If your family is like mine, meal times together don’t really exist. It’s rare at best. I mean, I am both husband and a dad and it’s not that I haven’t heard it’s important…because I have! 

Throughout my life, I’ve heard things like….

“It’s important to eat together at dinner time. This ensures that your kids are eating at least one healthy meal a day.” 

“It’s good for kids to eat with their parents because they spend too much time with their friends as it is.”

“If you don’t eat together as a family, ALL of your kids will grow up being crooked politicians, or worse, used car salesmen!”

I’m kidding…kinda.

I really have heard it’s important for families to consistently eat supper together. Growing up, it was very important to my mom and my parents definitely made it a priority.

I guess I’m just not sure WHY. 

Quick Disclaimer: This blog post is NOT (and I can’t emphasize this enough) a scientific journal’s finding! It’s NOT based on research or surveys or standard deviations from the mean. I’m NOT going to PROVE why family dinner time is important. Instead, I will share my family’s experience in finding our WHY.

A few weeks back, my wife and I were challenged to share our thoughts on family meal time and honestly our initial thought was something like, ”Well we don’t have the faintest idea, because we don’t really even do that.”

Now, before you get judgmental, balancing 2 kids, 2 careers, 2 commutes, 2 church callings, 1 dog, 3 Fantasy Football teams and 1 pet fish named Marshall can be extremely hard! Realistically, where does one find the time to cook, sit down and eat together? (Also, does sitting together in a car in the McDonald’s drive-thru count?)

Ultimately, we decided that our habit of not eating together as a family was both bad news and good news. Bad, because we were ashamed of our terrible parenting. Good, because having no experience would give us a clean benchmark to compare against. We realized we could actually just apply family meal time as a test and observe how it affected our family! Talk about a silver lining! 

Testing:

The Question: 

• What changes or results will our family experience as a result of eating together daily?

The Parameters:

• For 5 consecutive days my family decided to sit down and eat together as a family for at least 30 minutes. 

The Test Subjects:

• My wife – Code name Xena
• Myself – Code name Big Papi
• My two year old son – Code name Hades
• My 5 month old daughter – Code name Toad (I like Super Mario, okay?!)

The Hypothesis: 

• I assumed we would experience some sort of positive change as a family after the 5 days of testing.

Day 1 (Take 3):

First of all, yes ‘take 3’. Several days were meant to be day 1, but life got incredibly busy so we pushed starting our experiment out a few times. We will pretend it was only 3 times. 

Once we actually kicked off our first family meal time it was actually great! It was fun to sit together at the dinner table and just be…well together. My wife and I talked and laughed at our kids. It was fun to observe them in this setting. My two year old (Hades) tried to report on his day in DayCare. As you can see from the actual conversation below, my son loves school. 

Big Papi, “What did you do at school today?”

Hades, “Nap.”

Lesson Learned – I think it’s totally ok if your family sometimes misses eating dinner together. Long gone are the days of the Brady Bunch. Entire families are busier nowadays than they ever have been before! Kids are in school, in sports, in detention, in a band, in the choir, intensely insecure, and/or in the kill-zone on Fortnight! Parents are just as busy with their own multitude of priorities. We’re so busy we usually can’t even waste time speaking in full sentences. 

“Honey, TTFN! Back after PTA ASAP! Let’s peep those 1099s and W9s for the IRS STAT! OMG, on CNN, POTUS threatened higher taxes on CAP GAINS. Like WTF(ace)! Also, don’t watch ESPN the whole time I’m gone!”

While it’s harder than ever to find time on a busy day, and while it’s totally ok to miss meal times together, it’s also probably worth noting that I think the business of life makes it more important than ever to find time to be together.  

Day 2:

On our second day experimenting, I decided I was going to take the burden of cooking off of my wife so I decided to smoke 8 lbs. of pork butt…I may have been a little ambitious. I started smoking early in the morning and finished long after our meal was scheduled to begin. 

Lesson Learned – Family meal time doesn’t need to be an extravagant experience! My experience, while well intentioned, taught me that what we eat is way less important than eating together. What was so awesome about Day 1 was definitely cut short in Day 2. 

Day 3:

The good thing about cooking 8 lbs of pulled pork is that it lasts for several days. On Day 3 we just threw leftovers on some lettuce and made pork salad! Watch out, local restaurant that rhymes with Cafe Mio! (Listen, if this blog goes big, I can’t afford to get sued.)

This meal was great! It was awesome to prepare, eat and clean up after our meal together as a family. We spent a solid hour, or more, with no interruptions just playing, working and eating together. We played games in the living room as we ate and it was fun to watch Hades try to help Xena and myself with pre and post dinner tasks. 

Lesson Learned – Family meal time can be more than just eating. I realized my “lesson learned” from the day before could actually be revised to say “…what we eat is less important than eating together and heck, eating is less important than just spending time together.”

Day 4:

Day 4 – Yes we ate more Pork! I overdid it ok?! 

My son may, or may not, have said, “No Like It!”

On a positive note, this was the day I realized that my love for Hades and Toad was growing. I caught myself several times feeling warm and fuzzy on the inside while staring at them throughout the day. Normally, I would blame my heightened emotional state on allergies, but in this case I couldn’t because, I also noticed that my kids were loving me more too! My son literally was following me everywhere I went! He was at my side while I worked on my computer; He was holding my hand as we crossed the street; he was in the bathroom with me as I…well…He even wanted me to put him to bed instead of his mom (slow clap for that personal victory)! 

Lesson Learned – I found that investing more time in my kids on a daily basis created greater feelings of love between us. As I tried to play, work, laugh and talk with them without distraction, they also wanted to spend more time with me. 

Day 5:

For our last day, we ordered Pizza and had an indoor picnic. As you can imagine, this was both good and bad for a variety of reasons. It was nice to incorporate our 5 month old baby more as we dropped down to eating on her level…the floor! 

While Hades thought it was funny to spit out his half eaten bites of pizza in an effort to get us to chase him around the house, it was more good than bad. We just had a lot of fun together with the change of scenery. 

Lesson Learned – As I was cleaning up after eating, I realized I was cleaning up after eating! In fact, thinking over the last 5 days, I realized all of us had been much more engaged in helping one another. My wife and I had crossed over several gender stereotypes…and I (my wife is already so helpful) was finding myself wanting to chip in and help everyone more than ever before. It was less about doing the bare minimum and more about just wanting to help my family. 

———-

Conclusion (I realize this its soooooo typical to end a blog this way, But honestly, I have no idea how else to close this out…hmmm…I guess something from college did stick after all.):

WHY is finding time to eat together as a family important to me?

Now, I realize that some games of Risk last longer than my family’s little experiment. I realize I didn’t go off to war and gain some crazy perspective via life and death experiences. That being said, in just 5 days I learned a few things about WHY family dinner time is important to me!

Family meal time is less about the “meal” and more about the “time.” The time does need to be “quality” though…meaning time that is being spent experiencing one another and the world around you. This stands in stark contrast to sharing time in close proximity with another without interaction. 

Family dinner can be a time to take a needed break from the business of day-to-day life. This is worth its weight in gold by itself! But in my experiment, I learned that a nice break from the world is just the tip of the iceberg. It seems to me that more quality time spent together as a family results in a greater love and connection between its members as well. For me, I found a greater relationship with my wife and kids. I found a greater desire to serve them. 

In short, trying to get together consistently for family dinner time, is like nourishing that ficus that’s sitting in your windowsill. Consistent sunlight, water and fertilizer will help it grow into a much larger ficus. A ficus that you will graduate to a larger pot and sit on an end table one day.

In all seriousness, my hope is that consistently nurturing my family through years of finding quality time together will create a safe place where relationships can be fostered for a lifetime. I want to use family dinner time as a building block to my home becoming a place where my kids can always feel welcome; A shelter with those they love, just as my childhood home was for me.