In my last blog post, I talked about an article from the Washington Post written by a family therapist, who said, “As a family therapist, I often have the impulse to tell families to go home and have dinner together rather than spending an hour with me. And 20 years of research in North America, Europe and Australia back up my enthusiasm for family dinners.” To be academically sound, I’m going to put the link to the article here, and all quotes in this post come from that article: ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/on-parenting/taking-back-the-family-dinner-how-we-created-a-mealtime-renaissance/2019/08/19/b3d8c4e8-82ee-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html)
The impact of eating meals together and having conversations can’t be overstated. In my last post, I talked about how our brains are wired to form memories around food, and how my best memories from my childhood are eating dinner with my grandparents, and watching Looney Tunes, still my most cherished memory. The therapist who wrote this article expands on this point.
” For starters, researchers found that for young children, dinnertime conversation boosts vocabulary even more than being read aloud to. The researchers counted the number of rare words – those not found on a list of 3,000 most common words – that the families used during dinner conversation. Young kids learned 1,000 rare words at the dinner table, compared to only 143 from parents reading storybooks aloud. Kids who have a large vocabulary read earlier and more easily.” It’s not just the memories that you’re forming with your kids by eating meals together, your kids will be better off intellectually, and emotionally.
This is really why I’m a personal chef. It’s so easy in our busy day to day lives, and in these “interesting” times, so forgo eating dinner together. We have an opportunity though…we can use this time spent away from the general public to make a choice. We can stay inside separately, all of us doing our own thing, or we can use this as an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.
We all have a choice…we can wallow in our isolation to prevent illness, or we can use this as a chance to rise above it, and form connections with the people closest to us. I implore you to make the leap…spend time talking to each other. Prepare your meals together. Carefully go to the grocery store and experience food together. This can change your family’s lives.
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