Family Dinners Are a Great Marker of a Cohesive Household: Psychiatrist

Make dinnertime a time to connect with and bond as a family—without phones in sight. Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock

Meals together are more meaningful than ever in the age of devices and diverse family types, according to psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed.

Ahmed, who is based in Australia, said it’s worth maintaining some semblance of sharing meals together in a household, even if it’s just two to three times a week. Meal times provide a consistent opportunity for families to nurture strong bonds, as members share and discuss the challenges of the day or bond over new experiences.

Quality time shared between parents and children has become increasingly precious. Statistics show that by the time children are 18, 90 percent of their time with their parents has passed.

This is why family dinners correlate with all sorts of health markers, varying from healthier body weight to better mental health, according to Ahmed.

“Regular family dinners are still a great marker of a stable, cohesive household, and that is very beneficial for kids,” he told The Epoch Times.

Mealtimes give children a chance to connect with parents and grandparents and learn their values, while also opening their minds to a wider range of concepts, words, and stories.

“It challenges them and pushes them because, while they have teachers at school, most of their interaction is with their peer group. So it’s very important that they get a broader range of intergenerational contact,” he said.

“They hear abstract concepts and a wider range of vocabulary when talking to their parents, which can challenge them. There’s evidence suggesting that this does improve the kid’s language around abstract concepts and problem-solving.”

Sit-down family meals together are often a key time for children to learn a wide range of words, concepts, and stories. BearFotos/Shutterstock

For grandparents, regular dinners with the family are a great antidote for social isolation, which research has shown affects 1 in 3 elderly people today.

The elderly are more often challenged with health and mobility issues, physical changes, and cognitive decline, which are major hurdles to being social, especially if those issues render them unable to drive.

For some older adults, that family dinner may be their only interaction for days or weeks.

Old-Fashioned or Scientifically Proven

At a time of increasingly diverse family compositions and family practices, academics from Australia’s Monash University have suggested that the promotion of the “family meal imperative” sets unrealistic expectations.

Sociology professor Jo Lindsay said that sitting down together every night is “rooted in an anachronistic and conspicuously old-fashioned notion of the family” and that it “only serves to increase parenting guilt,” in her research published in the journal Critical Public Health.

Lindsay’s particularly modern take on family meals overlooks some important science on the benefits, however.

A 2011 meta-analysis published in Pediatrics looked at several studies, with a sample size of 182,836 children and adolescents, and found significant benefits to family meals, including lower odds of being obese and higher odds of eating healthier food. The research review also found a 35 percent reduction in disordered eating.

“Across the lifespan, eating with others, particularly family, is associated with healthier dietary outcomes,” reported researchers in another review, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.

A review published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2021 looked at 54 original studies and 11 review studies and found similar results in terms of eating, along with mental health benefits.

“Correlational evidence links shared meals with health and psychosocial outcomes in youth, including less obesity, decreased risk for eating disorders, and academic achievement,” it reads.

Family meals may be particularly important for teens, an age group in which there has been an uptick in depression and anxiety in recent years.

“Frequent family meals may have a protective effect on the mental health of adolescents, particularly for depressive symptoms in girls,” researchers state in a study published in Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior in 2017.

In a 2020 study in the American Psychological Association’s journal, Developmental Psychology, researchers wrote: “On days that adolescents shared a family meal, they felt greater happiness and role fulfillment, and less burnout and distress. Moreover, family conflict was associated with more negative emotionality only on days that adolescents did not also eat with the family. Findings suggest that family meals buffer daily risks associated with familial conflicts.”

The act of sharing food may even have a long-term effect on the most important elements of personality, suggests a study published in Appetite in 2015.

“Results confirm that higher levels of shared meal consumption correspond to higher scores on the self-report altruism scale among students,” researchers reported.

It isn’t only students who benefit from family meals. A study published in Preventive Medicine found that a higher frequency of family meals was “associated with higher levels of family functioning, greater self-esteem, and lower levels of depressive symptoms and stress.”

“Findings from the current study suggest that frequent family meals may contribute to the social and emotional wellbeing of parents.”

Even nontraditional nuclear families would benefit greatly from incorporating sit-down meals together as often as possible, Ahmed said.

He acknowledged that modern life may not allow for it in the same way that it did in the past because of a greater variety of family structures, busy teenagers and children, and a range of working arrangements including shift work and meetings from home.

“So there’s a lot of complexity here now, and it’s certainly not as simple as a 1950s-type family arrangement,” he said. “But that shouldn’t be a reason to feel guilty or give up trying.”

Meals together with family are a chance for the transmission of family values, history, culture, and ideas to the next generation through stories and the foods that are prepared and shared. Viktoriyaa/Shutterstock

Family Dinners in an Age of Devices and Distractions

“I think it’s important that we try to enforce rituals,” Ahmed said. “A good example is the Jewish Shabbat tradition of having a Friday night dinner.”

“But it can happen in other areas as well. It could be a walk on the weekend, playing board games, or watching a show together.”

Ahmed acknowledged the power that devices have and recommends limiting them to shared interactions.

“The default is often we all retreat to our own rooms and our own screens, and I think you have to work hard to mitigate against that,” he said.

“As long as it is something that’s connecting you together, rather than casually looking at TikTok on your own, it can still bring people together.

“If you have something that is shared, or it might be something you’ve shared during the day, and then you’re bringing it up and talking about it together, then I think that’s fine.”

Similarly, pediatrician Meg Meeker said that she asks everyone put away their phone for an hour during dinnertime.

While this might be a challenge, even for the parents, taking charge of screens at home will teach children that they will be OK without having to be alerted by their phone every minute, and it trains them to decrease their screen time over time.

Ultimately, the combination of school and family life is about the passing on of knowledge and experiences, and family dinners can be a particularly useful way for connecting, communicating, and having intergenerational interactions.

“Given family dinners are one of the rare places where everyone comes together, it’s a critical part of transmitting ideas and values to the next generation,” Ahmed said.