Paul Random

Studies have long established the importance and benefits of family mealtime. 

In fact, even secular social science has routinely found that families who regularly eat together raise and produce children who perform better academically, socially, emotionally and even spiritually.

Family therapist Dr. Anne Fishel, who co-founded the “Family Dinner Project,” was a guest on Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education podcast and stated:

I could be out of business if more families had regular family dinners, because so many of the things that I try to do in famxily therapy actually get accomplished by regular dinners. There have been more than 20 years of dozens of studies that document that family dinners are great for the body, the physical health, the brains and academic performance, and the spirit or the mental health. And in terms of nutrition, cardiovascular health is better in teens, there’s lower fat and sugar and salt in home cooked meals even if you don’t try that hard, there’s more fruit, and fiber, and vegetables, and protein in home-cooked meals, and lower calories. Kids who grow up having family dinners, when they’re on their own tend to eat more healthily and to have lower rates of obesity.

You’d expect an Ivy League academic to focus on nutrition and physical health. And cultivating and developing a child’s social and emotional IQ is a critically important benefit of eating together as a family. 

Yet, as Christian parents, our goal should go well beyond those important measures and extend and expand into the spiritual and cultural areas of life.

Are we raising children who are aware of what’s going on in the world – and more importantly, are we equipping them to process and interpret events from a Christian worldview?

Over the past year, Focus on the Family has devoted significant resources to a forthcoming documentary titled, “Truth Rising.” It’s a joint project with our friends at the Colson Center and it features beloved author, theologian and culture critic Dr. Os Guinness along with John Stonestreet on a worldwide touring looking at the pressing issues facing us today.

In many ways, it’s a follow-up to Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project, which featured the engaging and informative teaching of Dr. Del Tackett. 

“All the great civilizations of the past can be found in three places,” Dr. Guinness observes in the film, which will be released this coming summer. “They’re in ruins, they’re in museums, or they’re in history books. Great though they were, they rose, and they declined, and they fell. They lost touch with the inspiration that made them what they were.”

Does that sound like too heavy duty for dinnertime conversation with children? Wise moms and dads know how to reduce the complex down to the simple. Kids don’t want lectures, but they do like to be challenged. They’re hungry to have their parents translate the world for them.

Mealtimes with children should be fun and lighthearted, but we waste precious time if we reduce the entirety of the conversation to the trivial and the mundane. As my late friend Jim Downing liked to say, there are three levels of conversation: trivia (like weather and sports), gossip (people), and ideas. Talking about ideas and principles is the highest form of conversation. 

Classic Christian principles include love, compassion, forgiveness, character, integrity, generosity, humility, patience, and self-control.

My father would often bring home multiple newspapers each day. He and my mother would tear out articles for us to read. We’d then discuss them over dinner. It made us feel like we knew what was going on in the world. It wasn’t just an exchange of information but an exercise in processing the ideas being communicated.

It’s understandable that Christian parents want to shield and shape news for young and impressionable minds. We need to do so on an age-appropriate level. Just keep in mind, though, that if you don’t talk about something, there’s a good chance a teacher, neighborhood friend, or media outlets are shaping your child’s opinion of the subject.

Family mealtimes are not only important bonding times – they’re also fleeting opportunities. Talk with any parent who has already raised and launched their children. They often look at the empty chairs around their table. They not only wish they were still being filled by their now-grown children, but they often wish they had better utilized that time when their sons and daughters were seated there.

Family dinners won’t solve every problem – but they sure help make the inevitable problems and challenges more manageable for both parents and children.