The Family Dinner Deconstructed

by Alix Spiegel


Morning Edition, February 7, 2008 · About a decade ago, research started appearing on the family dinner, and the news was uniformly good.

Children who ate with their families were less likely to do drugs, smoke, have eating disorders or become depressed. They were better at reading, less likely to end up in the hospital for asthma and had better grades. And perhaps most shocking of all, in rare instances they could apparently demonstrate exemplary table manners. (Scientists have been unable to replicate this last finding on a consistent basis, however.)

Dads and moms across the country took note and began rearranging schedules. Meeting were canceled, work dinners declined, tuna casseroles purchased. It worked. By 2005, a study conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse — one of the country's foremost advocates of the dinner hour — indicated that the number of teenagers who ate with their families had increased by a whopping 23 percent since the late '90s.

Now, there is no doubt that dinner is a noble pursuit. But research on its benefits does raise a question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

In other words, does dinner itself offer some magical protection, or is something else going on?

David Dickinson, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University, says this remains an open question.

"It's possible that some of these findings are occurring because the ability to organize a mealtime and come together may be just one indicator of a family that is intact and functional," Dickinson says.

Basically, strong families are able to sit down together each night and eat, and strong families — rather than regular meals — produce healthy kids.

A Closer Look

Dickinson has done his own research on the family meal. Several years ago, he and a group of researchers from Harvard wanted to figure out why some kids learned to read early while others lagged behind.

They did this by looking at family routines, such as how often families read to their children, ate with their children and played with their children. When they started the study, Dickinson says the group fully expected that reading would be the most important contributor to early literacy.

Instead, Dickinson says, they found that mealtimes "were a much stronger predictor of how later development would go for children's language and literacy development."

And so that was the headline: Family dinner equals early reading.

But as Dickinson will tell you, if you looked more deeply at the research you might come to a different conclusion. It turns out that the verbal content of dinner was really important. The kids who did well didn't just eat dinner with families, they ate dinner with families that maintained complex conversations rich with explanation and storytelling.

"When a new word was used — like 'reptile' — the parent that would stop and say, 'You know, like a snake' — or say something that would give the child a definition of what that meant, and those interactions were very powerful," Dickinson explains.

Dinner provided an opportunity for children to be exposed to these language behaviors on a regular basis. But dinner in a more-limited verbal environment apparently didn't have the same effect.

And this kind of thing is true in a variety of studies on dinner. While the headlines tout the power of sitting together over a plate of meatloaf, often when you look beneath the surface, the clarity of that picture muddies.

Barbara Fiese, a professor at Syracuse University, produced a study which indicated that children with asthma who ate dinner with their families were less likely to end up in the emergency room. But as with the Dickinson study, it turned out that the specific behaviors that the families engaged in were critical to producing this result.

In order for the family dinner to have a benefit, parents had to demonstrate interest in a child's day, regularly express empathy, and organize the dinner in a fairly specific way, such as assigning roles like table setting and making sure that family members began and finished dinner at the same time.

So is it possible for a dysfunctional family to sit down together each night and benefit?

"They can if the meal is conducted in a way to support healthy development," Fiese says.

Don't Dismiss Dinner

While it may be that the good news on dinner is premature, it's also too early to dismiss the possibility that the meal itself substantively contributes to family well-being.

To answer this question, researchers need to do an experimental intervention where similar families are randomized into regular family meal groups and non-regular family meal groups. Thus far, no study of this kind has been undertaken.

In the meantime, as David Dickinson says, it's probably a good idea to keep the dinner hour going. As he points out, dinner is one of the few times in modern life when families can sit down together, speak face to face, and build relationships. All things, he says, which simply can't hurt.