Family Meals

Taking time to eat with your family is one of the most important things you can do for your children. Once a staple of family life, the family meal has been continually eroded over the past several decades. Sports practices, music lessons, meetings and other extracurricular activities all tug at the family dinner hour. Now research is validating the importance of families sitting down together to eat.

Benefits of Family Meals
When members of a family come together to eat, they connect with each other and find out how each member is doing. Family Meals are a chance for children to become grounded. It is where family traditions are passed along, where children learn table manners and develop conversation skills.
Studies show that Family Meals improve academic performance: The conversations that occur at family meals teach children more vocabulary than they learn when they are read to. With improved vocabulary students become better readers who do better in school. Research at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that a greater percentage of students who eat meals with their family 5 or more times each week, get A's compared to students who eat family meals 2 or less times per week.

Research also shows that teens who eat dinner with their families at least five times a week are less likely to feel depressed, take drugs or get into trouble. Another study found that teens who ate dinner with their families six or seven times per week are less likely to smoke cigarettes or marijuana or drink alcohol than teens who ate dinner with their family two or less times per week. Eating family meals together improves family communication, and creates stronger family ties and a greater sense of identity and belonging for children and teens.

Children who eat with their family at least once a day eat more nutritious foods and have higher intakes of vegetables and fruit, protein, iron, calcium containing foods and fibre. The EAT project (eating among teens) at the University of Minnesota found that family meals were associated with improved intakes of the above nutrients plus Vitamins A,C,E, B6 and folate and lower intakes of soft drinks and snack foods. This project also found that girls who ate meals with their families more often, showed less disordered eating.

Getting Started
Make family time a priority. Schedule family meals the same way you schedule extracurricular activities. Begin with once a week, Sunday dinner for example, and increase from there. If dinner doesn’t work, schedule a Family breakfast, lunch or snack. The important thing is to share food together. Family meals don’t have to be fancy. Begin with what you are eating now and eat it together. Later you can offer new and different foods. Family meals don’t have to be at the table: a picnic in the park or the backyard counts too!
Create a positive atmosphere. A Family Meal is a time when members can share what happened today, a time for food and pleasant conversation. Discuss discipline issues and report cards at another time.
During family meals recognize children for contributing to a happy time at meals.
Turn off the television and come away from the computer. An answering machine for the phone helps keep the meal undisturbed.

Shared Responsibility for Food Tasks
Children are born wanting to eat; they have the ability to eat the amount of food they need and to stop eating when they are full. The Shared Responsibility for Food Tasks supports this.

Parents decide What foods to serve - Offer foods from three or four food groups of Eating Well with Canada's Food Guide at each meal and foods from two food groups at snacks. When: children have small stomachs and need 3 meals and 2-3 snacks daily and Where food is served. This gives parents the opportunity to bring everyone together for a Family meal.

Children decide: How much to eat and Whether to eat. Consistent mealtimes allow children to feel secure, knowing that they will be fed. Eating regular meals and snacks rather than “grazing” allows children to come to the table ready to eat, hungry but not starving. Parents are children’s most important source of information and influence about food and eating. Family Meals provide an opportunity for parents to model healthy eating.

For more information see: Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family by Ellyn Satter and
How to Get Your Kid to Eat…but not too much, by Ellyn Satter, both are available in the local Vancouver Island Regional Library.

More information about feeding children and families:

Eating Well with Canada’s Food Guide; Baby’s Best Chance

Toddler’s First Steps Look under Parent Publication Initiative
B.C. Health Files

Helping Your Toddler to Eat Well: B.C. Health File 69d

Meal and Snack Ideas for your 1-3 year old Health File 69e

Christy Thomson R.D.
Community Nutritionist
Margaret Moss Health Centre
675 Canada Ave.
Duncan, B.C.,V9L 1T9
250-709-3050 ext 5509

« back