Family Time (family meals)

  August is Family Meals Month.   Celebrate it!

  ++There are many studies showing benefits to children of eating meals regularly with everyone in the household.  It's a great bonding time for the family.  Children are also watching adults; and older children can discuss ideas with them, even ones as simple as, "How was your day?"  Or, better yet, "Please share one good thing happened to you today, or you saw happen to someone else."  The sense of belonging fostered by this helps gives kids the resiliency to resist peer pressure regarding things like drug use or slacking off on studying.  They are also absorbing your ideas on what a balanced meal should include, how to practice good manners, etc.  They may appear to resist, but they will always have this to fall back on.

  It is tempting to say that you can't do this because cooking the meal takes too much time, because everyone is heading off in a different direction at a different time, etc.  If you make it an iron-clad rule that everyone eats together (with TV and phones turned off) at 6 pm on Wed. - or whatever works for you - they will learn to accept it, and eventually to look forward to it.  Naturally, it helps to start when they are young.  And, of course, you don't have to stop at just one meal per week. 

  The meal can be simple; even carry-out will do in a pinch.  The kids can help prepare the meal - and learn valuable skills in the process.  Just remember that they won't be experts right away.  Preschoolers can tear lettuce for a salad and set the table.  Grade-schoolers can, with supervision, slice fruit or soft vegetables, microwave vegetables, make macaroni/cheese from a kit, make garlic toast (which an adult takes out of the broiler or off the grill), etc.  Most teens can prepare a whole meal if they've gradually been given the chance to learn how.  I could do it before I started high school - but, I had the advantage of a mom who loved to cook and enjoyed having her kids in the kitchen with her.  Younger children will love doing "grown-up stuff" with you.  Older kids may complain to you, but will enjoy having bragging rights among their friends.

  What are you waiting for?  Celebrate Family Meals Month!