Our belief in the “magic” of family dinners is grounded in research on the physical, mental and emotional benefits of regular family meals.
Over three decades of research have shown that regular family meals offer a wide variety of physical, social-emotional and academic benefits. While some of these benefits can be gained through other activities, eating together is the only single activity that is known to provide all of them at the same time.
We recommend combining food, fun and conversation at mealtimes because those three ingredients are the recipe for a warm, positive family dinner — the type of environment that makes these scientifically proven benefits possible.
Some of the specific benefits of family dinners are:
Better academic performance
Higher self-esteem
Greater sense of resilience
Lower risk of substance abuse
Lower risk of teen pregnancy
Lower risk of depression
Lower likelihood of developing eating disorders
Lower rates of obesity
Better cardiovascular health in teens
Bigger vocabulary in pre-schoolers
Healthier eating patterns in young adults
There are also benefits for adults, including:
Better nutrition, more fruits and vegetables and less fast food
Less dieting
Increased self-esteem
Lower risk of depression
Researchers found that for young children, dinnertime conversation boosts vocabulary even more than being read aloud to. The researchers counted the number of rare words – those not found on a list of 3,000 most common words – that the families used during dinner conversation. Young kids learned 1,000 rare words at the dinner table, compared to only 143 from parents reading storybooks aloud. Kids who have a large vocabulary read earlier and more easily.
Older children also reap intellectual benefits from family dinners. For school-age youngsters, regular mealtime is an even more powerful predictor of high achievement scores than time spent in school, doing homework, playing sports or doing art.
Other researchers reported a consistent association between family dinner frequency and teen academic performance.
Adolescents who ate family meals 5 to 7 times a week were twice as likely to get A’s in school as those who ate dinner with their families fewer than two times a week.
You can read about all the additional benefits here but, of course, the real power of dinners lies in their interpersonal quality. If family members sit in stony silence, if parents yell at each other, or scold their kids, family dinner won’t confer positive benefits. Sharing a roast chicken won’t magically transform parent-child relationships. But dinner may be the one time of the day when a parent and child can share a positive experience – a well-cooked meal, a joke, or a story – and these small moments can gain momentum to create stronger connections away from the table.
The Family Dinner Project. (May 22, 2022). Science says: eat with your kids. Retrieved from thefamilydinnerproject.org/about-us/benefits-of-family-dinners/
Ketchell, Misha. (May 22, 2022). Benefits of Family Dinners. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/science-says-eat-with-your-kids-34573