This is a guest blog post by Allison Colson for our Eat, Play, Love: Raising Healthy Eaters blog series, which brings stories and advice from parents and dietitians to help you build lifelong healthy eating habits for your children.
As an aspiring dietitian, I have taken whole courses on pediatric nutrition and the importance of family involvement. However, children can carry their experiences far beyond the family home and on into adulthood.
I truly believe that my parents’ commitment to family mealtimes is the driving force behind my sense of responsibility, my ability to effectively communicate and my passion for food and health.
When I was growing up my parents always made time for dinner as a family. Sometimes that meant squeezing it in 25 minutes before my brother’s football game. Other times it meant spending an hour in our seats while my sister dramatically recounted stories from her school day.
Regardless of the day’s events, our family gathered in the kitchen for “dinnertime” -- a daily experience which provided us much more than a hot meal.
Lesson 1: Responsibility
With four children, full-time jobs, and hour-long commutes my mom and dad were busy, to say the least! But they made the most of it: four kids meant eight extra hands to help get organized before and after mealtimes. Getting children involved in the kitchen is a great way to establish the importance of mealtime as a family event.
Research has shown that cooking with kids, and assigning tasks surrounding mealtime, promotes independence and a sense of responsibility in the kitchen. Keep little hands away from chopping and stove-tops, but encourage help whenever it’s appropriate. Kids can help toss salads, layer casseroles, put toppings on pizzas, and set and clear the table. While it isn’t always easy to get the whole family on-board, if it is expected and reinforced each time, it will become a familiar routine.
Lesson 2: Food Choices
Like many families, there were certainly days when we didn’t get home from work, soccer practice, and guitar lessons until 8 o’clock. In my house, this meant an hour until bedtime and a good time for a “hodge-podge” dinner. We’d make sandwiches with whatever we could find, slice up fruit and veggies, and re-heat leftovers from earlier in the week.
Hodge-podge dinners may not have been as balanced as other meals, but this sort of creativity and resourcefulness is what made my mom the ultimate gatekeeper. Parents can set a great example in moments where they might otherwise feel like they’re slipping. Stay calm, get creative, and reinforce the simple fact that family mealtime is a priority. Find more kid-friendly recipes!
Lesson 3: Communication
When a family gathers around the dinner table, there’s a special opportunity to check out from the outside world and check in with each other. This can certainly go beyond the old, “How was school today?” from the head of the table. Ask about that math test, about tennis practice or music class. Learn the best part of your child’s day and probe more about what made the best part so great.
Don’t feel discouraged, though, if you can’t extract more than a word or two about your child’s day. Even a simple “please pass the peas” can be a monumental sentence when it’s coming from your five-year-old daughter who, yesterday, wouldn’t have touched a pea with a ten-foot pole. Plus, she used the magic word.
Shared family mealtimes have been associated with reduced risk for substance abuse, promotion of language development, academic achievement, and reduced risk for pediatric obesity. Surely, these reasons are enough to encourage many parents to make family meals a priority. But I can honestly say that many of my life tenets can be traced back to the importance of family mealtimes in my childhood home.
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Allison Colson, Dietetic Intern