Is Anyone Coming for Dinner?
Thanks to Phil Bowers for sharing a piece from last week's Wall Street Journal. Cameron Stracher, publisher of the New York Law School Law Review, writes a piece entitled Much Depends on Dinner. Stracher notes that fewer and fewer families are eating together at night. Related to this development is growing evidence that a correlation exists between family meal times and crime, alchol and drug abuse, and even problems with being overweight. In short, the family that eats together is healthier and less likely to make visits to the county jail.
Stracher points out the stresses and strains of job demands, commuting, and other struggles that make it difficult for families to be together at the end of the day. But perhaps the most telling point is his suggestion, following Arlie Hochschild, that frankly parents find it easier to not eat with children. It takes a lot of time and effort to prepare a meal from scratch and then have your kids turn their noses up at asparagus and artichoke chicken and cry for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Why bother?
Stracher gives some good reasons for bothering. Dinner, he says, is like a poem. "It's one of the few opportunities for conversation in a noisy world, a place to take a slower measure of our frenzied days. By missing mealtime, we are missing a substantial part of our children's lives."
Who will you have dinner with tonight?
Cameron Stracher has recently launched a blogsite here.
Carson Reed
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The Center for Fathering in Singapore (www.fathers.com.sg) sponsors an annual "Eat with Your Family Day," to try to get families to set down together at the dinner table -- even if its at a restaurant -- at least ONCE a year! It takes a special effort to ask workplaces, schools, community organizations, churches, mosques, sports clubs -- all those commitments that demand people's time -- to let up for one day -- so families can be together.