Family Dinners

As a family therapist, I often have the impulse to tell families to go home and have dinner together rather than spend 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.