Too Busy for Home-Cooked Meals? The Benefits of Family Dinner Have Nothing to Do with Food

Busy family schedules? Discover why takeout still counts and how the real benefits of family dinner come from connection, not complex meals.

Between hectic schedules and endless extracurriculars, gathering around the table can feel almost impossible for busy parents. Especially if you’re expecting a pristine home-cooked meal. In this excerpt from Eat, Laugh, Talk by The Family Dinner Project, you’ll discover why what’s on the menu actually matters far less than simple connection—along with practical, real-world strategies for overcoming busy schedules, picky eaters, and mealtime stress to help build happier, more resilient kids.

Why Does Family Dinner Have Such an Impact?

The secret sauce of family dinner isn’t a juicy roast chicken, a perfectly cooked lasagna, or any kind of sauce. It’s actually not about specific foods at all. The real power of family dinner is that it provides a reliable time for parents and kids to connect with one another. Think about it: You separate from your kids each morning and spend about eight to ten hours apart. To eat dinner together is to reconvene, to talk and learn about one another. Dinnertime can be an opportunity for you to detect early problems or conflicts in your child’s life. And if you and your child spend a good deal of time communicating via text message, it’s a chance for face-to-face conversation. Children who feel known by their parents, who have a chance to talk and feel heard, are less prone to depression and anxiety.

Dinner is also a great forum for you and your kids to tell stories, which is the main way we all make sense of the world.

Researchers have found that children who know the stories of their own families are more resilient and have higher self-esteem. Stories about family members who have overcome adversity, fallen in love, immigrated to a new country, had a mischievous pet, lost a job, or started fresh—all these can help kids feel connected to something bigger than themselves. When your kids are young, they often enjoy hearing stories from your childhood. Family stories offer kids perspective about paths and choices they can take—and proof that adults didn’t arrive in the world all-knowing and fully capable. Embedded in stories are lessons about mistakes, risks, and growth. And, of course, stories are an opportunity for humor and laughter.

As an extra bonus, kids who know how to tell stories are also better readers. To draw kids out, ask lots of “how” and “why” questions, rather than questions that can be answered simply with yes or no. In addition, to build empathy and emotional intelligence, asking questions about how people feel helps cultivate a child’s storytelling abilities.

What Is a Family Dinner, Anyway?

Many parents wonder what “counts” as a family dinner and if they are doing enough to get the benefits. Here are some questions I’ve been asked at community dinners and in my family therapy practice:

1. What if only one parent is home for dinner?

A ten-year-old boy whose father was deployed to Iraq asked me at a community dinner held at the Hanscom Air Force Base, “Does it count as family dinner with my father away?” I told him emphatically, “Of course! It’s a family dinner with you and your mother at the table.” As long as there are two family members eating together, experiencing connection, and enjoying one another, that is a family dinner. And it can include extended family!

2. What if it’s takeout?

If the meal is eaten with conversation and storytelling, it’s a family dinner. A takeout dinner may not have the same nutritional value as a home-cooked meal because restaurant food tends to be higher in fat, salt, and sugar. But remember that the food is secondary. The human interaction and connection are paramount.

3. What if the TV is on?

Research suggests that kids tend to eat more calories and fewer fruits and vegetables when the TV is on. And when the TV is on, or when family members are constantly checking their gadgets, it detracts from everyone feeling that they are important and worth listening to. If you and your family occasionally watch a TV program during dinner (such as a special event), or watch the news together, that can be a natural opportunity to spark conversation beyond the usual school day report.

4. What if we can only pull off having dinner once a week, but the research says that it should be five times a week? Should we just forget about it?

No! Often when families have one great meal or one “good enough” meal, they find that they want to have more of them. Even one positive dinner a week can be very beneficial to you and your family.

5. Does it have to be dinner?

No, it doesn’t! In any average week, there are at least sixteen possible times for families to eat together: seven breakfasts, seven dinners, and two weekend lunches. A nighttime snack when you and your kids take a break together, eat fruit, and sip hot chocolate, for example, is another chance to connect and enjoy one another. The goal is not to achieve a magic number. The goal is to find as many opportunities as you can and to make the most of them.

What Gets in the Way, and What Have We Learned from Families and Researchers?

The impediments to family dinner are pretty universal, regardless of income, family composition, or ages of children. These obstacles will almost certainly be familiar:

• Lack of time
• The hard work of making dinner
• Picky eaters
• Too much tension and conflict at the table
• Teens not wanting to eat with their parents

The research summarized at the beginning of this introduction provides the answers to why family dinners are so important. At community dinners held by The Family Dinner Project in firehouses, schools, clinics, libraries, military bases, homeless shelters, and after-school programs, we’ve talked to thousands of parents about how they’ve overcome these common obstacles. While the meat of this book—the fifty-two weeks of recipes, games, and conversations from real families—provides many creative solutions, here is an appetizer, a preview of some of those work-arounds.

1. There’s Just No Time

Kids and parents both feel rushed, stretched thin by hectic work and school schedules, and exhausted by screens that keep us tethered to work around the clock. Against this sped-up backdrop, we need a chance to slow down and decompress more than ever. And to state the obvious, we all have to eat to live, so why not make the most of that fact and eat together?

Flexible Courses

If one parent can’t get home until 8:00, and there are small children who get hungry by 5:00, you might want to consider feeding your family in overlapping shifts. For example, offer your kids a plate of cut-up vegetables, cheese, and some fruit. Then they can be invited to join a full dinner later with you and/or your partner. Or, the kids could eat a whole dinner earlier and the family can sit down together for dessert.

Don’t Forget Breakfast or Late-Night Snack

We’re quite partial to dinner, but any chance for food, fun, and conversation that is reliable and regular may work better for some families. Several years ago, we realized that if you don’t hit the “snooze” on your alarm clock in the morning, there are seven additional minutes for breakfast. We came up with a breakfast program that includes:

• A piece of toast smeared with peanut butter and decorated like an animal with fruit pieces, or a make-it-yourself yogurt parfait.
• A morning playlist of favorite songs, or notepads on the table to write notes for one another’s lunch boxes.
• Look-ahead conversation starters, like forecasting the day with weather analogies.

Additionally, families have often found that making breakfast foods like pancakes or scrambled eggs for dinner can be a big time-saver and stress reliever—and kids love the switcheroo.

Push Back on the Culture of Commitments

Some families get together and take a stand against excessive time commitments at their kids’ schools. We’ve met some who talked to a soccer coach or band leader to ask if the schedule could be changed so that kids could participate in family dinners. We’ve heard of parents insisting that their children let go of an activity that meets during the dinner hour because the nightly mealtime is more important than an extracurricular activity. If your family is feeling overbooked, you may want to review your commitments and see if any can be adjusted.

2. It’s Too Much Work

Historically, women have shouldered the lion’s share of family prep. Today, men are much more likely to participate. Between 1965 and 2008, men nearly doubled the amount of time they spent cooking; 42 percent of men now cook. Of course, total equality in the kitchen has not been achieved, but family dinner can provide an opportunity to move in that direction. It’s a good idea to get your kids to help out too, both to teach them life-sustaining skills of cooking and because it’s good for their well-being.

In a survey of 1,000 children ages eight to eighteen, researchers found that kids’ participation in cleanup was correlated with good feelings. In fact, pitching in on the workload was found to be as helpful as having a good conversation. Since the main benefits of family dinner come from what happens once the food comes to the table, here are some ideas about how to lighten the labor.

Make Double Batches

This is a practice used by many families to great success. Over the weekend or on a night when there is a little extra time and energy, make a double or triple batch of a soup, stew, or chili. Freeze the extra batches. Then, when the meal is defrosted the following week, it’s as though you have a sous chef who did the work for you.

Cook with What’s on Hand

If you get in the habit of keeping your pantry stocked with staples such as pasta, tomato sauce, Parmesan cheese, eggs, rice, and lemons, prep time can be dramatically reduced. Every cook needs to have a few meals that can be thrown together with essentials that put you completely at ease and eliminate the need for a cookbook or grocery store run. Sauté an onion and whatever veggies you have on hand, crack some eggs into the pan, shred some cheese, and pop the whole thing in the oven for ten minutes. This is a one-pan meal I can make in my sleep. Many parents have a trusty, go-to pasta dish, or a farro or rice bowl with leftover vegetables that will do in a pinch.

Use Shortcuts

Since the benefits of family dinner don’t depend on food being made from scratch, why not use some shortcuts, like store-bought rotisserie chicken, pre-cut vegetables, or frozen pizza dough? Lots of families have come to rely on slow cookers and Instant Pots, which can be huge time savers. And it’s hard to argue with any meal that comes from a single pot and reduces cleanup!

3. My Family Has “Picky Eaters,” and I Can’t Figure Out How to Make One Meal for Everyone

About 14 to 20 percent of parents report that preschoolers are often or always selective with their food. Sometimes there are medical or developmental reasons for selective eating, but those tend to be the exception.

Broadly speaking, young children have very little control over their lives, and food is one arena where they can exercise some agency. If there are no medical reasons for your child’s pickiness, here are some strategies to try.

Keep Food Talk to a Minimum

The best advice I’ve heard about picky eating came from a nutritionist, Ellyn Satter, who suggests that it’s a parent’s job to choose what healthy food to serve, and when and where it’s going to be eaten. But it’s a child’s job to decide whether and how much to eat. Even though it can be challenging, parents should try to refrain from commenting about how much or how little is being eaten. In fact, the less said about the food, the better. Even seemingly positive commentary can backfire, as it can be heard as taking charge of the eating experience, rather than letting kids decide for themselves what and how much they want to eat.

Want More Real-World Strategies, Conversation Starters, and 52 Weeks of Family Recipes?

^{Excerpt from Eat, Laugh, Talk by The Family Dinner Project.}