Want to do something radical and counter-cultural—I mean something that is totally unique in terms of what most other Americans are doing and will do this evening? Well, here it is—here is an idea that will really make your family stand out as well as help make it an outstanding family. Eat dinner together as a family around a dining room table instead of separately around a T.V. That’s right. Perhaps the most radical and beneficial thing you can do with your family in this new post-modern age of individualism is to eat dinner together.
Miriam Weinstein, the author of the book, The Surprising Power of Family Meals (Steer Forth Press, 2005) suggests that the "magic bullet" missed by so many families is the simple shared family meal. Weinstein, a filmmaker and journalist, has collected an impressive body of data in order to make her case that the institution of the shared family meal represents something of vital importance for human life. Even as the family meal is fast disappearing, Weinstein has issued an eloquent call for its recovery.
As she explains, the research indicates that a shared family meal leads to the strengthening of family bonds, the deepening of relationships, and higher levels of satisfaction and effectiveness among family members. According to Weinstein, the research shows that eating ordinary, average, everyday supper with your family is strongly linked to lower incidents of bad outcomes such as teenage drug and alcohol use, and to good qualities like emotional stability. It correlates with kindergartners being better prepared to learn to read and apparently even trumps, for them, getting read to. Regular family supper also helps keep your kids out of hospital because it discourages both obesity and eating disorders. It supports your staying more connected to your extended family, your ethnic heritage, your community of faith.
Weinstein is not ignorant about the complexities of modern family life. She does point back to a golden age of shared family meals in the past, but she acknowledges that families now find themselves drawn in too many directions all at once. In once sense this is the larger problem, and the eclipse of the family meal is only a symptom of what has gone badly wrong. In reality, families did not merely decide to stop eating together. The rhythms, complexities, and chaos of today's lifestyles simply produced a reality that made shared family meals almost impossible.
Any number of factors play a role in marginalizing shared family meals, but Weinstein points to some of the most easily identifiable among these factors. For parents, the issue is often work schedules and fatigue. As millions of mothers have moved into the workforce, the elaborate ritual of the nightly family meal has often given way to the urgency of getting family members fed as a necessity of human need--rather than as the focus of a shared event. For adults, evening hours are often filled with extended work, social commitments, and the practicalities of keeping life together in the midst of frenzied lifestyles. For kids, the problem areas are after-school sports, time with their friends, and/or time locked away in a bedroom with headphones on, consumed with themselves.
In essence, our modern culture has turned us into people who do more than frequent “drive-thru” lanes—we have become “drive-thru” people reproducing ourselves in “drive-thru” families.
Parents have forgotten that family meals fulfill more than the function of feeding the family. In years past, it was in the intimate sphere of the shared meal that children learned how to engage in conversation and how to enjoy the experience of hearing others talk. The family meal became the context for sharing the events of the day, for dealing with family crises, and for building the bonds that facilitate family intimacy. Parents taught children how to think about the issues of the day by making these a part of the conversation that was shared around the table. Gentle admonitions and direct correction taught children how to respect others while eating, instilling an understanding of the basic habits that encourage mutual respect and make civilization possible.
Interestingly enough, a 1996 study by the national Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University [CASA] intending to see what differentiated kids involved in substance abuse from those who were not, stated, "Kids who eat more family dinners do better than those who eat a few. Kids who share a few dinners weekly do better than the ones who have none at all."
So, if you are not in the habit of eating dinner together as a family or at least one meal a day as a family, perhaps this would be a good time to start. Oh, and is there a biblical basis for this? I think there is. I think that Hebrews 10:25 has more in mind than just the fellowship of the church. I think that when we neglect to take adequate time with our families and especially when we neglect to sit down together to share a family meal we are forsaking the assembling of ourselves together. In fact, we are beginning to look a lot like the world in terms of family life and this is probably why so many Christian kids are going the way of the world.
One more thing, if your family is just too busy to share a meal together—your family is too busy!
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