not found, at least occasionally, that hell is eating together.
Family meals can be full of challenges: the child who regards a sausage as a weapon; the toddler who screams if the carrots touch the mashed potato; the teenager who spends the entire meal texting the friends he’d rather be spending his time with; the parent who punctuates any quiet moments with instructions to sit up straight and stop fidgeting; and the cook, watching in despair as the food prepared with such care is surreptitiously fed to the lurking dog.
It’s no wonder that so many of us have abandoned the dinner table altogether, blaming the pressures of a 24/7 society on the decision to turn family meals into a portable smorgasbord. Yet a number of recent studies have suggested that sharing meals may be one of the most important ways parents can improve their children’s physical and emotional well-being.
In the most recent study, researchers at Minnesota University in the US found that even having the TV on during dinner wasn’t enough to negate the health benefits of a shared meal.
The researchers surveyed the eating habits of about 5000 high school students, two-thirds of whom ate dinner with their parents at least three times a week – half the time, with the TV on. The children ate healthier meals when the TV was off, but the differences were far fewer than expected.
Children who didn’t eat regular family meals at all, however, ate fewer vegetables and calcium-rich foods. Girls who dined alone ate less fruit but had more soft drinks and snack foods, and consumed 14 percent fewer calories than girls who ate with their parents – suggesting that solo eating puts girls at a higher risk of suffering from eating disorders.
But perhaps the family meal isn’t a magic bullet, and families who are happier and more health-conscious are simply more likely to sit down at the table together. The Minnesota researchers took this possibility into account by measuring the “connectedness” – or psychological health – of the families they looked at. They found that regularly eating together was even more important than whether a family was well connected or poorly connected.
Other studies have found that the more often families eat together, the less likely children are to smoke, drink alcohol, use drugs, binge on junk food, become depressed, consider suicide and have sex at a young age. They’re more likely to eat vegetables, do well at school and master table manners.
The conversation over the dining table may be as valuable as the food on the plates: researchers at Harvard University found that family dinners were even more important to children’s language development than having parents who read to them or played with them.
In May, New Zealand’s Health Sponsorship Council began promoting family meals as part of Feeding Our Futures, a social marketing campaign aimed at preventing obesity and encouraging children to eat more nutritiously. The council said children learnt from watching other family members eat, and benefited from communicating as a family and sharing stories.
Similar campaigns are under way in other parts of the world. Scotland, for example, launched its campaign after research carried out in 2002 found that 53 percent of families ate together once a month or less, and eight percent of families had never had a meal together.
Several social trends can be blamed for dining tables falling into disuse: a culture of busyness, which rates individual schedules above time spent as a family; the increasing number of families with two working parents; the downgrading of domestic tasks such as cooking; and the notion that children are customers to be satisfied rather than small people expected to fit in with the rules, routines and preferences of the rest of the family.
Robin Fox, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told Time magazine that food comes so easily to us now that we have lost our sense that eating together is a sacred event. “A meal is about civilising children. It’s about teaching them to be a member of their culture.”
The good news is that eating together – like learning the piano, or playing soccer – is a skill that gets better with practice. A 10-year study by the National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse in the US found that the more often a family eats together, the happier the experience becomes.
Most compellingly of all, the study also found that most children wish they could eat together as a family more often.
