Family dinners: a healthy tradition by: Penny Gumbert | |||
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Bow your head. The family dinner is dead.
The family who regularly sits down together to eat is as rare as a balanced budget.
Statistics Canada reports people spend a little more than an hour a day eating meals. That works out to about 20 minutes per meal. You can bet your life
people aren't taking the time to have the old-fashioned, sit-down, pass-the-potatoes kind of collation. They're eating on the run. If they do take time to sit down they're usually doing it in front of the TV and, in our three and four
television homes, it means
everyone's eating alone with his favourite show. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Children already spend an average of 18 hours a week watching television and listening to the ads, which they're
swallowing whole. Picky eaters revel in foods like Kool Gels,
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Snak-Stiks, Dunkaroos and Fruit by the Foot. In school lunchrooms, children are ripping open plastic packages and chowing down on processed food. People aren't cooking anyomore and the
market is cashing in on this trend. Fast, fork-free and
fat-laden cuisine is taking over the store's shelves.Food can be eaten
anywhere, without implements, served in no clean-up-just-throw-out platters. Our stores runneth over with push 'n eat products, tube food and edible spoons.
Big deal. What's so great about the sitdown dinner? Try to remember. It was a safe place to try out new ideas. Your family would listen to your thoughts, sometimes agree with them or, more often, scoff. That was all right, because the family dinner was a safer environment than the school-yard to learn how to
defend yourself.
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A family was intuitive, knew if you'd run into the school bully, aced a test or lost your
spelling homework. If you'd had a bad day, families usually rallied to your support, right or wrong.
If your brother had been teasing you mercilessly, it was nice to see his power dissipate in the family setting. Finding out about the lives of the people in your family, good or bad, helped you learn about life.
You heard about family
finances, what the next grade was going to be like, the price of cars, why the neighbours acted that way.Family meals are
invaluable, and not just for
children. Parents get to take a deep breath. Talk to their kids. Come down to earth.
Besides being better
emotionally for the family, recent studies have shown it's also
healthier to eat en famille.
Such meals usually
contain all the important food groups and less processed food.
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The family who eats
together knows more about the benefits of proper nutrition and its's been shown this knowledge is applied when such people go out to
restaurants. Sensible solutions for fussy eaters are more
practical and effective at the
sit-down meal.
"One of the most
powerful ways your children learn what and how to eat is
observing you," says Carolyn Webster-Stratton, PhD, in her book The Incredible Years. Children are less likely to be
allowed to snack as they wait for the family dinner. What better way to establish the concept that we eat when we're hungry, not because we're bored, lonely,
dissatisfied?Clear off the dining room table and 'do dinner' the family way. the proof's in the pudding.
* edited for length
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