Greater Good

This posting is about how to make chow-time a powerful ritual for kids—and how doing so will make them happier people.

At least in my family, dinnertime is really our only daily family ritual. Rituals are any kind of routine that has symbolic or expressive meaning. They are important because they illustrate our values—kids know intuitively that we celebrate or ritualize the things we believe are most important. There are two reasons dinnertime can be important for your kids' well-being:

1: It makes them feel that they are a part of something larger than themselves (that would be your family). As I've said before, 50 years of happiness research has consistently told us that human happiness is all about meaningful social connections. Kids need to feel a part of their family on a daily basis, and dinnertime is a terrific way to accomplish this.

Running out of things to talk about? Start telling your kids some family history. Research shows that telling stories about your shared past creates strong and secure emotional bonds, which directly impacts how well families are functioning. Turns out this study also found that kids who knew a lot about their family history learned it at dinnertime.

I also try to think about what the way we get dinner on the table says symbolically about our family. We sit together at the table to literally create a family circle. And we try to get dinner on the table as a team. We try to cook as a team, even if it just means having Molly press start on the microwave and Fiona wash the lettuce. (Even if it takes longer, involves nagging someone to set the table, and everyone is starving and cranky.) We try clean up together, too, though again it is often tempting to let the kids leave the table while the adults hang around and talk. The idea is to show our children that this is the way that we care for each other on a daily basis.

Sometimes it definitely is easier to do the mom-as-waiter/personal chef routine. But when we wait on our children the symbolic meaning is that they are passive actors who are entitled to our service—rather than lucky and active participants in a larger whole.

2: Dinnertime can habitually evoke positive emotions for everyone at the table. The easiest way to do this is to say grace. If you aren't especially religious, make it a general blessing or a toast—invent your own family tradition. In terms of this conversation, it's not important that it be about God. A blessing is an incredible opportunity to habitually cultivate positive emotions. Think about it:

1) Usually you are expressing some sort of gratitude or appreciation for the food (my kids often spontaneously give thanks for bigger things – like "being in this world"). Gratitude is a positive emotion about the past.

2) A blessing (or a toast or whatever) can at the same time be a moment of contentment—joy that comes from hearing a little girl give thanks, gladness that comes from all being together. Contentment, joy, gladness: these are positive emotions about the present.

3) Saying grace can also be an act of faith, which is a form of optimism and positive emotion about the future.

4) Joining hands around a table is an act of love. It says I care enough about you enough to share this meal with you. Love is a positive emotion about others.

If a happy life is defined as one that is full of positive emotions, a blessing at dinnertime is a powerful tool for cultivating happiness.

I am often asked if there are other things a family can do instead of have dinner together that will work in the same way – Sunday Parcheesi night or something. But think about all those positive emotions that go with grace – perhaps a nighttime family prayer could work in a similar way, but reading probably wouldn't. And think about all the modeled behaviors we talked about last week. What else could you do that teaches good nutrition and social skills? Plus teaches about family history and establishes a strong sense of belonging? Perhaps storytelling in a circle, as a family. At breakfast.


I fear I'm really pouring on the pressure to have dinner together, and to do it well. I know how darn difficult this can be. Last night I sat at the table with my two daughters eating a Trader Joe's frozen delite thinking: this doesn't feel symbolically meaningful. No one wanted to tell me about their day. I don't think anyone learned any new words. Grace happened, but everyone was curiously thankful for the same things that they were thankful for the night before. There was a lot of complaining about the food and getting out of chairs. But then when I was putting the kids to bed, Fiona told me that dinnertime was one of the three best things about her day. Go figure.

Really, the fact that getting a family mealtime together is so difficult is a big social problem, not an individual one. Our households have shrunk down so much that what used to be a community affair of people working together to get food on the table is know usually the mother's problem. Broad economic forces mean that many people are now at work when a generation ago they would have been eating dinner at home. And countering these forces is hard.

I keep saying that what I really should do is to combine forces with some other families – I live in a neighborhood dense with people I'd love to have dinner with regularly. So long as the adults and children eat together—rather than segregating them at a kids' table as our family is prone to do—we should all reap the benefits of family dinnertime. Friends, please consider this an open invitation to come to my house for dinner.

How do you manage family mealtimes at your house? Lots of people have been sending me emails with comments about these postings. I love to hear from you, and I'd love it even more if you'd post your comments for everyone else's benefit. What other powerful family rituals do you have?

Christine Carter, Ph.D., is a mother of two and the executive director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Find more tips for raising happy kids at greatergoodparents.org.

Last week's video and posting take a look at the benefits of dinnertime and what it is we should model during dinner.

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Last week's video and posting take a look at the benefits of dinnertime and what it is we should model during dinner. This video and the posting that will follow give you the tools to make it happen. Even if you've only got 20 minutes and one parent available, you CAN teach your kids dinnertime rituals that will make them happier people. Seriously!

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Of everything I'll discuss on Half Full, having dinner as a family is one of the most important things. Think of it as concentrated dose of nurture and nourishment, two of the greatest and most fundamental human needs.

The powerful effects of family mealtimes come from two things:

1) Modeling: the dinner table is a place where kids learn important social and emotional skills that they might not have the opportunity to learn elsewhere.

2) Ritual: A family mealtime is a routine rich with meaning that combines the basic human needs of emotional nurturance and physical nutrition.

Last week's video and this posting take a look at the benefits of dinnertime and what it is we should model during dinner. Next week's video, and the posting that will follow, are about some important family rituals we can establish during dinner.

I know that this is a tough topic for families today, who often think about time together the same way starving people think about food. Even if you are managing to feed your kids a reasonably healthy dinner, few of the benefits of family mealtimes are transmitted when parents eat separately from their children, or when we eat in front of the TV.

The Benefits
Kids who eat dinner with their families regularly are more emotionally stable and are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. They get better grades. They have fewer depressive symptoms, particularly among adolescent girls. And they are less likely to become obese or have an eating disorder. Family dinners even trump reading to your kids in terms of preparing them for school. And these associations hold even after researchers control for family connectedness, which means that the benefits of family meals go above and beyond being close-knit as a family.

Why is dinnertime such a powerful tool for raising happy kids? How can we as parents get the most out of it?

Reason #1: Adults model important things during dinner, like…

…Healthy Eating
The most obvious thing that we grown-ups should be modeling during family mealtimes is healthy eating. Eating a VARIETY of foods is important for health—and physical health is very important for happiness. Unfortunately my kids would prefer to eat mac n' cheese (specifically the shells with white cheddar) 3 meals a day. To say that they resist new foods would be a gross understatement. I read once that this hearty resistance to new foods is an evolutionary trait designed to keep our young from eating anything green or unripe. Which makes it up to us parents to train our children to eat lots of different kinds of foods.

Here's how: Research shows that kids learn to like new foods by watching adults and other kids eating them. Here's the bad news: it's all about repetition. Meaning your kid needs to watch you eat the food, uh, a lot—maybe daily, maybe for years.

Paul Rozin, an anthropologist, traced how kids in Mexico learned to eat spicy foods. Most Mexican babies and toddlers hate spicy foods, but they grow up watching adults eating it and around the time they are 5 or 6 years old they begin enjoying what we Americans would think of as "adult food." What I think is funny about this study is that the family dogs that hang out near the table also learn to eat spicy foods through their owners' modeling—stray dogs that never eat with families but have equal access to spicy foods can't be trained to eat them.


I talk a good game about rarely serving my kids something separate than what the adults are eating, but walking the talk is less of a strength. "My kids eat anything, don't fix them something different!" I say blithely when we're over at friends' houses. Molly gets that adults love kids who eat anything, and when faced with a plate of "new" food, she'll pretend to take a bite and then will declare with gusto, "I LOVE CUCUMBER RAVIOLIS!" to which all the adults ooo and ahh and say things like, "Golly, I wish Jack would eat spinach pudding!" Nine times out of 10 Molly hasn't even tasted anything.

Second only to eating, cooking is my favorite hobby. So it is a little disheartening when there is no one eager to eat my labor of love without first being bribed or cajoled. Still, what I should do is just expose them to the food (it's on their plate, I'm eating it) and leave it at that. The experts don't recommend the type of encouragement to eat that I am prone to: "Fiona, if you take three bites of that delicious slow-cooked pazole your mother worked so hard to make you can have two Girl Scout cookies for dessert." Nutritionist and psychologist Ellyn Satter gives us a good rule of thumb: "the parent is responsible for the what, when and where of feeding, and the child is responsible for the how much and whether of eating." Hard for me to do, but after about 6 months of always putting salad on my kids plates and then letting them ignore it, they now often eat their salad.

…and Social Skills
So many social skills are learned at the dinner table I hardly know where to begin. The research is really compelling around language development and dinnertime – and language is the most important facet of social intelligence that we have.

A team at the Harvard Ed School wanted to know where children learned the rare words that they had found were particularly good markers of literacy. Of the 2,000 words they were looking for, only 143 of them came from parents reading to their children. More than 1,000 were learned at the dinner table. This is why dinner loses its power when we isolate kid meals from adult meals. My 7-year-old isn't going to be able to teach my 5—year—old all those rare words (though I'm sure she could teach her about 250 euphemisms for, oh, just about any bathroom word). I can only imagine how much worse it will be once they are teenagers.

Manners are a more important social skill than we sometimes think. As a sociologist, I believe that certain social norms teach kids about the emotions that make up a happy life. When I say, "Molly, don't interrupt your sister," I am teaching her about reciprocity and empathy. When they watch me offer a guest the best cut of meat, they learn generosity. Simple acts of gratitude, like saying thank you to someone for passing the salt, are happiness building blocks.

Social skills, including language, are just that – they are skills that are built over time, better learned by example than explicit instruction. Kids develop any skill better if they learn it in a routine situation that feels safe, and the dinner table might just be the best place to teach and learn certain skills. The good news is that there needn't be loads of adults around—single parent families who have regular dinnertime routines reap the same benefits. If you have trouble getting food on the table, check out Leslie Kaufman's plan—and the next video for added incentive.

Christine Carter, Ph.D., is a mother of two and the executive director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Find more tips for raising happy kids at greatergoodparents.org.

Join the Campaign for 100,000 Happier Parents by signing this simple pledge.

Become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook.

Follow Christine Carter on Twitter

Subscribe to the Happiness Matters Podcast on iTunes.

Sign up for the Raising Happiness CLASS!