Meridian Magazine:: Around the Table:Family Dinners: How to Get Your Kids Talking at the Table

Family Dinners: How to Get Your Kids Talking at the Table
By Janet Peterson

Just as significant at the dinner table as tasty and nutritious food is family conversation. Once the family has gathered together for dinner, what takes places between bites is just as important as what food is being ingested.

Dinnertime offers a wonderful forum for families to catch up on each other’s day, laugh, socialize, and just simply talk to each other. By valuing the dinner hour (or half hour) as precious, private family time, parents can utilize these moments to teach, encourage, strengthen, and enjoy their children. Talking together at the table provides children with a regular audience with their parents — a much-needed experience given most families’ busy, often hectic, schedules.

“Dinner is more than what you’re eating; it’s family time together, to unwind and find out what’s happening,”^[1] said Jean Quanbeck, a mother of six and a winner in the 2005 National Chicken Cooking Contest.

A few years ago, D. Louise Brown interviewed her own children about what they gained from family dinner conversation. She reported:

I asked my three teens (at the dinner table the other night, of course), if they valued eating dinner together and why. Family dinner is a must in my household, and I was both relieved and pleased to hear their positive responses. Michelle, age 20, said, “It gives you a chance to regroup and make sure you're still a family.” Andrea, age 17, said, “It's a wonderful time to find out what each other's been doing.” Jonathan, age 14 and our only son, stated, “You're on the run the whole day. It's the time that lets you slow down and be with each other.”^[2]

Another mother, Linda Chaousis, reported:

When we all sit down to eat, relax, and get talking, it’s amazing to see the mood transformed. On more than one occasion, the ‘not hungry’ one has ended up eating everything on her plate, and arguments before dinner have turned into giggles as the kids linger. Sometimes it would be so much easier to just throw something together and sit in front of the tube. But when I take the time and bring everyone together, it has an enormous impact on our family.^[3]

“The table talk that occurs when families sit down to a meal together helps parents better understand their children and the challenges they face, experts say,”^[4] wrote journalist Kathy Stephenson.

Randy Chatelain, a professor of child and family studies at Weber State University, observed:

Meals are a time to engage each other. Dinner is a valuable time when families can gather as a group and have a cooperative experience. It’s a time parents and children can talk about family stories, family values and what is happening in each person’s life. People take turns talking and listening.^[5]

Janette Hales Beckham, a former general Young Women president, noted this:

Now that my children have grown, I think of my kitchen as a symbol of the right place. I realize that it was in a family setting that I came to understand Planning with a Purpose long before I was in the Young Women program. You’ve all heard us ask the question in the Young Women program, “What do we want to do?” when we really want to ask ourselves, “What do we want to have happen?” For me I was more likely to ask on a hot summer day, “What are we going to have for dinner?”

Along with the demands of mealtime, I also started to realize that my own children were gone from home more and more. I remember reading one day these words: “A table surrounded by eager, hungry children ceases to be a table and becomes an altar.” All of a sudden the question for me became, “What do I want to have happen in the lives of my family during this brief time we are together each day?”

I started to plan mealtime with a purpose. I started to think about Ann, Tom, Jane, Karen, and Mary rather than whether or not the hamburger was thawed. I wondered if they were fortified and strong enough to make decisions and live by the values our family and the Church had tried to teach. The evening meal became an important time. It's interesting to me now that my children are raised and grown, the one thing they love is to come home and sit around our kitchen table and talk, laugh, and reattach to those close family feelings.^[6]

In addition to the emotional nurturing and sense of security children gain from consistent interaction at the dinner table, they also gain specific benefits, such as learning conversational and social skills and reading readiness and vocabulary development.

“Children learn conversational skills in the course of family discussions. When conversation doesn’t happen in the home, children have difficulty conversing with adults and sometimes even with their peers. When conversation does happen, they learn skills that carry over into school and into life. Studies have shown that religious students with strong family support are the most likely to succeed in school. A related factor is that the most successful students were also those most likely to eat dinner regularly with the whole family,” said Alan Bush in a USA Today article.”^[7]

Weber State University professor of child and family studies Craig Campbell once worked at a juvenile court-mandated mental health facility. His job was to assess overall knowledge of the teens in the facility. He said, “It was kind of an IQ assessment, and the kids were scoring low. I realized this was the kind of information kids would be picking up at mealtime. These kids didn’t have that experience of dialogue with parents or older siblings to pick up that general knowledge.

“Our conclusion was that, if they didn’t have that kind of experience, they weren’t gong to pick up that information, and that was important to them, socially and psychologically. A shared time, such as dinner together, gives kids the format to express themselves, joke and laugh and build their knowledge and self-esteem.”^[8]

Ardeth G. Kapp, also a former Young Women general president and a long-time educator, wrote:

A study of first graders’ reading readiness found that “high scorers had a radically different atmosphere around the meal table,” as compared to the low scorers. The former group enjoyed family meals that were “a focus for total family interaction” and were both positive and permissive in emotional tone.^[9]

Here are a few suggestions that might enliven conversation among your family members:

Eat together around a table, rather than at a bar or as you watch TV, so that looking at each other will facilitate family conversation.
Make sure dinnertime belongs only to you. Let the answering machine respond to phone calls, turn off the television, and put away the newspaper.
Don’t make dinner a time to solve family problems or differences. Strive to make meals enjoyable experiences.
Recount the day’s more humorous experiences. Even experiences that were not humorous earlier in the day can seem funny a few hours later.
If a member of your family is living away from home, arrange to have dinnertime conference calls on occasion. This will allow everyone in the family to talk to the absent family member, making it seem for a moment as if he or she is at home for dinner.
Verbal games at the dinner table will help young children think creatively and are also fun. Ask your kids to name all the vegetables that begin with the letter B or to think of all the foods they like that are red. You could also tell the beginning of a story and let each family member add to the story.
Play family trivia games at the dinner table. Prepare questions ahead of time or make them up as you go. Ask questions such as, “How long have Mom and Dad been married? What is ______’s favorite dessert? What is ____’s favorite movie?”
Start a dinner table conversation with, “What is the most unusual food you have eaten?” Responses such as ostrich, boiled black beetles, or bludwurst, will surely get your family talking and will make everyone grateful for the food in front of them.
If your children are older, turn dinnertime into a forum for discussion of current issues and happenings in the area and around the world. Make sure that your conversations are friendly.
Begin dinnertime discussion with the question, “What was the best thing about your day?”
Use baby pictures of family members as place cards at the dinner table. During the meal, reminisce about each of the children and parents as babies and toddlers.
Jump-start your dinner table conversation by keeping a jar of conversation topics handy. Every now and then, pass the jar around the table and have family members draw a topic, such as, “What is your earliest memory of your grandparents?” or “What was your favorite vacation and why?” Or “What do you remember about kindergarten?”
Hold an “ancestor dinner.” Display photos and memorabilia of one of your ancestors. Serve food from his or her country of origin or area, and share stories about your ancestor’s life.
Have a “joke night” dinner. Ask family members to tell jokes or take turns reading from an appropriate joke book.
Discuss books during mealtime. Ask family members to share their current and long-time favorites.
Shake things up a bit at dinnertime. Instead of having family members sit in their traditional places, play musical chairs and sit somewhere new during dinner.
Start dinner conversation with the question, “Do you remember when?” and specify a particular enjoyable event or experience that the family can discuss. For example, last summer’s campout when you cooked your dinner in a Dutch oven, the vacation spent at the beach, or planning the surprise party for Grandma.
Take time to occasionally read a story or article aloud to each other at the dinner table. You’ll likely find that even if dinner is finished, family members linger around the table to hear the end of the story.
During dinner, talk about favorite family vacations and what made them memorable.
Have your family name book and movie titles that mention food. (For example, Like Water for Chocolate, James and the Giant Peach, Blueberries for Sal, Bread and Jam for Frances, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Bean Trees.)
With older members of your family, discuss the use of food in books in setting a scene, depicting characters, and advancing the story. (For example, Aunt Petunia’s baked custard pudding in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Scarlet O’Hara’s longing for bygone feasts in Gone with the Wind, the scant meals in The Diary of Anne Frank, the opulent dinners in The Age of Innocence.)
Ask family members to say something they appreciate about the person sitting on their right.
Ask your children if they know where the food they are eating comes from. An interesting and educational discussion could ensue about the sources of the many foods they eat.
During Sunday dinner, ask each person to share something they learned or experienced at church that day.
At different times, prepare recipes from other countries. Then talk about various aspects of that particular country, such as location, customs, language, clothing, food, and what it is noted for. If you have traveled there, share your experiences.
Invite missionaries to dinner. Prepare children so that they can ask the missionaries questions about their home states or countries as well as recent missionary experiences.
Have each person tell about his or her favorite foods.
Talk about sports — about favorite teams, recent games, or family members’ participation in particular sports.

^[1] Jean Quanbeck, quoted in Valerie Phillips, “Home Cooking Has more to do with ‘Home” than ‘Cook,’ Deseret Morning News, May 25, 2005, C-1.

^[2] D. Louise Brown, letter to Janet Peterson, 2000.

^[3] Linda Chaousis, quoted in Meg Cox, “Reinventing the Family Dinner,” Good Housekeeping, April 2002, 78.

^[4] Kathy Stephenson, “Recipe for A Closer Family,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 24, 2006, C-3.

^[5] Nancy VanValkenburg, “Mealtime Magic,” Ogden Standard Examiner, June 20, 2006, C-1.

^[6] Janette C. Hales [Beckham], Young Women President's Message, April 1993 Open House, 6.

^[7] Alan Bush, “Understanding Different Types of Students,” USA Today, 30 Sept. 1993, quoted in Mimi Wilson and Mary Beth Lagerborg, Table Talk: Activities and Recipes for Bringing the Family Together (Wheaton, Ill: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2000), 15.

^[^8] Nancy VanValkenburg, “Mealtime Magic,” Ogden Standard Examiner, June 20, 2006, C-1.

^[9] Ardeth Kapp quoting “The Family in America,” The Rockford Institute Center, My Neighbor, My Sister, My Friend (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1990), 105.