We’ve all heard the research about the benefits of having dinner together as a family: strengthening relationships, developing healthy eating habits… Regular family dinner has even been said to reduce substance abuse, violence, and other risky behavior in children. It sounds so cozy and idyllic. The family sitting around the table, discussing their day, current events, sharing their feelings. And maybe this is what family dinner looks like at your house. I truly hope it does.
But for many of us, family dinner is not a picture on a Hallmark card. Two week ago, the very day I published the first episode about taking the fight out of food, I spent about an hour making a delicious beef stew and salad for my family. I got it on the table, piping hot, served it up, and called them to dinner. No response. They gradually straggled in, and then a fight started about one kid wearing the other one’s socks. One thing led to another—by which I mean one hand led to the other one’s sock which led to that kid falling off a chair, which led to a mom screaming, “Enough! Go to your room or go outside.”
When that proved ineffectual, said mom followed said child around the room chanting “go to your room or go outside” while clapping and stomping, in a full-blown temper tantrum of my own. It worked. The boy went to his room. I recognized that I, too, needed a time out. I grabbed my dinner, got in the car, and ate in the parking lot at the park, then went on a rage hike up and down a big hill for about an hour.
When I got home, the kids were all watching tv and the bowls of stew were still on the table, untouched. Not exactly the cozy family dinner I had pictured.
Today’s episode is part two of a two-part series about how to take the fight out of food. In the first episode, we talked about picky eating and house rules about what kind of food you eat. In this episode we’re going to talk about two other potential battles: When kids eat and how they eat.
When Kids Eat
Despite what you may surmise from the temper tantrum from the intro, I am not “gasp” anti family dinner. Most family dinners at my house are much more successful than the one I just described. But I do think it’s healthy to acknowledge that there are so many hard things about family dinner. The spills, the arguments, kids who refuse to even try the food, whining, potty talk, parental lectures instead of actual conversation…the list goes on.
When I think of family dinner fights, I always think of this Saturday Night Live Sketch about a disfunctional family dinner with Will Farrell, Ana Gasteyer, and Sarah Michelle Geller, where they eat in silence (except for much fork and knife clinking) except for occasional and very dramatic outbursts of rage.
But joking aside, I think the magic of family dinner—the reason it has such a sacred reputation—is that it’s an excuse for the whole family to be together in one place at least once a day. That is something I’m heartily in favor of. If family dinner fills this role for you and works for your family, by all means, have family dinner and hold it sacred. But if family dinner is a constant source of conflict and stress, I’m giving you permission to let it go (may lightning strike me) and experiment with a different time to gather as a whole family.
I had this epiphany about ten years ago and it was so liberating. Before that, I’d try to work dinner around my husband David’s schedule so we could all eat together. That meant holding the kids over with snacks until we ate at 7:00 or even 8:00. This was a recipe for disaster. Family dinner was a fiasco because everyone was overly tired and hungry at that time of day.
Once I realized that I didn’t have to tie myself to family dinner, I started feeding my kids a good dinner right after school, at about 4:00, and then we’d have a bedtime snack while my husband ate his reheated dinner. This worked great for us, because my kids were always hungriest right after school, and ate their dinner so well.
Now that my kids are older, after-school schedules have made our dinner schedule much more erratic—changing from day to day. Sometimes we eat together, sometimes in shifts. We still usually eat before David gets home, but our nightly family devotional, where we get together to talk about the day, read and discuss scripture, and pray together essentially fills the same role as a traditional family dinner.
Every family has the same freedom to determine their own eating schedules, based on what works best for them. This summer may be the perfect time to try untethering yourself from convention and experimenting with a schedule that better fits your family.
Maybe for now you feed that toddler early, spend some time together as a family as you get him ready for bed, and then enjoy a meal with your husband in peace. Maybe you eat your biggest meal at mid-day and then have a light supper like farmers used to do. Maybe you let dinner happen when it happens, because you don’t like the pressure of a strict schedule.
My friend Kara Farnsworth is a dietician. During a normal school year, her kids get off the bus at 4:05 and they eat dinner at 5:00. They’re hungry right away, so she lets them have one snack, and she’s strict about enforcing that limit so they will still eat dinner.
This summer, our family is experimenting with a French-inspired meal schedule, since I just read the book French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon. The French way is to serve breakfast at about 7:30, lunch at 12:30, and dinner at 7:30, with a snack at 4:00. And they’re very strict about snacking at other times. No crackers in your purse or (heaven forbid) your car. They don’t even have snack time at school. Although this sounds super strict, it’s calculated to make sure kids actually eat at mealtime, and there’s still an overarching culture that food should be enjoyable—especially that afternoon snack.
Delphine Brandt, a friend of mine who grew up in France, explains:
Snacks are incorporated into a normal meal plan, so at 4, every little French kid has what we call a catre, which means a 4:00. It can be a pain au chocolat or another pastry, but it’s okay. They’re going to burn it off. They’re young. Because French people have late dinner, between 7 and 8, they understand that kids have to have a snack at 4. Where in the U.S. we eat at 5 or 6, so at 8:00 when they go to bed they’re going to be hungry and we let them have an ice cream snack and they go to bed on that bad sugar. So, different approach.
Stacie Billis from Didn’t I Just Feed You also generally follows this French philosophy, whether she realizes it’s French or not:
I do try to be conscientious of the times of day that kids are getting sugar. I don’t typically serve cereal for breakfast. Usually cereal is a snack—an after-school snack with some milk because it can be a source of added sugar. I make sure my kids have protein in the morning and good fat to keep them full. But I love the strategy of dinner as a snack before dinner. We were doing dessert before bedtime, right after dinner… and there wasn’t enough time to burn of the energy from eating dessert, so we just moved dessert to the afternoon.
I love this idea of a scheduled afternoon snack, sweet or otherwise. As I record this, summer break is starting and we’ve already been home with the kids for the length of a whole summer because of the COVID pandemic. And none of us know whether double summer will turn into triple summer. Because they’re home so much, the kids are constantly hungry and constantly angling for a snack.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, because I’m pretty sure it goes against all the rules about making food feel forbidden, but one Christmas break, I went to the hardware store and bought one of those door handles with a key code so I could lock my pantry. I was so tired of the kids filling up on snacks between meals and not being hungry at mealtime. Plus, they made monumental messes, eating snacks all over the house. I still have it, though I don’t lock it much, but have still been known to lock it in that hour before dinner to stop them from prowling.
Obviously a better approach is to teach our kids better habits, and how not to just graze all day. But even this is up for debate. Some nutritionists endorse several small meals throughout the day instead of the typical three meals a day.
Another dietician friend of mine, Jen Brewer approaches snacks:
When it’s bedtime and all of a sudden my kids are starving, I say, “You bet. You can have any of these fruits, any vegetables.” Because if they truly are hungry, they’ll eat it. And if they’re not, you’ll find out for sure.
Another benefit of a strict meal and snack schedule is that it helps with that other battle—where kids eat. One of the things Karen Le Billon, the author of French Kids Eat Everything, noticed when she moved to France noticed is that French people thought it was absurd to eat anywhere besides the table. Part of this is because they weren’t snacking, but part of it was just a matter of respect for the food and the home. Imagine not having to constantly remind your kids not to eat in the living room or the computer room.
Battle 4: How Kids Eat
The final battle we’re going to talk about is how kids eat—table manners.
My favorite idea for achieving more peace at the table is a rule from Margaret Ables, the host of one of my favorite podcasts, What Fresh Hell. In a great episode called “House Rules that Work” she says:
“The only real rule is you’re not allowed to talk about the food…. We just don’t comment on the food and mostly that’ to stop complaining.”
She also has the simple and sensible rule: no feet where we eat. Another great rule is no phones at the dinner table.
Kara Farnsworth also generally sticks to this good old-fashioned rule:
They are required to ask to be excused before they stand up and leave. It’s different for every time of day, breakfast people are coming and going, but at dinnertime they ask to be excused. Just last night my 12 year-old asked to be excused and I hadn’t even sat down yet. So I said, “No, I’m not ready for you to leave yet,” and he actually talked to me, so that was kind of fun. It may sound too controlling, and maybe we’ll drop it in the future, but I like that at least for now that it’s a practice that helps them focus on other people at the table with them and not just them eating until they’re full.
This is something I really have to try consciously to model. I don’t like it when my kids are popping up and down all during dinner, but sometimes I myself am the biggest yo-yo of all, grabbing things I forgot and bustling around the kitchen instead of sitting down with everyone else, often to ice-cold food. I’ve tried make a better effort at getting everything on the table before we start, and asking for more help from the rest of the family to make that happen.
Hillary Hess is a mother of seven children. Just imagine how chaotic mealtime could get with that number of kids! Nevertheless, she’s an avid fan of family dinner. Here are some of her fun ideas to make family dinner an occasion to look forward to. Many of the ideas have links to longer explanations on Hillary’s blog:
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Manners dinner. Hillary’s grandparents used to live near her while she was growing up, and they’d eat by candlelight every night. Often, they invited one of their grandchildren to come over for a fancy candlelight dinner. Hillary has adopted the tradition occasionally with her own kids and calls them manners dinners. They practice their table manners and the one who is most polite gets to snuff out the candle at the end.
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Talking stick. With so many voices that want to talk at once, Hillary and her family often pass a simple talking stick around the table to indicate who has the floor.
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Grateful Game. In the month of November, in preparation for Thanksgiving, the Hess family keep a game die at the table. They take turns rolling it, and the number on the die determines how many things they have to name that they’re thankful for.
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Pass the Witch. One October, when her kids were struggling to be kind at the table, Hillary invented the game Pass the Witch. She just grabbed the Halloween decoration, and they passed it around the table. They took turns complimenting whoever was holding the witch, to get rid of any witchiness that was going on.
Hillary blogs about feeding and raising children and hosts the podcast A Helping of Happiness. She’s also teaming up with Family Looking Up and Nikki Olsen to host an event this September called The Mom Break in Lehi, UT. I’m going to be one of the speakers, so I’d love it if some of you can come
Of course, we need to talk about the French take on how kids eat. Here’s what Karen Le Billon has to say about it:
“The French believe that eating is innately social. The family meal is a daily ritual that cements the bonds of French families. Now, the fact that food is social doesn’t only mean that you need to eat together. It also means interacting, learning, and sharing ideas. Family meals are moments during which French children learn about the world (through hearing the stories their parents tell) and where they learn important social skills (how to argue without offending someone, how to ask good questions, how to wait your turn to speak). This is why conversation is so important at French meals.”
They also start teaching manners much earlier than we tend to do in the U.S.:
As strict as all the French rules sound, the bottom line for French eating is that it should be a pleasurable experience. Karen Le Billon’s final rule in French Kids Eat Everything is “Eating is joyful, not stressful. Treat the food rules as habits or routines rather than strict regulations; it’s fine to relax them once in a while.”
So, this summer, we’re going to be recreating Karen’s French eating experiment as much as possible, and see if Francifying our eating habits makes a difference for us. Whether you go French, try some of the other great ideas in this episode, or come up with some experiments of your own, here’s to making food less of a battlefield and more of a delight.
