Raising Healthy Children: The Importance of Family Meals¹

Anghela Z. Paredes and Karla P. Shelnutt²

Family meals, regardless of whether they're consumed at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, provide the opportunity for family members to spend time enjoying good food and each other's company. For many families, mealtime may be the only time when they have a chance to come together as a unit and to share quality time. Eating meals together provides a great opportunity to create and strengthen family bonds as everyone shares stories about the events of the day, plans for the next few days or other things that family members want to talk about. Unfortunately, the average number of meals shared by families per week has decreased over the years. This publication highlights the benefits of family meals and provides strategies to help families increase the number of meals they eat together.

Why should families eat together?

One of the major barriers to having family meals is difficulty scheduling a time that everyone can be present. School and work schedules, and extracurricular activities, can make it difficult for families to find time to eat together. Even if every family member is not available for every meal, families should strive to eat together as often as possible. Eating meals as a family has been associated with healthful dietary patterns. For example, in a recent study, an average of 0.8 more servings of fruits and vegetables were consumed by families who ate dinner together every day compared to families that did not eat dinner together. They also had higher intakes of important nutrients such as dietary fiber, calcium, folate, vitamins B₆, B₁₂, C and E, and iron, and they were less likely to eat fried foods and drink soda.

Family meals also provide an opportunity for family members to come together, strengthening the ties within the family unit. Eating meals with family members can be viewed as a time for togetherness and socialization with members of the family.

Children from families who eat together on a regular basis are more likely to have more family support, positive peer influences, and positive adult role models. Family meals provide an environment that encourages communication, thus increasing communication between the child and caregiver. The building of relationships and family connectedness allows children to trust and to depend on their caregivers for support. Researchers have shown that family connectedness is associated with decreased engagement in high-risk behaviors such as substance use and violence, and fewer psychological problems, including emotional distress in children.

Researchers also found that characteristics such as having a positive view of one's future, being motivated and engaged in school, being committed to learning, having positive values and positive identity were positively related to family dinner frequency. Families that had five to seven family dinners per week were three times more likely to report having family support, positive family communication, and parental involvement in schools. Thus, eating family meals is not only associated with improvement in the nutritional quality of the diet, but also improvements in the overall well-being of the child.

Tips for making and eating more meals together

The following are tips on ways to involve family members, including children, in sharing family mealtime:

Make family meals a priority in your household. Focus on the importance of being together as a family more than on making an elaborate meal.
Start with small steps. Try increasing the number of family meals by one extra meal a week. Small steps can lead to large rewards.
As a family, plan a menu for the week and make a grocery list. Using weekly grocery store ads to design meals for the week and clipping appropriate coupons are great ways to work together to keep costs down.
Let children gather food needed for making the meal from the cabinets, pantry, or the refrigerator.
Let children mix foods together or stir food in a pot with appropriate supervision. If the oven is needed, kids can set the temperature or grease a pan.

• Ask your child to help set the table.

Work as a family to clean up after dinner, making it FUN!
Select family-friendly recipes that give everyone an important task to do. This will teach children about the importance of family togetherness and team work, both of which help the job get done faster.
Design conversation cards. These cards can be used to start conversation at the dinner table just in case there is quiet time.
Turn off the TV! Instead, use the time to talk about each other's day.

Learn More

To get more information about family meals, contact one of the following reliable sources in your county:

Cooperative Extension Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) Educator (look in the blue pages of your telephone book). Florida Extension offices are listed online by UF/IFAS at http://solutionsforyourlife.ufl.edu or http://SolutionsForYourLife.com/map.
WIC nutritionist at your county Health Department (also in the blue pages of your telephone book).

For referral to a registered dietitian (RD) in your area you can call the Florida Dietetic Association at (850)386-8850 or check the yellow pages of your phone book.

Recommended Websites

• Family Day—A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children™ is a national movement to inform parents about the importance of family dinners in the lives of their children. The site offers tools caregivers can use to raise children in a drug free environment, and a family dinner kit. http://casafamilyday.org/familyday/

Meals Matter is a site that contains a database of recipes, with a specific category for kid-friendly recipes. It offers a daily meal planner, and it presents healthy meal planning resources that provide nutritional information for a variety of meals. http://www.mealsmatter.org/
The Power of Family Meals offers thousands of recipes for families. The site also delivers information on why mealtime matters and its implications on children. Once families sign up for free, they have access to 'My Recipe Box' where they can collect recipes found on the site. http://www.poweroffamilymeals.com/default.aspx

Footnotes

This document is FCS8925, one of a series of the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida. Original publication date June 2010. Visit the EDIS website at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu.

Anghela Z. Paredes, dietetic intern, Master of Science Dietetic Intern Program, Food Science and Human Nutrition Department; Karla P. Shelnutt, PhD, RD, assistant professor, Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences; Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences; University of Florida; Gainesville 32611.

The Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) is an Equal Opportunity Institution authorized to provide research, educational information and other services only to individuals and institutions that function with non-discrimination with respect to race, creed, color, religion, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, political opinions or affiliations. For more information on obtaining other extension publications, contact your county Cooperative Extension service.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Cooperative Extension Service, University of Florida, IFAS, Florida A. & M. University Cooperative Extension Program, and Boards of County Commissioners Cooperating. Nick T. Place, Dean.