I've talked before on the importance of One on One time with our kids, but equally important is family time. This is time when we are strengthening and building up the family unit, by drawing one another closer together. While we obviously love our kids individually, but we also love them as a group, as our family. We hope that one day they will lean on one another and draw from one another even after we are gone. While there is no way to guarantee that they will remain close in adulthood, we do all we can to build that family bond so that they will consider each other not just siblings, but friends. One of the best ways we've found to do this is by having family meals together.
What constitutes a Family Meal?
While you can begin by preparing and cooking the meal together, we don't have that amount of time to pull everyone together, and instead allow that to be one on one time for Daddy and one of the kids. They talk and learn and joke around. Each one of them gets the experience often and also learn how to prepare various dishes. If you can make this work for your family you extend the time together building up family and teach your kids the skills they need as adults at the same time, but think of it more as the prequel to the main show.
A family meal is simply when everyone in your household gather to eat a meal together in a calm and unhurried atmosphere, without other distractions. You need your entire household because if you don't you create a situation where the missing member is isolated from the family and creates a distance between them and the rest of the family. You need a place to congregate, whether that's at the kitchen or dining room table or even circled together in a living room eating off of tv trays. And you need no distractions from one another. While some specialist will tell you that you can get all the benefits of a family meal while watching a tv show together, I can tell you for a fact that you cannot. TV and other distractions keep you from connecting together and having a shared experience, because it is not a communal activity that inspires discussion or connection.
When to Have Family Meals?
Since a family meal is when everyone in your household prioritize and make plans to eat a meal together in a calm and unhurried atmosphere, without other distractions, this can occur any time of day. Perhaps you get up earlier in the morning to make breakfast together be your family meal time, before the stress of the before school crunch. Maybe you plan it for supper as is more commonly done. When Daddy was working night shift we had a family meal for a late lunch each day before he left the house for work. The goal is to get everyone gathered together around a meal.
We once heard a preacher say too many functions makes a family dysfunctional. And there is quite a bit of truth in that statement. Too often we are overscheduled and our evenings are filled with activities, this is especially true of children who aren't homeschooled since everything outside of academics has to be crammed in a few hours in the evening: there's doctors' appointments, extracurriculars, family time, and of course don't forget about homework.
The truth for most families is that unless family meals are made a priority and scheduled ahead of time they won't happen. They fall by the wayside as everything else stacks up. You may have to do something unconventional to make it work. You may have to skip a practice each week, or stay up later to finish homework, you might have to say no to some good things in order to make time for the best things. I can assure you that the pay offs are worth it, choosing family is the best thing you can do.
How does this work?
The setting is really the most important part. It doesn't matter what the meal is because food is just a facilitator, it's been called a social glue that invites meaningful interaction to take place. The lack of distractions, especially electronic distractions is vital. If you are taking every few minutes to "check your phone" the kids quickly realize the reality of your phone being more important than they are, because it gets your focus. We try to very rarely take calls or answer messages sitting at the table, because the people who are with us are our priority. IT allows us to model respectful behavior and also require the same from them.
It's also important that it is calm and unhurried, because you want your family to organically draw together, and you need time to do that. For that reason, we also try our best to set aside plenty of time and not drop negative news until after everyone has eaten. With that said, we don't all sit at the table all night, but we do require the kids who finish eating first to sit with us until most of the family is done eating. Otherwise those kids who devour their food by swallowing it all whole would be right back to video games and not engaging with the family. But by the other token, we would be there all night if we waited for everyone to finish, because we have a few INSANELY SLOW eaters.
Finally, we encourage conversations. Usually, we begin by going around the table and asking each person what their favorite part of the day was. Sometimes the answer is something funny or something fun that they did. They get to then share about it from their point of view so that even those of us that might have been together see it in a different light. Sometimes the answer is a goal met or something accomplished and they get to share their triumph with the rest of us. Usually after going around the table with that we easily find some other topic to fall into. These conversations are the life blood of a family supper. You can use them to teach and do all sorts of things, but the main focus is conversations between family members.
Benefits of Family Meals with Kids
Dr. Natalie D. Muth has written defining the benefits determined through several studies in support of the importance of family meals even when only eating together three times a week. By spending time eating with our family we actually find that we tend to consume more nutritious meals and maintain healthier body weights. While I'm not certain that their studies included rich, traditional, Southern, comfort foods, meals at home together are definitely healthier than a McDonald's burger while running through the drive through to inhale before football practice. Furthermore when we try different foods we teach our children to be more adventurous eaters. By ensuring that we have a vegetable with our meal we are modeling healthy eating habits.
With these physical benefits it's no wonder that school performance often improves with family meal time because healthier kids means healthier minds. However the Family Dinner Project has also discovered that the conversations also increase literacy and school performance. By exposing kids to adult vocabulary and illustrating the art of story telling, children perform better in these areas in a school environment.
Most importantly in my opinion however, are the mental benefits of family meal time. By giving them all a voice at the table we building their self-confidence in an atmosphere where everyone is for you, which in turn means that there are less behavioral issues at home and at school because they feel valued and important. By having important conversations and allowing them to see how we handle adult interactions, we are building their emotional and mental health. They see us and very often model their behavior on what they see, so we have a great impact on how they express emotions and how they think. Finally, studies have even shown that quality time impacts a child's physical health, because children with healthy attachments to parents experience less stress and make better decisions in the teen and young adult years. If some of this sounds familiar it is because family time is quality time and we've talked in the past about how one on one quality time improves our children in many of these areas. Additionally, family time models conflict resolution, loving disagreement, and many other relationship skills that our children will need to thrive throughout their lives.
Family Meals 2.0
Perhaps you already like us have family meals several times a week, and often even several times a day, and would like to shake things up a bit. I'll give you a few activities that we've done in conjunction with family meal time that give our family even more fun and togetherness. Family game nights are a huge hit in our house, but sometimes we play them while we are eating supper together. We will spread it out on the dining room table and either play everyman for himself, or we'll make teams to go against one another. The kids especially enjoy Beat the Parents, but we've also played Clue, Ticket to Ride, Risk, etc. At lunch (or dinner time when Gary is on night shift) me and the kids all eat together, but I eat MUCH faster than they do as a product of my 13 years of training in the public school system. So after we've talked a bit and I'm done eating, I often pull out a current read-aloud. It's not uncommon for us to become so engrossed that an hour has passed by and everyone is long done eating. We'll then discuss what happened in the story or where we think it is leading us. I really love the conversations that come up while we do this, as they are often deep and thoughtful. As a homeschool family, this also counts toward our lit work, aside from being just good fun. Sometimes I even do our Bible reading during a family meal instead of in the morning as we start our school day. There are so many benefits in this that I'm going to tackle it in a second post next week.
In Conclusion
We are human and like any other parents sometimes hide in our room to eat and have a conversation without the kids. I have even been known to work on school stuff or blogging while eating my supper from time to time. However I have found from personal experience that the importance of family meals is that it is the single best way to invest in my family and build relationships between them. After all what would the point of having a large family if you don't enjoy your time together.
Kommentare