By Camille Beckstrand, guest writer from SixSistersStuff.com
When I was growing up, family dinner happened every night at 6 pm. In spite of crazy schedules with sports, dance, gymnastics,and school activities, we knew that our mom would have dinner on the table every night at that time. During our meal, we were not allowed to take any phone calls – dinner was a time spent together to talk and eat.
During family dinner, we would discuss the happenings of each day and to talk about the things that were going on in our lives. It was a time to laugh and share funny stories and a time to talk about serious current events. Many of my favorite memories happened around the dinner table and helped shape me into the person that I am today.
When my sisters and I started our blog SixSistersStuff.com, we shared many of our favorite family recipes and we soon realized that one of the reasons we loved these recipes so much were because of the many memories and traditions associated with them. As our following grew, we started to get emails and comments from readers who would tell us that family dinner was a rare occurrence in their home – for many, Christmas and Thanksgiving were the only times that their family gathered around the table to enjoy a meal together.
My sisters and I couldn’t believe what we were hearing! It seemed to be that family dinner was a old tradition that was quickly being forgotten. We decided that it was important to start sharing why we were so passionate about family dinner and invite others to experience the benefits that eating together can have on your children, your relationships, and your overall happiness.
We did some research and found a couple of studies on family dinner that had mind-blowing data. Who knew that family dinner was such a powerful thing? Here are a couple of statistics about dinner that we learned:
-Family dinner will help children get better grades in school.
-By having family dinner together, there is a lower chance of children experimenting with smoking, drinking, or other drugs.
-Family dinner can also help lower depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts during the teen years.
-Family dinner has been proven to help with a child’s vocabulary development even more than playtime or story time.
-By eating family dinner together, adolescent girls will have a smaller chance of developing an eating disorder.
-Children that have dinner with their family on a consistent basis will be less picky and be more willing to try new foods.
-Family dinner has shown to help lower stress in adults.
It just blew us away that something as simple as eating dinner with your family each day (or as often as you can) would have such an impact on your family and their lives!
To help promote the idea of family dinner, my sisters and I launched the 4×4 Dinner Challenge. We challenged our readers to eat dinner with their family at least 4 times a week for 4 weeks straight. Thousands of people around the world took on the challenge. We shared ideas on how to make dinner a success by giving them easy family-friendly recipes, dinnertime conversation topics, and ways to include the family on the preparation of the food. We asked our readers to share with us their experience, whether good or bad, and the responses came pouring in. The responses that stood out the most to us were from families who had never had dinner together; the ones who did not know how to talk to their children when they did finally sit down together because family dinner and conversation was something completely foreign to them.
At the conclusion of the 4 week challenge, we invited our readers to join us in the “Family Dinner Around The World”. On the day chosen for the worldwide family dinner, we asked our readers to eat dinner with their family at 6 pm and share a photo on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter so that others could see it and we could track the different dinners around the world. We also had a sign-up page on our blog where people could put in their location and a little pinpoint would appear on the map so that we could see where they were located. We literally had people sign up from every country in the world and in every time-zone. It was so fun to watch the pictures roll in all day long- families in Australia, India, Sweden . . . the pictures just kept coming! Families across the world were sitting down together and making memories, strengthening their families, talking to each other, and of course, enjoying their food.
I know that sometimes the smallest things in life can make the biggest difference and I firmly believe that family dinner is one of them. If you are looking for a way to strengthen your family, a way to have better relationships with your children, or a way to keep the doors of communication open with each other, I know that family dinner will provide the way to do that. I invite you to take the Family Dinner Challenge – eat dinner 4 times a week for 4 weeks – and see if you notice any changes.
Camille Beckstrand
SixSistersStuff.com
