The nightly ritual of a family dinner gives families a relaxed, nourishing context for coming together, connecting, and communicating. Additionally, parents who dine with their children every night know where their kids are in the evening and whether homework has been done. They get a sense of what’s on their kids’ minds, who their kids’ friends are, what their kids are interested in, and how their moods change. (Excerpt From: Joseph A. Califano. “How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid.” Touchstone).
Being there for dinner, without TV or technology at the table, creates big benefits for children’s mental, physical, and academic well-being including:
• Staying up to speed on how children are doing in school and offer opportunity to intervene if there’s a problem.
• Seeing how children are doing emotionally.
• Having dinner most every day means that it’s much harder to hide smoking, drinking, or drugging from parents.”
Here are some dinner conversation starters excerpted from Joseph A. Califano’s book “How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid; For preteens, appropriate conversation starters might be questions about their world:
• What are the best and worst things that happened today?
• What’s your favorite place in the house to hang out?”
• If you were in charge of the music for our family vacation, which songs would you pick?
• Which TV show is the most fun to watch?
• What do you like about your friends?
• What’s your favorite amusement park? What’s your favorite ride?
• What’s your favorite smell?
• What’s your favorite toy (or game)?
• If you could have a wild animal from anywhere in the world as a pet, what animal would you choose?” • “What’s the greatest invention of all time?
• Using one word, how would you describe your family?
• What do you want to be when you grow up?
• What do you most like to do with the family?”
For teens, dinner conversations are the perfect opportunity to instill values in your children when they enter the teen years. Appropriate topics at this stage include current events, family matters, topics of special interest to your family (film, sports, philosophy, politics, religion), goals, difficult situations, and questions such as:
• What are the best and worst things that happened today?
• What values are most important to you?
• Who’s the greatest athlete of all time?”
• What can each of us do to make the world a better place? What can we do as a family?
• Did you see anything fun on YouTube today?
• Who’s your favorite teacher (coach, role model) and why?
• What’s your favorite subject in school?
• What’s your favorite pizza topping?
What would you do if your best friend started using marijuana (OxyContin, Xanax, cocaine)?
• What three things do y”
• “What do you want to be when you grow up?
• What’s your favorite movie? Band/musician? Sports team?
• What did you think of last week’s sermon?”
If you can’t make family dinners, seek out other times to engage in the same conversations that you would at the dinner table. This may be in the car on the way to school or some activity, while watching a TV show, or playing a family board game. What if your schedule doesn’t permit for family dinners? Here are some suggestions for other ways to create regular family time with your children:
• Share every available meal on the weekends.
• Have breakfast together.
• Take your child out to lunch once a week or once in a while.”
• Go for walks together after work/school or on the weekends.
• Take advantage of one-on-one time in the car; offer to drive your kids to or from school, to their activities, friends’ houses, movies.
• Take miniholidays together, such as afternoon trips to visit family, or go to museums, parks, or other towns. • Have family meetings.
• Don’t overschedule your child’s after-school activities, and don’t let those activities take away time from family dinners. You want to avoid a situation where most weekday nights your child rushes home at six o’clock, grabs a snack from the fridge, and says, “I’ve got to go do my homework.”
• Use dinnertime to ask your child about his day at school, soccer practice, or theater rehearsal; about the upcoming math test or history presentation; and about his friends.
• Use dinnertime as an opportunity to monitor your child’s emotional and mental well-being. Sudden changes (beyond typical teenage mood swings) may help you spot signs of substance use early on.”
(Excerpted from Joseph A. Califano. “How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid.” Touchstone).