This WaPo article talks about the important of the family dinner. I tend to agree with all of it, but I'm one of the biggest offenders against the venerable tradition. How does a person arrange a family dinner, when children have piano lessons, soccer and football practice, Tae Kwon Do--all of which continue past 5:00 or don't even start until 5:30 or later?
I'm open to suggestions, but I suspect the family dinner is a casualty of the emphasis on keeping kids busy at all times. The homework today is excessive; the demands of sports are excessive. But when you're dealing with adults who can't bear to sit in silence for more than ten minutes, who need a constant stream of entertainment and distractions, we can't expect much stillness from their kids.
Family supper . . . isn't just a meal, it's a ritual from which all who participate benefit: "Family supper is important because it gives children reliable access to their parents. It provides anchoring for everyone's day. It emphasizes the importance of the family nonverbally. It reminds the child that the family is there, and that she is part of it."
All of which is true. The family suppers of my own childhood are more than half a century in the past, but they are among my most vivid memories. Actually they were breakfasts, not suppers -- my father was a boarding-school headmaster, and my parents had to be in the school dining room for lunch and supper -- but they served exactly the functions that Weinstein describes. They were regular, routine occasions at which we gathered as a family and functioned as a family: exchanging the trivial news of our lives, hearing tales about ancestors long since dead and relatives in faraway places, picking up bits and pieces of informal but invaluable education. All of the children -- eventually there were four of us -- came away from the table with firm if unconscious knowledge of ourselves as part of a human lineage to which, in time, we would contribute.
