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Dear Miriam,
Before I had kids, I was very committed to the idea of family dinners. I had always been envious of my friends’ families who ate together when I was young. And, as an adult, I had read a lot about the importance of sitting at the table together and wanted my kids to have that experience. But my kids are 4 and 7, they need to eat at different times, and more often than not, we all eat separately, with the kids often in front of a device. How can I reclaim my vision of family dinner, or do I need to let this go?
Signed,
Not at the Table
Dear Table,
Family dinners are great! But only if they work for the reality of your family and not just the image of your family you had before the reality was in front of you. Parenting books have a lot to say about the benefits of lots of things, and no one can fulfill all of them. No one can even try! Especially when different sources of parenting advice naturally contradict each other.
I understand that this is a longstanding thing you think you want, but it might help to take a step back from the what of dinners to think about the why. Why are family dinners important to you? What benefits are you hoping your kids will gain through the experience? How might you find those benefits in places beyond the confines of a timing issue that doesn’t work for your family?
When you answer those questions, you may be able to find some alternatives that scratch the same itch. Maybe you alternate eating with each kid at the table at the time that works for them, which gets you the “table” part of your vision if not the full togetherness. Maybe you have a family show you watch altogether so you’re not getting the table part, but you are focusing on a family activity while eating. Maybe you can commit to not scheduling after-school activities or late work meetings one night a week and make that night special for the family in some way. Maybe you can get everyone at the table for a few blessings on Friday nights for Shabbat. Maybe dinner is just too hard while your kids are these ages, and instead you arrange your family meal time around Shabbat lunch or Sunday breakfast.
There’s no one right way to do this, despite what the parenting books say. Family meals are one way to share loving attention with your children, but there are many other ways, too. While I don’t know the circumstances of your own childhood, I wonder if the difficulty you’re facing in scheduling dinner time can give you some insight or compassion into your family of origin and why family meal time wasn’t prioritized. Wherever you go from here, remember that your kids won’t be these ages forever, and while the stresses and strains won’t go away, they will continue to look different at different stages in your kids’ lives. Holding fast to one image of family meals is only temporarily useful because the people in the image will inevitably change.
Be well,
Miriam
