More Family Dinners, Please

Another day, another article about the importance of family dinners. This time the author is Anne Fishel, associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.

I am encouraged when I see the mental health profession look more closely at the psychosocial side of human development.

I am also encouraged to see the profession offer solutions that do not involve medication and do not even involve more therapy.

Fishel has provided a valuable service. She has reviewed all of the studies—there are many—about family dinners and provided a synopsis in an excellent article in the Washington Post.

In her words:

As a family therapist, I often have the impulse to tell families to go home and have dinner together rather than spending an hour with me. And 20 years of research in North America, Europe and Australia back up my enthusiasm for family dinners. It turns out that sitting down for a nightly meal is great for the brain, the body and the spirit. And that nightly dinner doesn’t have to be a gourmet meal that took three hours to cook, nor does it need to be made with organic arugula and heirloom parsnips.

For starters, 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 five to seven 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.

Family dinners also mitigate the anti-social tendencies that often appear during adolescence:

In addition, a stack of studies link regular family dinners with lowering a host of high risk teenage behaviors parents fear: smoking, binge drinking, marijuana use, violence, school problems, eating disorders and sexual activity. In one study of more than 5,000 Minnesota teens, researchers concluded that regular family dinners were associated with lower rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. In a very recent study, kids who had been victims of cyberbullying bounced back more readily if they had regular family dinners. Family dinners have been found to be a more powerful deterrent against high-risk teen behaviors than church attendance or good grades.

Obviously, it is not enough to go through the motions. For family dinners to work their magic, they require adult conversation… not silence, not a television set in the background, and certainly not psychodrama:

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.

Is Family Dinner an Injustice?

Everyone complains about family dinner. So says Sarah Bowen in a study that tries to show how unrealistic it is for anyone to expect that women (or anyone) would be sufficiently competent to prepare family dinners on a daily basis.

Bowen is the researcher whose study into the “burden” of feeding a family has warmed feminist hearts and minds.

Note that the question, as Bowen framed it and as Amanda Marcotte and now Anna North articulated it, always revolves around an injustice. Women are unduly burdened with the responsibility for preparing family dinners. Men barely contribute. Children are ungrateful wretches who are always complaining. Obviously, the situation calls for government intervention.

Did it strike anyone that Bowen’s study, to say nothing of the feminist cheerleading it inspired, is one large complaint. If you ask where children learned to complain, you do not have to look very far.

But, more importantly, the feminist critique of the injustice of family dinner leaves out one crucial element. It ignores the many studies that show family dinners to be of enormous benefit to a child’s psychosocial development.

Why is this not relevant? Why is the well-being of children so easily tossed aside in favor of a perceived injustice?

Why, pray tell, does that not provide a sufficient motivation for these modern superwomen to get their acts together and put something nourishing on the table each night? In most families, it does not even matter that it is all that nourishing. When it comes to food children are notoriously easy to please.

If, however, a modern woman is following Michelle Obama’s nutritional guidelines in her home cooking, she is likely to meet with resistance.

If a woman decides that every family dinner must be a gourmet extravaganza or even a vegetarian delight she will be misreading her family. Most families do not require a grand production. Most children prefer Big Macs to carrot sticks.

As for Bowen’s whine about how expensive fresh produce is, she should try Walmart. Besides, frozen produce is often better than fresh, anyway. Vegetables that are flash frozen when harvested are probably fresher than the ones that were trucked cross the country in refrigerated containers.

To her great credit Anna North balances her report on Sarah Bowen with some real-life reports about family dinners in poor families.

In her words:

The poet Kima Jones recently conducted her own survey of family food traditions: For an essay at Scratch, she asked 29 poets, “What did your mother teach you to always have in the house in case of hunger and no money?” The answers she got ranged from bologna to cassava bread to “Savings. You can always turn that into food.”

Many of the poets she talked to grew up poor, but her survey painted a more optimistic picture than Ms. Bowen’s research. She told Op-Talk that a lot of the stories she heard involved extended families coming together — the poets “talked about their grandmothers, their aunts, their uncles. There were always these reservoirs to tap into and this community where, we don’t have a potato, but we have some rice, some string beans, we have some stew meat, and we’re going to make a meal out of this.”

Growing up, she said, “I don’t remember ever not eating and not eating well, even though we were definitely working poor.” Now she lives far away from her mother, and eating dinner with her “is the thing I miss most.” And when she visits her mother in New York, she never eats out: “As long as my mother’s on the face of this earth, and as long as she’s making dinner, I’m eating dinner.”

Nuf said….

Family Dinner

It should have been good news. Thirteen years ago parents learned that if they wanted to shield their teenage children from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, they needed merely to schedule more regular family dinners.

In 1996 Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Drug Abuse reported this conclusion. Further studies have confirmed their findings. Other researchers have suggested that regular family dinners can also prevent some adolescent eating disorders.

This suggests that adolescents are suffering because their families lack organizational structure. We need to spend less time thinking about whether parents love their children enough and more time encouraging them to organize family life.

As a cure for adolescent malaise, this feels more constructive than pills, talk therapy, mystical journeys of self-discovery, identity crises, and soulful conversations with parents.

Of course, family dinner is also harder. It requires more work, more coordination, and more planning.

You would think that it would all be good news. Not quite. Two days ago the New York Times reported that our therapy culture has taken this simple advice and used it to guilt-trip parents.

When you have learned how to guilt trip yourself and others, constructive suggestions become opportunities to exercise your talent. Link here.

It would be better if we all understood that once the information is out, once people know the importance of these rituals, then it is up to them to work out the details. Or not.

The more important issue concerns why family dinners work.

For my part I am not surprised by this research. Nor was I in 1996.

I emphasized the importance of family dinners in my book on "Saving Face," which slightly predated the original research. When I was working on that book I did not want to look at parent-child relationships in terms of a mother-infant dyad or in terms of psychosexual development. So, I took the more Confucian approach and considered the family as a functioning group, held together by ritual, not by emotional glue.

I wrote: "In a functional family the family dinner serves as a ritual affirmation of group membership. It transforms nourishment from a private experience of consumption into an orderly social event."

I added: "A family is not a romantic idyll in which solidarity is created by covering everyone in love. A child may receive all the love he could ever deal with and still by harmed by not knowing whether anyone will be there when he comes home from school, by not knowing when and with whom he will be having dinner, or by not knowing whether anyone cares about how well he did on his spelling quiz. Erratic evidence of deep affection will not compensate for the insecurity produced by inconsistent behavior."

Insecurity about an uncertain future causes children to look backward with nostalgia. It does not allow them to look forward with optimism.

As the Times article suggests, the value of family dinner does not lie in the deeply meaningful conversations that may or may not take place there. Dinners provide a child with organization, structure, and reconnection. They make him feel that he belongs, thus that he is not simply out there on his own.

I did not think then and I do not think now that the issue should be quality or quantity time. You may recall that the culture invented the notion of quality time when parental schedules became so full that parents did not have very much time to spend with their children.

Supposedly, increased quality time would compensate for decreased quantity time.

Thereby parents were encourage to seek out moments of intense emotional connection.

At the time this seemed shortsighted. It still does. It ignored the child's social being and veered dangerously close to taking the therapy session-- quality time, if ever there was any-- as the prototype of human relationships.

A child who does not have consistent family dinners will lose the sense of belonging to a group, will fail to see how his actions affect others, and will lose control over his impulses.

He might compensate with experiences of intense intimacy, or by experiences of intense sensation. Feeling along and isolated, disconnected from others, demoralized and depressed... a child might need to go to an extreme to connect or to experience pleasure.

Unfortunately, relationships that involve excessive intimacy can never fully provide the feeling of being a functioning social being.

Nor can talk therapy. Isn't talk therapy an excessively intimate experience that is supposed to cure anomie, but that often turns into drama.

As I have suggestion, drama ensues when we seek to use intimate relationships to compensate for a failure to affirm ourselves as social beings.

Family Dinner

Beyond the fact that she is a celebrity environmental priestess who worships at the church of Al Gore, I know very little about Laurie.

She produced a filmic screed called “An Inconvenient Truth,” and has written or contributed to several works on global warmism.

All things considered, I did not consider her writings to be worth the trouble.

And yet, today, David, along with Dr. Grace Freedman wrote an illuminating article on how best to control our nation’s childhood obesity problem. Link here.

Her solution: family dinners.

As it happens, I, among others, have long since advocated the importance of the ritual dinners. The fact that Laurie David has endorsed the idea wholeheartedly tells me that good ideas make their way into even the most environ-mentally unfriendly locales.

This does not mean that the idea was wrong. It means that there is hope for the planet.

Strangely enough, as you read the article, you start thinking that David is some kind of a family values conservative.

Because she begins by saying that while Michelle Obama is correct to target childhood obesity, she is wrong to place so much faith in government programs. The solution, Laurie David says, lies in the family. Or, most especially, in family dinners.

While we are at it, let’s emphasize that David is standing up for the kind of Confucian values that we last saw evidenced by the Tiger Mom.

Hopefully, her ideas will be granted more respect than were those of the Tiger Mom.

As a reminder ... Confucius believed that human communities are held together by the fact that people participate in common rituals and ceremonies.

People pay lip service to this idea all the time. It is not a self-evident truth, especially in America where everyone thinks that the country is being held together because we all believe in the same ideals.

Confucius might have said that saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag is a more significant social glue than is our shared belief in freedom or equality or rights.

In truth, most people have different conceptions of our founding ideals. And when you make national unity depend on shared ideals, you are on the road to mind control.

The school of thought that emphasizes the importance of ritual is actually more consonant with free expression than is the one that wants us to be worshipping the same ideals.

Rituals create cohesive communities regardless of what anyone thinks. And they do so without anyone having any flashes of insight or raised consciousness.

The Confucian principle is the enemy of the therapy culture.

To return to Laurie David, she recognizes the gravity of childhood obesity, and she offers the following solution: “There is one simple idea, though, that gets barely any attention. It's something that parents can act on right away, without any special training or government support and its available to them every day! That solution is family dinner. How and where we eat may seem too simple in the face of the enormous problem of childhood obesity. Yet, the ritual of eating meals together as a family, be it one parent at the table or both, has been shown to greatly improve healthy eating habits.”

For those who believe that we need a slew of new programs to address this problem, David responds: “Programs are geared mainly towards schools, and occasionally to adults, but rarely do we treat the basic social unit of the family with any consideration. What an oversight! Family dinner is a positive activity that is immediately understandable to parents, and immediately actionable. It is something that the vast majority of parents can do without much more than some basic ingredients and a kitchen table.”

How can one explain why family dinners are so beneficial? According to David: “Regular, routine meals add structure to a child's day (and to a parent's) and from this structure stems a myriad of health and social benefits, including better relationships with peers and adults, better grades at schools, and less likelihood of using drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. We all know this. But children (and adults) who have regular mealtimes, with the television turned off and conversation turned on, are also far less likely to be overweight, are less likely to have eating disorders, and are more likely to eat more fruits and vegetables than are those who eat alone or on the run.”

Better yet: “Many studies have shown that families who make dinner at home do indeed eat healthier. One theory is that once parents take the step to mindfully shop, prepare, and serve dinner, they also start making better health choices for themselves and their families. The act of sitting at the table and putting the focus on the mealtime may, all of a sudden, make the "fast-food" meal less palatable and a lot less interesting as an everyday option.”

One other point struck me about David’s article. Not only did she skillfully jettison the idea that we need more government programs, but she did not trot out the idea that we all need to put children on diets.

For that I, for one, am grateful.

The therapy culture has long purveyed the notion that we are involved in a great struggle between mind and appetite.

For quite some time now Americans have been told that they must sate their sexual appetites freely and openly. In principle, the beneficiaries of this new social policy was supposed to have been women. Yet, many of today's Americans-- certainly, most American women-- are involved in some kind of draconian effort to suppress their alimentary appetite, the better to make them sexually attractive.

Frankly, I think that the world would be a better place if we get over the idea that the only alternatives are to allow our alimentary appetites free reign or to suppress them in order to melt off those last few fat cells.

In my view, David is correct to see that active participation in the social ritual of the family dinner will lead to better eating habits, better health, and probably better figures. Without government programs and without a new diet.

How to Fight Bullying

If bullying and cyberbullying are as rampant as the studies suggest our schools are suffering from a severe breakdown in decorum.

It’s well and good to say that we are going to attack bullying or that we are going to prohibit it. Surely, it would not be a bad idea to make an example of a few bullies by expelling them from school.

And yet, children are not going to stop bullying each other until they learn how to treat each other with respect. They need to learn to practice decorum, to develop good manners and to get along with others in social situations.

They can only learn by doing. Children practice good manners before they understand why they should do so or what it means not to do so. It’s similar to rote memorization of multiplication tables. You learn them before you understand the basic principles of arithmetic.

Unfortunately for a large number of American schoolchildren the designers of the Common Core curriculum did not understand this point. So they refocused on learning how arithmetic was constructed—unnecessary and a waste of time-- and children never learned how to do math efficiently and effectively.

Surely, schools should teach decorum. They should expect that children behave themselves in the classroom. They should sanction children who disrupt the learning experience.

But it is also true that decorum begins at home. For most children it begins with table manners. Parents teach their children how to hold and to use knives and forks. They show their children the correct way to handle utensils. The result is dinner-table harmony. If everyone is using the same table manners, thus showing respect for others, the experience can affirm a child’s sense of belonging to a group.

This helps explain the salutary effects of family dinners.

And yet, family dinners and strong family structures are almost relics. So children are suffering from a pervasive sense of anomie, of not belong to a positive group. Our nation has decided to deal with the problem with medication. It’s not a surprise that many children graduate to drugs and alcohol.

It’s easier and less work than family dinners.

Unfortunately, when it comes to one of the most powerful therapeutic tools, the family dinner, today’s Americans are often too busy and too disorganized to get together regularly as a family over the dinner table. The minute we ask who is going to be responsible for dinner, we enter into the culture wars.

Many families have adopted a disorganized structure... everyone for him- or herself. 

For those parents who need an incentive, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics has shown that children who have family dinners are better able to deal with bullying. One suspects that children whose sense of identity and security is affirmed on a daily basis by participating in family dinners are less likely to be bullied in the first place.

For some children and for some adults being the center of attention is better than being ignored and marginalized. This pertains even when the child is subjected to abuse.

The Daily Mail reports on the study:

Regular family dinners are good for teenagers’ mental health, helping to tackle the problem of cyberbullying, according to new research.

Canadian researchers suggest that the social contact, support and communication experienced during family meals could help shield teenagers from the effects of online bullying.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, surveyed more  than 20,000 adolescents, measuring exposures to cyberbullying and traditional (face-to-face) bullying.

It also asked the teenagers about a wide range of other mental health issues including depression, anxiety, substance use, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and suicidal attempts.

The researchers also gathered information on how regularly the teenagers ate a meal with their family.

Teenagers who experienced cyberbullying were 2.6 to 4.5 times more likely to have emotional, behavioural and substance use problems than those who experienced traditional bullying, they found.

These problems were found to be more common among teenagers who had fewer family meals, which suggests that family contact and communication reduces some of the distressing effects of cyberbullying. 

Bullies terrorize people by isolating them, by separating them off from the rest of a group. One way to counteract the effects of bullying is to feel secure as a member of a group.

Obviously, family dinners are not the only way to accomplish this. Belonging to teams and clubs, especially those that are strictly rule-bound, like sports teams will surely help too.

The Benefits of Family Dinner

Another day, another study showing the benefits of family dinners.

As it happens, it’s not news. By now everyone should know that children who have family dinner on a fairly regular basis do better than children who do not.

Effectively, participating in a group ritual confers a therapeutic benefit. The ritual provides structure, order, security and discipline. It allows parents to interact with their children and allows children to engage in conversation with adults.

The research shows that if you want your children to be well-behaved and to do better in school you do well to “insist” that they show up for family dinner.

The Daily Mail reports:

Psychologists who studied children aged six to eleven found they concentrated more at school, acquired better social skills and got into much less trouble as teens if they regularly took part in family meals.

It continues:

Although numerous studies have shown family meals can have a positive effect on adolescent behaviour, the latest research concentrated on the long-term effects on younger children.

Experts at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University analysed the eating habits of more than 24,000 young children who took part in a major health study in 2007.

The US National Survey of Children’s Health recorded youngsters’ dietary patterns but also looked at behaviour, school performance and social skills.

The results, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, found more frequent family meals increased the odds of a child having positive social skills and being more engaged in school by around ten per cent.

At the same time, eating together reduced the risk of bad behaviour by about eight per cent.

But, what prevents children from participating in family dinners? Why is it necessary for parents to insist that their children be present?

For one, technology:

Family meals have been decimated by technology, with children often spending their entire time tapping away on their phone - if they can be removed from their bedroom to come to the table at all.

For another, disorganized households.

One wonders how many parents understand the value of family dinners and how many are sufficiently confident to impose the structure on their families.

In this as in many cases empathy is not enough.

Are Bad Table Manners Ruining Your Marriage?

Maybe we've gotten it all wrong. What if it isn't all about sex?

We are so accustomed to thinking that good sex will solve all marital problems, that we have overlooked a more obvious component of a good marriage: harmony at the dinner table.

A good marriage, to say nothing of a good family life, is more surely enhanced by regular family dinners than by great coitus. Of course we would wish that all marriages had both, but it would be short sighted to ignore the first and assume that the second is always going to bail you out.

As Confucius might have put it, human life revolves around social rituals, not your private behavior.

Yesterday Elizabeth Bernstein focused our attention on married couples that have made a complete mess of their interaction around food issues. Link here.

She does not claim to know how prevalent these bad behaviors are. Her article wants to draw our attention to a different and highly salient aspect of marital relationships.

For my part I hope that the couples Bernstein describes have the world's greatest sex, because their table manners, their food preparation, and the way they interact over dinner leaves me feeling that they are not even couples.

Many of them sound like people who live in separate, wholly autonomous kingdoms where they can do what they want, when they want, as they want... regardless of how offensive, insulting, disgusting, or provocative it is.

I am in awe of Jocelyn Breeland's stoic fortitude. She has been married for 23 years to a man who: "slurps sauces, sucks on bones, smacks his lips and licks his fingers while eating."

Apparently, this was the way people ate when Ben Breeland was growing up, and, he is enough of a multiculturalist and a nonconformist to refuse to give up his childhood toys.

Ben understands that his table manners are making his wife sick. He observes his wife's discomfort and feels "like the worst person ever." Still, he makes no effort to change his behavior. In some way he must be proud of his behavior, because he has allowed it to be highlighted in a national newspaper.

However badly he feels, I would say that he doesn't feel anywhere near badly enough.

How has Jocelyn Breeland learned to cope with this daily assault on her sensibility: "Now she drinks wine to calm down, dines in another room or rushes through her own food so she can get away from his noises as quickly as possible."

Can we excuse Ben Breeland by saying that he is, as Bernstein suggests, asserting his identity, or expressing his feelings, or living life with gusto? Certainly not.

There is more to the dinner ritual than table manners. In some families every aspect of food preparation seems to have become an opportunity to bicker and fight.

If couples counselors and marriage coaches want to help their clients to improve their marriages, they should be spending less time asking them to express their feelings and more time showing them how to organize their kitchens.

How bad is it? Bernstein reports: "Couples squabble over everything from how much mayo to put into the tuna salad to whether to order in or go out for dinner. Meat lovers vs. vegetarians? Organic vs. junk food? A spouse 'gently' telling you to put down the Chunky Monkey Ben & Jerry's? The possibilities for food to go bad in a relationship are endless."

And the possibilities for a relationship to go bad over food are equally endless.

Some people insist on a fair and equitable division of labor in the kitchen. In some marriages, this works like a dream. In others it descends into constant fights about territory and authority.

Some people consider food to be the basis of their primary religious experience. They feel that they have the right and duty to attack their mates for colluding with the destruction of the planet or the murder of innocent life. And they feel compelled to criticize their spouses for eating too much of the wrong foods, because this is going to compromise their health, produce excessive medical bills, and shorten their life span.

Some are so consumed with righteous zeal that they do not ask themselves whether constant harassment is the best way to get someone to change behavior.

But this is all just the beginning of the opportunities for conflict in the kitchen. People fight over who is buying the food, what food they are buying, who is preparing the food, how it should be prepared, who is setting the table... it goes on and on.

As Bernstein said: "When I asked people about the food fights they'd had with their spouses or romantic partners, stories poured in. There were disputes over shopping lists, how closely to follow directions on a recipe and exactly how brown a banana has to be before it becomes officially inedible."

Whoever gave these people the idea that marriage should be a constant struggle over power and territory? Whoever told them that it was good to fight, to clash, to have impassioned conflicts?

And why have they never learned that marriage requires effective organization? Or that it involves the production and observance of harmonious social rituals.

Why do two people who have different preferences for when to eat dinner dig in their heels and decide to fight it out? What ever happened to negotiated compromise?

Try this one: "Heather Hills likes to eat dinner at 5 p.m. Her husband, James, wants to eat later, around 9 or 10 p.m. Making matters worse, the two differ in their cooking styles: He loves to take his time creating beautiful entrees, with special sauces and carefully chosen side dishes. She throws ground meat, frozen vegetables and cream of mushroom soup into a casserole."

Do you think that Heather and James should keep fighting it out? Would it be too much to ask them both to try to split the difference and have dinner together at 7? And if he likes to cook more than she does, then perhaps he can be charged with food preparation and she can be charged with other aspects of the dinner. It's called a division of labor. If James cannot manage to get a meal together by 7 then he should go to cooking school and learn a few shortcuts.

By now everyone knows that family dinners are a good thing. They are good for children and good for everyone else who participates. Now that childhood obesity is a national concern, why not recommend a harmonious family dinner as a way to help children redefine their relationship to food and even to control their appetites.

You cannot police what children eat. You can make the ritual of family dinner into a positive experience for them.

Bernstein does not mention whether the offending couples in her article have children. But, can you imagine what will happen to the growing psyches of children when they are thrown into the middle of the chaos that is produced when two perfectly independent self-actualizing autonomous beings are each trying to assert themselves and express their feelings over the issue of how much oregano to put in the tomato sauce?

More Family Dinners, Please!

I had thought—naively, it appears—that everyone accepted the transcendent value of family dinners. I wrote about it many years ago and have been revisiting the topic from time to time on this blog.

So, when I saw a study showing that children who regularly ate with their families were less susceptible to bullying and cyberbullying I thought it worth notice here.

I was somewhat surprised to see all the attention the study attracted, though I was not at all shocked to see that feminist firebrand Amanda Marcotte was having none of it.

For a true feminist, the call for regular family dinners is a call to relegate women to the role of food-preparers. To Marcotte’s mind only a woman would understand how much of a burden it is to feed one’s children while living within the walls of what Betty Friedan called “a comfortable concentration camp.”

Since feminists want, at best, for food preparation to be a shared activity, they are alert to any effort to return to the safe and well-ordered family life that they, truth be told, have been undermining for the past four decades.

But then, others began to chime in on the topic. Megan McArdle, a fine writer who most often helps us to understand complex economic questions wrote a post about how she prepares dinner. Apparently, she wanted to echo the thoughts that some commenters on this blog made. Namely, that feeding your children need not be torture; it need not even be a burden.

By entitling her article: “Feminism Starts in the Kitchen,” McArdle underscores the important point. Second wave feminism was not as much about political rights as it was about undermining the family, subverting traditional roles and turning the kitchen into a war zone.

One commenter on this blog offered the most salient critique. She explained that while feminists insist that they are uber-competent in all areas of human endeavor, they cannot muster up the energy or the talent to prepare regular meals for their children.

Then again, no one said that women have to be the family cooks. Inn more than a few households, men know how to cook and women don’t. In others, men like to cook and the women don’t.

None of this makes it impossible to hold regular family dinners.

And yet, in many cases the men and the women in question are slightly embarrassed by their role reversal.

Of course, now that the word about family dinners is out, parents who do not practice this edifying and character-building activity get defensive. Or better, they take offense. So much so that they jump on the Marcotte bandwagon and declare that, for them, family dinners are too much of a burden to bear.

Among the defensive, we find Time editor, Jeffrey Kluger, a man who occasionally sits down with his daughters while they are eating, but who prefers not to have family dinners. Apparently, his utterly loveable daughters are insufferable at the dinner table.

As I mentioned, one primary reason people do not have family dinners is the absence of decorum at the dinner table. If we ask where children learned how not to behave, one does not need to look very far.

In the meantime, Kluger tries to justify himself by blaming his daughters. Their behavior, he suggests, is so bad that they are a horror at the dinner-table.

In his words:

It’s not that my wife and I don’t eat with our daughters sometimes. We do. It’s just that it often goes less well than one might like. For one thing, there’s the no-fly zone surrounding my younger daughter’s spot at the table, an invisible boundary my older daughter dare not cross with touch, gesture or even suspicious glance, lest a round of hostile shelling ensue.

There is too the deep world-weariness my older daughter has begun bringing with her to meals, one that, if she’s feeling especially 13-ish, squashes even the most benign conversational gambit with silence, an eye roll, or a look of disdain so piteous it could be sold as a bioterror weapon. Finally, there is the coolness they both show to the artfully prepared meal of, say, lemon sole and capers — an entrée that is really just doing its best and, at $18.99 per lb., is accustomed to better treatment.

If there is a special virtue to holding regular dinners, and if Kluger sees fit to deprive his daughters of this beneficial activity, he might have had enough grace not to blame them.

After all, Kluger’s daughters are children and children have feelings too. Is there any good reason to hold them both up to ridicule in a major national publication? Who knows when they might discover their father’s harsh judgment of their behavior? Who knows what their friends might say?

Kluger is entitled to refuse to eat dinner with his children. It may not be for the best, but, until he wrote his article, no one was paying it much mind. And yet, justifying his dereliction by blaming his daughters is very bad form.

The Importance of Family Dinners

Nearly two decades ago I wrote a book called Saving Face. In it I pointed out the importance of family dinners, as a bonding ritual that was essential to social cohesion and good mental health.

Over the years I have posted about the topic on this blog. Link here.

As a rule, eating together is always better than eating alone. People undertake all manner of diets, but they should realize that eating with other people helps in controlling appetite. Those who are struggling with their appetite would do better if they got into the habit of eating with other people.

If it’s just you alone in a struggle with your appetite, the chances are you are not going to fare very well.

As it happened, Freud also contributed to this problem. By this theories, weaning an infant from the breast is the decisive event in the development of eating habits. Freud suggested that human beings are tormented by a perverse desire to return to the breast. They suffer under a mental struggle between their appetite and the socially-imposed need to control it. Thus, he posited a dialectical conflict between an impulse to express a forbidden lust and its repression.

Nothing in Freud’s theory grants a positive value to table manners and family dinners.

Now, social scientists have researched the subject and have again demonstrated that family dinners, eating with other people, contribute significantly to your well being.

Cody Delistraty reports in The Atlantic:

Using data from nearly three-quarters of the world’s countries, a new analysis from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that students who do not regularly eat with their parents are significantly more likely to be truant at school. The average truancy rate in the two weeks before the International Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test administered to 15-year-olds by the OECD and used in the analysis as a measure for absenteeism, was about 15 percent throughout the world on average, but it was nearly 30 percent when pupils reported they didn’t often share meals with their families.

Children who do not eat dinner with their parents at least twice a week also were 40 percent more likely to be overweight compared to those who do, as outlined in a research presentation given at the European Congress on Obesity in Bulgaria this May. On the contrary, children who do eat dinner with their parents five or more days a week have less trouble with drugs and alcohol, eat healthier, show better academic performance, and report being closer with their parents than children who eat dinner with their parents less often, according to a study conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

In one sense this shows that intact families provide a better environment for child development.

But, what does it mean to have an intact family and why do some aspects of family life—like family dinners—exert such an important developmental influence?

The answer to those questions lies in the fact that family dinners are routines that require full participation of all family members. It's one thing to be a member of a family. It's quite another thing to participate actively in family life.

When members of the family can, several times a week, put aside temptation and self-interest in order to consume food in a disciplined fashion, to practice self-control, good table manners and conversation… they gain an important psychosocial benefit.

It is also true that, nutritionally speaking, much of what people eat when they eat alone is less healthy than what they eat when their meals are prepared at home.

The former usually involves fast-food and food carts. The latter usually requires parental involvement.

Thus, from Delistraty:

There are two big reasons for these negative effects associated with not eating meals together: the first is simply that when we eat out—especially at the inexpensive fast food and take-out places that most children go to when not eating with their family—we tend not to eat very healthy things. As Michael Pollan wrote in his most recent book, Cooked, meals eaten outside of the home are almost uniformly less healthy than homemade foods, generally having higher fat, salt, and caloric content.

Fat Shaming and Family Dinners

The headline blares from the Daily Mail:

Over half American kids will be obese by 35: Report reveals more than 57% of children are dangerously unhealthy

• Current eating and exercise trends are making children unhealthy
• Even those who are currently normal weight face high obesity risk
• The study by Harvard University warned the boom in adult obesity in a couple of decades will cost America billions more in healthcare costs

To be fair, if half of America’s children are still children when they are 35, obesity will be the least of their problems.

But, I digress.

At least, we have overcome fat-shaming. Didn’t the Tiger Mom declare that she felt no guilt whatever for telling her daughters to lose a bit weight, even if that meant calling them “fatty.” As Amy Chua put it, America’s parents refuse to fat-shame, but are bringing up children who have serious weight problems. Duh?

How did we get to this point?

Julie Gunlock suggests that it might—it just might—have something to do with Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity crusade. Could it be that the campaign to force children to eat what Michelle Obama wanted them to eat has failed? I know it's hard to believe.

Gunlock comments on the Daily Mail story:

That's interesting considering all the work Former First Lady Michelle Obama did to reduce the number of overweight children. She completely revamped the school lunch program (which resulted in inedible food being served to kids and a massive and very embarrassing food waste problem). She launched "Let's Move" in an effort to get kids moving. She beat up on food companies for producing what consumers demand and backed food activist demands to add more and costly labels to foods and restaurant menus. She pressured grocery stores to stop stocking certain food items and even criticized advertisers for putting food ads on television.

What went wrong?

Gunlock suggests that the Obama administration tried to solve the problem by giving the government power over people’s lives. It took eating out of the home and family, thus undermining family structure. So much for family dinner or family breakfast:

Instead, the Obama administration sideline parents and encourage them to pass off their child's nutritional development to the state—in this case the school lunch lady. In fact, under the Obama Administration, the school dinner program expanded from a small federal pilot program serving 13 urban areas to a national program serving all schools. So, now, kids can have three full meals served at school--breakfast lunch and dinner.

And what has that gotten us? More chubby kids.

Apparently, the Obama administration failed to notice that consuming victuals is a family ritual.  And that children control their appetite best when they regularly eat with other members of their family. It is not just a question of calories and globules of far. For undermining the family and especially the security a child feels when he has a consistent and structured mealtime the Obama administration failed America’s children and pushed them toward adult obesity:

There's a high cost to parents ceding their child's nutrition--and kids are paying that price. Childhood obesity studies overwhelmingly show that family meals, limiting television viewing, and getting kids to bed at a reasonable hour are the real keys to helping kids eat right and maintain a healthy weight. A home-packed meal is a part of that.

So maybe, given these latest grim childhood obesity numbers we can hold off on yet again expanding these useless government feeding programs and do something new and cutting edge--encourage parents to take responsibility for feeding their own children.

Home-Cooked or Take-Out

You would think that everyone knows how important family dinners are. Yesterday I posted about a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics. It demonstrated that, for children, family dinners are a good antidote to bullying. Add to that the mental health advantages of family dinners and you would have a great deal of difficulty finding detractors.

Yet, detractors there are. The issue, as the detractors see it, is home-cooked meals. Apparently, these are a burden to women. Strangely enough, after four decades of feminism women are still charged with preparing meals.

Obviously, nothing says that family dinners must be home-cooked. Nothing says that the family dinner cannot be pizza or take-out Chinese.

Even if we accept that home-cooked meals are better for everyone’s health, one suspects that they are more economical than take-out.

Now, as though to provide grist for my mill, feminist zealot Amanda Marcotte has presented the case against home-cooked family dinners. What Marcotte really, really wants is more male participation in food preparation, but she does not consider the fact that when two people are in charge the process might become more chaotic and disorganized.

Marcotte seems unaware of the mental health benefits of family dinners. In this paragraph she presents her idea:

The home-cooked meal has long been romanticized, from ’50s-era sitcoms to the work of star food writer Michael Pollan, who once wrote, “far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention.” In recent years, the home-cooked meal has increasingly been offered up as the solution to our country's burgeoning nutrition-related health problems of heart disease and diabetes. But while home-cooked meals are typically healthier than restaurant food…sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton from North Carolina State University argue that the stress that cooking puts on people, particularly women, may not be worth the trade-off.

To sustain their argument the North Carolina researchers paint a picture of America as a third-world country. Reading it you wonder how all of that food stamp money is being spent.

In Marcotte’s words:

Low-income women often don't have the money for fresh produce and, in many cases, can't afford to pay for even a basic kitchen setup. One low-income mother interviewed “was living with her daughter and two grandchildren in a cockroach- and flea-infested hotel room with two double beds,” and was left to prepare “all of their food in a small microwave, rinsing their utensils in the bathroom sink.” Even when people have their own homes, lack of money means their kitchens are small, pests are hard to keep at bay, and they can't afford “basic kitchen tools like sharp knives, cutting boards, pots and pans.”

One might suggest that the breakdown of the traditional family structure, the rise of matricentric families, of families without fathers, might have something to do with said living conditions, but Marcotte does not go there.

When men are around, they are, according to the researchers and to Marcotte, a bunch of whiners:

The women interviewed faced not just children but grown adults who are whiny, picky, and ungrateful for their efforts. “We rarely observed a meal in which at least one family member didn’t complain about the food they were served,” the researchers write. Mothers who could afford to do so often wanted to try new recipes and diverse ingredients, but they knew that it would cause their families to reject the meals. “Instead, they continued to make what was tried and true, even if they didn’t like the food themselves.” The saddest part is that picky husbands and boyfriends were just as much, if not more, of a problem than fussy children.

One might imagine that these children, to say nothing of the adults, lack decorum and have never learned good table manners. The absence of gratitude is always demoralizing.

Once upon a time Betty Friedan launched second-wave feminism by comparing suburban homes to “comfortable concentration camps.” It was an idiotic analogy, one that Friedan eventually walked back.

But apparently, the notion that feeding your family healthy foods is akin to being imprisoned in a concentration camp lingers in the shadows of some feminist minds.

I accept that in families where people have not learned any manners and where they believe that they should express their feelings openly, honestly and shamelessly dinner verges on anarchy. But if we are to blame unruly children and whiny husbands let’s also understand that women have been led to believe that preparing a meal for a family is a form of domestic servitude. It might be the case that they complain about their roles.

Feminists are within their rights to call out bad behavior in men and children. But they should also think about their own role in this supposed debacle. Didn't they want to make the kitchen into place for class struggle in the culture wars? They are not quite as saintly as Marcotte would like.

And yet, in the study I cited yesterday families did manage to have family dinners. And these dinners were apparently sufficiently civil to provide a measurable psychological benefit for children.

The study Marcotte cites suggests otherwise, but one suspects that its evidence was selected to buttress an ideology and to give women a reason for more righteous complaining. 

Dalrymple on Culture

Confucius said that community is bound together by ritual and ceremony. It’s not about what you think or how you feel. Human community is forged by active participation in rituals and ceremonies. It does not, at first, even matter whether you believe in what you are doing. The key is to be there and to do it.

By participating, people assert and produce the reality of community and affirm their place therein.

It’s a nice thought; it feels so bland that we tend to pay it lip service.

When I was writing my book about Saving Face, I started looking for a concrete example that would make the idea more persuasive.

Finally, I came up with the family dinner.

Families that participate in this ritual affirm everyone’s place in a social grouping. Better yet, they build character.

Regular family dinners do more to help children than quasi-therapeutic encounters with family members who are too rushed and too self-absorbed to sit down together for dinner.

Yesterday, these thoughts came back to me as I was reading a 2005 interview that Theodore Dalrymple’s did at the time his book Our Culture: What’s Left of It appeared. (Via Maggie’s Farm.)

Being a British physician and social commentator, Dalrymple usually limits his comments to what is happening on his side of the pond.

In the course of his interview he noted that the ritual of family dinners has fallen into desuetude in Great Britain. He added an analysis of the consequences.

In Dalrymple’s words:

About half of British homes no longer have a dining table. People do not eat meals together - they graze, finding what they want in the fridge, and eating in a solitary fashion whenever they feel like it (which is usually often), irrespective of the other people in the household.

This means that they never learn that eating is a social activity (many of the prisoners in the prison in which I worked had never in their entire lives eaten at a table with another person); they never learn to discipline their conduct; they never learn that the state of their appetite at any given moment should not be the sole consideration in deciding whether to eat or not. In other words, one's own interior state is all-important in deciding when to eat. And this is the model of all their behaviour.

Young patients now eat in doctors' offices; they eat above all in the street, where of course they drop litter as unselfconsciously as horses defecate. This is not evil, though it is antisocial, but you can easily see how people who attach such importance to their own desires, and lack any other criteria to help them decide to behave, come to do evil.

With the loss of the family dinner people have lost a primary means of socialization and self-discipline.

When eating is no longer part of a social bonding ritual, you are no longer functioning as a social being. You have become your appetites. You eat to satisfy hunger, but for no other reason.

The personal replaces the social; satisfying an impulse replaces asserting the good of the group.

I suspect that these new eating habits numb people to sensations. When you are merely a creature of appetite you are going to feel isolated, alone and rejected. The attendant feelings of demoralization will produce depression, and depression will kill your appetite and your ability to feel pleasure.

The loss of ritual does not make us more ravenous and does not fill our lives with more gusto. It numbs us to sensation.

Dalrymple says that people today seek out bigger and better thrills because they are bored. They would be suffering from what Baudelaire called: ennui.

In his words:

One reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British, if not the whole of Western, society, is the avoidance of boredom. For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men - that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring.

In a world that has made a fetish out of feeling, it is worth noting that more and more people require excessive stimulation to feel anything.

Dalrymple makes one other point that is worth underscoring, if only because it also echoes an idea we owe to Confucius.

The Chinese sage stated that society cannot function if people do not use words properly. If a “cow” is one thing to you and one thing to me, we cannot have a real conversation about “cows.” We will never connect if we are unsure of what we are talking about.

Similarly, you cannot do business with someone if you do not know what he means when he says that he will deliver the goods tomorrow. 

In a community where words are used correctly people do not haggle over levels of meaning. They do not require contracts to define all transactions. They trust each other because they are both using words correctly. They know that when you say that you will be there at 4 you will be there at 4.

Confucius called it “the rectification of names.” Dalrymple describes what happens when, in the name of communist ideology or political correctness, people are forced to use words incorrectly, to state as facts things they know to be untrue.

In his words:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

In the published interview Dalrymple does not offer examples of what he means here.

Some examples pop into mind immediately. When schools tell children that they are the best, and when they insist that everyone go along they are simply trafficking in lies. 

And this tends, as Dalrymple notes, to humiliate, thus to demoralize and depress.

When we are told that men are women are the same, that there is no fundamental difference between a man’s experience and a woman’s and when we are, as was the unfortunate Larry Summers, excoriated for thinking that there might be biological differences between men and women, we are being forced to assert a lie.

We are being forced to act the fool in public, to the detriment of our emotional well-being.

Social Disconnection in the Time of Pandemic

Yesterday, Niall Ferguson wrote in the Times of London that we are facing “a new anomie,” a social disconnection that has been enforced in order to save us from the virus, but that will not easily be overcome.

French sociologist Emile Durkheim conjured the concept of anomie in a book about Suicide over a century ago. Strictly speaking, the terms means, rulelessness or normlessness. It refers to situations where we do not know our place in society, do not know the rules or the players, do not know where we fit or even whether we fit. Durkheim declared that anomie was one of the three reasons people commit suicide. The other two are egotism-- to punish other people-- and altruism-- to do the world a favor by exiting it.

For further discussion of anomie, and to show that I did not discover it yesterday, see my book: The Last Psychoanalyst.

Today, George Friedman offers a more detailed analysis of what we are losing socially. Few have really grasped the psychosocial aspects of the current social distancing, so it is worth our trouble to study Friedman on this issue.

On his first point, I will take slight exception. He says that the root of sociability lies in the family:

At its core, the social is the family. The functioning of the family assumed that children would go to school, one or both parents would go to work, and all would have periods of being alone, or being in other places with other people. 

He adds that homes run according to rules. They follow rituals. And yet, they were not designed, and have never been designed to be a place where people could spend all their time.

Human beings mediate their relations with other people through rituals — sometimes called manners and sometimes having no name at all. We know the rituals in our home. We know what will make mom and dad sad, we know how to come to dinner, and we know when we may disappear into our rooms to chat online. When we look at social organization, the family, dysfunctional or robust, is the most intense experience we have, and that experience is filled with safety valves, ritualized opportunities to be free of the family. This may be school, work, parties, whatever.

But then, the effort to make the home the unique center of our lives has produced conflict and friction. Home is not designed to educate children, to do business… all the while sheltering and feeding people. 

Friedman explains:

If social distancing and the economic crisis will have a social impact, it will be sensed first in the most delicate seismograph humans have: the home. Nowhere are the stresses so intense and continuous, nowhere are the safety valves so essential and rigidly prescribed. So when the medical structure requires that families dramatically alter their behavior, and the economic system generates such fear and uncertainty, the pressures are first felt in the family. Outside the family the pressures can be diffused, but now the family is the only sphere there is, and it becomes the sum of all fears, a place whose releases have been closed down.

The social system, including the family, has endured through the first month of social separation quite well. Gallup polls show happiness and contentment at normal levels. But under the hood, we can see the first signs of dysfunction. The secretary-general of the United Nations, for example, has issued a warning that domestic violence is surging. There have been scattered reports coming in as well, from Italy to Ohio.

When home rituals have been designed to function in the absence of certain family members, their presence is disruptive. Some people will feel as though their territory is being violated by alien invaders. Some people will have difficulty producing new rituals and new routines.

Friedman continues his analysis:

Family violence, normally man against woman, secondarily either against children, is a constant reality. Individuals who are psychologically dysfunctional, and families that are fractured, cause a constant and predictable level of family violence. When violence surges globally, it is unlikely that the numbers are being cooked, and unlikely that the violence is coincidental. There are two forces at work. First, homes and apartments are frequently built with the expectation that a substantial amount of time will be spent outside. They are not designed for constant occupation by all. The pressure of 24-hour intimacy coupled with a situation that has no clear endpoint can create tension between even the most loving families. And many families are not particularly loving. These are the ones that explode first, most without violence, all with a high degree of rancor that can’t be escaped. In some cases both parents are home without work. The parents must finally face each other, along with their unruly children. The family explodes inside of walls from which there is no escape. Family violence is not the norm. It is simply the first statistically collectible indicator. Many or most families will accommodate with love. But some won’t.

My only difference with Friedman is that I do not believe that the family is not the cornerstone of social life. We are being forced to make it thus, during the pandemic, and the fallout suggests that it is not.

At its core, the social does not begin within the family, then to branch out into the world. I would say that, at its core, the basis for social life is interfamilial, not intrafamilial. It lies in the relationships between families. After all, marriage, to take the obvious, is an alliance between families. By definition, people are not allowed to keep marriage within a single family.

Among the most important things we lose during social distancing is social connection. Depriving people of their everyday interactions with friends, colleagues and even strangers makes them slightly crazy. Depriving them of their bearings in the outside world will also make them slightly crazy. It undermines their mental health because it disconnects them from others and makes them feel like outcasts, like pariahs. Thus, it produces the peculiar anomie that arrives when people do not receive the moral sustenance that they gain by leaving the home, going to the office, interacting with the porter and assistants and managers… these affirmations of one’s social being get lost when we all shelter in place.

Friedman notes the importance of social interactions. More importantly, he sees that they function as a series of ritual behaviors, formal gestures that show us that we belong to a group and are among friends. If we do not have constant affirmation that we are among friends, we might be among enemies. And if we are among potential enemies, our default will be distrust, not trust. And when our default is distrust, things fall apart.

On the broadest level, the social is our mingling with strangers, from going to the movies, to standing in line and chatting, to discussing the purchase of a computer with a salesman. There are a billion kinds of social interactions, and each has its rituals. We know how to find a seat in a movie, and how to excuse ourselves as we pass by those already seated. We know how to appear amiable and unthreatening when standing in line. We understand the rituals when buying a computer, the carefully crafted pretense of knowing what you are talking about.

I will also recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Talking to Strangers, for its clear presentation of the importance-- and the risks-- of defaulting to trust. As Gladwell puts it, we assume and have an interest in assuming that people are telling us the truth, even when we suspect that they are lying. The reason is: that if we don't place social connection ahead of individual self-fulfillment, nothing will ever get done.