Family Dinner: The Most Important Meal of the Day

Liquid Library

Family Dinner: The Most Important Meal of the Day

Once a widespread tradition, eating dinner together as a family is becoming more and more rare. Studies now show what a loss this is.

It’s time we reconsider what dieticians claim the most important meal of the day is. Common answers to that question are breakfast and lunch. But statistics reveal that it is in fact family dinners that are the most important meal of the day—for many reasons.

Unfortunately, statistics also show that this all-important family meal is on the way out.

In today’s age of convenience, family dinner time is easily replaced with fast food, frozen dinners and take-out. According to the Opinion Journal, “fewer than one third of all children sit down to eat dinner with both parents on any given night” (July 29). Other reasons for family dinner becoming extinct are mothers, who typically do the cooking, entering the work force and parents working longer hours.

But study after study shows that it is in the family’s best interest for parents to make the effort to be home in time for dinner and to pass on the microwavable dinner and opt to get the knife and cutting board out instead.

A recent study released by the Harvard Medical School reports that chances of being overweight are 15 percent lower among those who eat dinner with their family on “most days” or “every day” (ibid.). This shouldn’t be a surprise, considering what families typically eat on the go.

The importance of family dinners extends far beyond diet. Another study, from Columbia University, found that “teens from families that almost never eat dinner together are 72 percent more likely to use illegal drugs, cigarettes and alcohol than the average teen” (ibid.). That same study reports that those who eat dinner with their parents fewer than three times a week are more likely to smoke and drink than those who eat with their parents six times a week.

When both parents go to work and children go to school, dinner time provides a rare opportunity for the whole family to gather and converse about the day. It provides the occasion for parents to get involved in their children’s lives and build a strong family bond that children can lean on for the rest of their lives.

Dinner time can help build close families. Make it a vital part of your family life. Don’t neglect the most important meal of the day: family dinner.