8

Lessons Learned from The Family Dinner Project

The Family Dinner Project is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to helping families use dinner as an opportunity to connect with one another through “food, fun, and conversation about things that matter.”¹ Inspired by the scientific research about the benefits demonstrated among families who eat together, The Family Dinner Project’s mission is to make it easier for more families to reap these benefits.

In 2010, a group of men and women from a variety of backgrounds—all of whom shared a belief in the power of family dinners—started to meet monthly. Our professional backgrounds included education, family therapy, research, design, social work, communication, marketing, and food.² Some of us were experienced home cooks, and others served cereal at dinner. We were mothers, fathers, grandparents, and adults without children. We knew why dinners were important, but we wanted to provide a road map—how do you get from knowing that family dinner is a good idea to the daily practice of cooking healthy foods, and then having a good time at the table?

Of course, we had many beliefs and stories about family dinners from our childhoods, and from raising our own children. Even so, we wanted to learn more, and we hoped to learn from a more diverse group of families than was represented by our little group. So we invited single parents, three-generational families, same-sex parents, stepfamilies, low-, middle-, and high-income families, and families from many different cultural backgrounds to teach us their best tips. Over time, we incorporated many of these ideas into our website, and tested them out with more families at community dinners and parent workshops that we’ve hosted all over the country. The result of this work has been twofold: We offer free online resources that thousands of families are using to have more and better dinners. And we work with families in person, through community-based programs in schools, colleges, community clinics, afterschool programs, and neighborhood groups.

In this chapter, you’ll learn the best practices that we’ve found for making dinners simpler, more fun, and more interesting. You’ll meet some families we’ve worked with, and learn how these families set goals for themselves and then went about achieving them. You’ll read about some of the grassroots organizing we’ve done and maybe you’ll be inspired to host a dinner or workshop in your community. Along the way, you’ll find out what we’ve discovered about the most important ingredients to making change happen.

OUR BEGINNING IDEAS

Behavior change happens in different ways for different families

Making a commitment to having dinner, preparing it, and staying at the table for conversation is a set of behaviors that may need a little tweaking or a total rebooting, depending on the family’s own agenda. Regardless of the amount of change needed, when it comes to getting on the road to changing behavior, individuals differ in the kind of on-ramp they prefer. Some of us get motivated by emotion. We feel in our gut that family dinners are important; we love cooking a delicious meal and having our loved ones eating and talking together. Once we’ve gotten a taste of that feeling, that’s all we need to keep on with family dinners.

Others get going on a new plan through thinking—because the benefits of family dinner, documented by research, make logical sense to us, we feel compelled to set a regular family dinner plan in motion.

Still others form new routines by making step-by-step behavioral changes. Committing to a program, setting goals, being accountable, and tracking one’s progress are essential to creating regular family dinners.

At The Family Dinner Project, we’ve tried to incorporate each path—emotional, cognitive, and behavioral—as an entry point to change. Regardless of the entry point, we hear from all kinds of families that one of the most powerful parts of The Family Dinner Project is that when they sign up to participate, they join a community of families. For many people, being part of something bigger than themselves is the key to change.

Families know best what goals are important to them

Another important idea: Families need to set their own agendas for change. While the scientific research on family dinners sets five nights a week as the gold standard, real families aren’t research subjects. Instead, it’s more important that families make the changes in their dinner habits that are meaningful to them. Some families set a goal of having dinner twice a week, while others are already having dinner every night of the week but want to have more fun at the table. Still others want the work of shopping, planning a menu, cooking, serving, and cleaning up to feel more equitable.

We meet families where they are. By asking each family member what he or she would like to improve, we also begin to shift the focus from a parent in charge to everyone feeling a sense of agency. So, let’s start with where you are, and where you’d like to be. The goal sheet we give to families who sign up online or who work with us in person is shown in the box on page 142.

Parents are innovators

At The Family Dinner Project, we believe that in any community, parents—not professionals or our team members—are each other’s best advisors. If families are the real experts on how to make dinners better, then our job is to get families talking together and sharing the best practices that we’ve learned in meeting with families all over the country. When we ask families about their dinner challenges, we tend to hear the same ones regardless of the community—not enough time to cook, family members who won’t try new foods, a tight budget, conflict at the table, and busy schedules that interfere with the dinner hour. While the challenges are often the same, the solutions that families come up with are creative, novel, and specific.

Dinner is about more than food, though food brings us to the table

Food is usually the gateway to better dinner rituals. Often, when parents start with a focus on improving the food, they find that other parts of the dinner start to change, like the liveliness of the conversation.

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM OUR FIRST PILOT FAMILIES

When we first started The Family Dinner Project, we relied on our own experiences with and our research about family dinners to build a library of tips and resources that we posted on our website. We hoped that these ideas would help other families improve their dinner rituals, but we weren’t sure. So we decided to “road test” the ideas with fifteen families that made a commitment to having at least three meals over the course of three months. To learn what was and wasn’t helpful, we interviewed these families in depth before, during, and after their participation. As part of this pilot, we hosted our first community dinner event with several of these families, where we cooked together, played games, and tried out conversation starters. We learned a tremendous amount from these early participants about what challenges families faced, what helped, and what was realistic to expect from our online program. Two families who gave us a lot of helpful feedback and insight were the Walkers and the Smith-Bells.

Vanessa and Anthony Walker³ are parents to three teenagers living at home and four more who have already left home. Anthony contacted The Family Dinner Project because he was afraid that he was losing touch with his kids. Most nights, he told us, his teenagers bought fast food and ate it while holed up in their bedrooms, watching TV. Finances were tight and the parents struggled to put food on the table. Anthony is disabled and was no longer able to work his job as a professional cook. Vanessa worked during the day and went to nursing school at night, so scheduling family dinners was a challenge, too.

The Walkers’ goals were to have family dinner together at least once a week, and to have more fun. The parents’ first step was to announce to their family that there was going to be a new game plan: They would start eating dinner together. And it would be a home-cooked meal, not Styrofoam boxes with chicken nuggets from a fast-food joint. At first, the kids bellyached and protested. But after a few family dinners things changed.

“They kind of anticipate it,” Anthony explained. “They know it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be a little fun.”

As often happens, one change led to another, so that where they ended up wasn’t where they expected to be.

The Walker parents got things moving by announcing their commitment to family dinner. Other changes soon followed. The parents found ways to get the children excited about dinner. For one meal, each child picked an ingredient—noodles, broccoli, and meatballs—and voilà! A new recipe was created. They also began to make up games at the table. One game, called Thumbs Up to the Chef, involved grading the chef on taste, presentation, and atmosphere. Anthony got the family talking about current events using “old-school verses, new-school rap,” another Walker-invented game. The kids named a current song about something happening in the world right now, and the parents countered with an old song. Vanessa explained further: “By doing this, we can find out how much things have changed and how much they’ve stayed the same over the years.”

After three months, the family that had begun without even a table, and with only an expectation of getting the family together for dinner, got more than it bargained for.

“We got back some of what was lost in the family,” Anthony explained. “Sitting down together, talking, and laughing helped us get back a sense of closeness and family unity.”

The Smith-Bells,⁴ composed of two mothers, a five-year-old son, and one-year-old twin boys, were already eating home-cooked meals together most nights of the week and participating in an organic farm share. Unlike the Walkers, who had just wanted to get the family to sit down for at least one meal a week, the Smith-Bells’ goals were to make the work of food preparation more equitable and to make dinner feel like a strong tradition.

When they started with The Family Dinner Project, Monica complained that most of the cooking fell to her because Nora had more pressing work demands. This imbalance led to tensions between the couple. The first change they made was to prepare more meals in advance on the weekends, when everyone could join in. Even the twins looked on and played with eggbeaters. And five-year-old Connor played an active role in cooking.

In order to make dinner feel more like a tradition, they saved big news to share at dinner. The mothers wanted to make sure that everyone had a fair share in the conversation, as well as with the workload. Nora knew that she was charting new territory that hadn’t been part of her childhood dinners.

“My parents monopolized the dinner-time conversation, and this is one thing that I didn’t want to repeat,” she said. So they developed the practice of lighting a candle that gets passed around the table. When a family member holds the candle, it is his or her turn to talk. The candle not only introduced a way to keep the conversation moving, it introduced a symbol that contributed to making dinner feel special, and like more of a ritual.

As with the Walkers, the Smith-Bells exceeded the goals they’d set for themselves. The initial goal of getting the kids more involved in food preparation led to some surprising and unexpected benefits. One night when Monica was preparing acorn squash with Connor, he asked, “How come it’s green on the outside and orange on the inside?” This led to a lively discussion about other things in life that aren’t always what they seem to be. Including Connor in preparing the meal created an opportunity to discuss a valuable life lesson—you can’t judge a book by its cover or a vegetable by its skin color. Dinner turned out to be a place to talk about everyday ethics.

WORKING ON THE GROUND WITH FAMILIES

The Family Dinner Project has worked with communities all over the country in an effort to share ideas about family dinners, to try out the efficacy of our tips with diverse groups of parents and grandparents, and to learn new tips and recipes from others.

Community dinners

After a year of working with families like the Smith-Bells and the Walkers, The Family Dinner Project began hosting regular community dinners in schools, diners, community centers, college cafeterias, and church halls. Not only did parents and their children attend these dinners but also leaders in the community—parent educators, health clinic nutritionists, clergy, afterschool staff, and teachers—so that they could test-drive our materials and ideas and then use them with the families they work with.

The Family Dinner Project partners set up community dinners for many reasons. A middle school in Cumming, Georgia, used a community dinner to get parents talking about becoming more engaged in school, and for kicking off a parent-supported program about improving literacy. At one community dinner in Red Bank, New Jersey, following the devastating Hurricane Sandy, kids made place mats and sent them to kids in Watertown, Massachusetts, who were having a community dinner; then the Watertown kids returned the favor with a delivery of place mats. The message was clear: Another community is thinking about you and cares about the same things that you do.

At a small college in Vermont, where most students are the first in their families to attend college, we organized a community dinner so that students could talk about the importance of college to local high school kids and their parents, many of who had not attended college. And, in West Concord, Minnesota, the goal of a community dinner was to promote health education in a rural county.

Omar’s Café

West Concord is about a half hour outside of Rochester, Minnesota (home to the Mayo Clinic). You get there by traveling on Route 14, past farms and grain silos, then down a narrow dirt and gravel road. West Concord has fewer than 800 people, but Omar’s Café is a watering hole that attracts diners from all over Dodge County. The sign on the door reads: “Home cooking at its best,” with a retro menu of comfort foods like goulash, chili, and beef noodle soup.

On a warm autumn night in 2012, The Family Dinner Project was invited by the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation to host a community dinner at Omar’s Café. About eight families piled in, each occupying a booth with banquettes.

The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation’s reason for this invitation was to be part of their Community Health Transformation initiative, a wide-reaching plan to introduce a new model of healthcare. The clinic was experimenting with ways to improve health and wellness through a number of innovative practices, including increased community engagement outside of the hospital setting. The aim of the partnership with The Family Dinner Project was to bring people together and showcase the long-term positive benefits of family dinners. The ultimate goal was to transform the experience and delivery of healthcare, and at Omar’s Café that goal started with fajitas.

As families moseyed in after work, they passed tubs of ingredients, ready for assemblage—sautéed vegetables, grated cheese, olives, salsa, hot sauce, and beans. There were about twenty-five participants from all over Dodge County, with children ranging in ages from five to eighteen. There was an elderly couple, too, who worked at a local food pantry. Omar, the café’s longtime owner, remarked that he had never seen such a diverse group of people assembled there before—old and young, low-income and professionals, Latino and Caucasian families.

This dinner event was planned with a structure that mirrored a dinner that families could have at home: Over the course of ninety minutes, participants would cook, talk, and play together. But first we engaged the children as soon as they entered, hoping to tame some end-of-the-day-energy with an invitation to make place mats and to pound on dough to make rolls in the shapes of animals and people. Once each table had place mats and the rolls were ready for baking, we introduced the rationale of the evening—to discuss the emotional, nutritional, and intellectual benefits of family dinner, and to invite this group to share its best practices about how to make dinner happen despite busy schedules and tight budgets.

The families didn’t know one another, so we suggested a quick icebreaker. Each person said his or her name, a favorite family meal, and a favorite thing to do together as a family. Then we plunged into making dinner together. Each table was equipped with a few avocados, a lemon, sour cream, salsa, and garlic so that each family could mash the avocados to create guacamole. With the appetizers done and the rolls hot, each participant took a tortilla and customized fillings for it, choosing among the variety of ingredients laid out.

After everyone had made a couple of fajitas, we suggested a conversation for each family to have over dinner. We asked the children to interview their parents about what dinner was like when the parents were children. These were some suggested questions that kids could ask their parents:

• What was your favorite food when you were a child?

• Who sat where? Can you draw a picture of your childhood dinner table? Did you have a special seat as a child? If so, how was it chosen, and what do you think the seating arrangements convey?

• Who decided the menu? What did you do if there were differences in food preferences? Did kids or parents decide? Were there compromises, turn taking, or multiple meals made?

• Who shopped, cooked, served, and cleaned up? What did you talk about at dinner?

• What do you most want to carry forward or leave behind from those experiences?

After dinner, we asked if anyone wanted to share a story of childhood dinners.

(These questions tend to provide a snapshot of what a childhood was like. So when we reminisce about childhood dinners we are also remembering what was bitter and sweet, sour and salty about our relationships with our parents and siblings. Not every dinner memory is going to be a happy one. But parents don’t need to rely solely on their childhood experiences to build a vibrant dinner practice with their children. Our hope is The Family Dinner Project provides enough resources and ideas to kick-start a commitment to family dinners, even if parents recall their childhood dinner tables with ambivalence.)

When it was time for dessert, the children traipsed off with a few members of our team. Once outdoors, they poured heavy cream into plastic containers. Then they shook the living daylights out of these tubs, passing them from child to child while dancing to music until the liquid cream became whipped cream that could be dolloped onto apple crisp. The children plated up the desserts and served them to their parents, who had been having a conversation about their biggest dinnertime challenges.

Stephanie, a mother of two young children with a husband in school, confided that she was overwhelmed by balancing three different school schedules on top of her own work schedule. Other parents offered their solutions to similar scheduling challenges. Stephanie came away from this dinner with a new idea of a weekly meal planner, suggested by another busy parent, as a way to make the most of limited time available.

During dessert, we suggested the game Two Truths and a Tall Tale (described in Chapter 6). This game is one of many on our website that families can try to make dinner more fun, and so to keep kids at the table longer.

At the very end of the evening, we told the families about The Family Dinner Project’s “Food, Fun and Conversation: 4 Weeks to Better Family Dinners,” which is packed with ideas and resources that we have collected from families all over the country. We asked them to try it in their own homes and then to gather again at Omar’s Café in a month’s time to share their experiences.

The structure of this family dinner has been repeated at community dinners across the country. You can try it, too, at your local elementary school, religious hall, or any other place where your community gathers. It starts with an activity for kids to do when they first arrive, followed by an icebreaker so that everyone gets a chance to say hello. There’s an opportunity to cook together, and then while eating, families are invited to try having a conversation that’s different from the customary “How was your day?”

Next, the children go off with a team member to make dessert so that parents have a few minutes to talk about their own dinner challenges and solutions. Once dessert is served, the families are taught a game to play. At the end of the dinner, families learn about our four–week program, which can extend and expand the experience they have just had. They’re asked to return in a month and share what the experience was like.

THE FAMILY DINNER PROJECT’S FAJITAS (FOR 24)

6 red onions, thickly sliced

12 bell peppers (red, green, or combination), seeded and sliced into strips

2 tablespoons minced garlic

6 yellow squash, halved and sliced into strips

Vegetable oil

3 cups salsa

2 tablespoons ground cumin

3 teaspoons salt

8 (15-ounce) cans black beans, rinsed

48 (8-inch) flour tortillas

6 cups shredded cheddar cheese

1½ cups chopped fresh cilantro

Sauté the onions, peppers, garlic, and squash in vegetable oil in a large frying pan over medium heat for about 10 minutes. In a separate pan, heat the salsa, cumin, and salt for about 5 minutes.

Wrap the tortillas in foil, and heat them in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes. Give each participant two tortillas, and let them fill each one by spooning ingredients evenly down the center of the tortilla. Each person can choose among several options to stuff their tortilla—vegetable mixture, salsa, cheese, and cilantro—or choose them all. Roll up the tortillas, and enjoy.

WHIPPED CREAM WITH BERRIES

4 pints cold whipping cream

Fresh berries or other fruit

Using a plastic container with a tight-fitting lid, fill it halfway (or less) with whipping cream. Put the lid on tightly, and shake, shake, shake! You can pass the container from person to person and encourage jumping, running, singing, dancing, and rolling on the floor while keeping the container tightly closed. Be sure to check after a couple of minutes because if you go too far, you’ll end up with butter.

Dollop some of the whipped cream on sliced berries.

Parent and grandparent workshops

In addition to community dinners, our organization also facilitates parent and grandparent workshops, where only one adult attends, rather than a whole family. This format allows for a smaller group that can potentially reach a greater number of families. For example, we can easily host fifteen adults in a workshop, whereas if those same adults brought along their families, we would have a boisterous group of more than sixty people.

The workshops are usually offered in a package of two. The first focuses on the challenges and solutions to creating a family dinner ritual, relying on the expertise in the group to solve common problems. The second workshop is about learning how to make the most of conversation at the dinner table—interesting conversation starters, ways to deepen the conversation once it starts, suggestions for different types of storytelling, and games to play.

In an after-school community building in Lynn, Massachusetts, ten grandmothers gathered around primary-color rectangular tables to talk about family dinners. This meeting was part of an ongoing weekly gathering of a state-run group for women who are raising their grandchildren. The following week they planned to talk about bringing out the best in their grandchildren. For two hours with us, they compared the obstacles they confronted in getting their families together each night to enjoy a home-cooked meal. Then they brainstormed solutions.

Three members of The Family Dinner Project were along to conduct a workshop we have taken on the road many times before. We started with a check-in or icebreaker so that everyone had a chance to speak about the way family, memory, culture, and food are intermingled like a well-simmered stew. We asked the women, “What is a food memory you have from your family growing up?” Almost everyone offered a memory tied to a special holiday dish, and all the memories were positive ones. Cleo rhapsodized about an Easter treat of sweet beans, milk, and sugar from her home country, the Dominican Republic. It was a dish her grandmother taught her to make. Paula, an African-American woman, described the collard greens and cornbread that “you have to have for any family gathering.” And Pat, a Polish woman, shared her memories of Christmas Eve dinners of beet soup and fish. John Sarrouf, a team member of The Family Dinner Project, who was leading the discussion, commented, “Traditions help us all feel like we belong to something.”

The goal of the meeting was to ask about the challenges these women face at dinnertime and then harness their collective wisdom to generate solutions. I started by asking about what is often the most difficult challenge for any of us: What do you do well? Using a flip chart, Grace, another team member, wrote down the strengths that the grandmothers offered:

• I make time for everybody to sit down together.

• I help create meaningful conversation. My grandchildren feel heard and valued.

• I make a delicious soup that brings everyone to the table.

• I like to make new foods.

• I can cook a meal in forty-five minutes or less.

• My grandchildren want to help or want to learn how to cook.

We then asked about the obstacles to making dinner and keeping everyone engaged. Most of the challenges were variations on the same two themes: the struggle to expand children’s food choices so that the grandmothers aren’t cooking the same meal night after night (or cooking multiple meals to accommodate disparate tastes), and the problem of limited time for cooking given competing responsibilities of work and childcare.

“As wise grandparents, you have all the creativity and skills right here in this group to share with one another in order to solve these challenges,” John explained. The challenges tend to be same at every workshop—not enough time or money, family members who won’t eat the same meal, parents who don’t like to cook, too much nagging at the table.

The group brainstormed ideas to meet the common challenges. In thinking about how to expand children’s food choices, for example, they generated many useful ideas:

• Blend vegetables into a soup to get kids to eat more variety.

• Substitute a fruit for a vegetable, like roast chicken with apples, instead of with carrots.

• Make dinner special by setting the table and lighting a candle.

• Use leftovers to make an interesting new meal. One woman, from the Dominican Republic, offered her recipe for empanadas, which is a great way of reusing food from the night before (see the recipe that follows).

• Involve kids by getting them to help with cooking or shopping.

• Serve raw vegetables for kids to munch on while you’re cooking.

• Put one new ingredient alongside something they already like.

EMPANADAS FROM CLEO

Leftover meat

Leftover vegetables

Guava, peeled, seeded, and chopped

Cream cheese

A stack of disc pastries (find discs in the frozen foods section of the supermarket)

Canola oil (optional)

Add leftover meat, vegetables, or a combination of guava and cream cheese to the center of a pastry disc. Fold the pastry over and seal the edges with a fork or using your fingers.

Fry the discs in canola oil, or place them on a baking sheet and bake in a 350-degree oven for about 10 minutes.

John mentioned an idea he learned from a parent at another workshop: Instead of asking a child to take a bite of a new food, ask him to take a taste, and then describe it. Paying attention to the taste slows down a child’s quick rush to judgment about a new food. This solution isn’t found in textbooks. Rather, it is an example of one parent’s wisdom passed from one community to another.

After the discussion of common challenges and unique solutions, the women moved into the kitchen, where Grace had assembled all the ingredients needed to make lasagna. The grandmothers would take the dish home and serve it for dinner or freeze it for another busy night.

Despite the extra challenges these women faced—strained relationships with the parents of their grandchildren, declining health, and limited budgets—they were eager to try new things to improve family dinners. They agreed to try The Family Dinner Project’s four-week program and meet again in a month for another workshop. At this second session, they planned to share their experiences with the “4 Weeks to Better Family Dinner” program, and also focus on making the most of conversation at the table. Many of the grandmothers exchanged recipes as they headed out the door, lasagna pan in tow.

THE FAMILY DINNER PROJECT’S EASY LASAGNA

15 ounces ricotta cheese

2 large eggs

½ cup Parmesan cheese, shredded

4 cups shredded mozzarella cheese, divided

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil (optional)

3 garlic cloves, minced (optional)

1 (45-ounce) can tomato-and-basil pasta sauce

8 ounces no-boil lasagna noodles

3 cups fresh baby spinach

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease a 13- × 9-inch baking pan.

Combine the ricotta cheese, eggs, Parmesan cheese, ½ cup of the mozzarella cheese, salt, pepper, basil, and garlic in a bowl.

Spread about 1 cup of the tomato sauce at the bottom of the greased pan.

Arrange a layer of lasagna noodles on top (about four noodles will cover the pan). It’s fine if they overlap.

Next, layer ⅓ cup of the ricotta cheese mixture, one-third of the spinach (it will shrink, don’t worry), 1 cup of the mozzarella cheese, and about 1 cup pasta sauce.

Repeat the layering twice more in this order: noodles, ricotta mixture, spinach, mozzarella, and sauce. On top layer noodles, the remaining sauce, and the remaining mozzarella.

Cover with aluminum foil, and bake 40 to 50 minutes. Remove the foil and bake 5 minutes longer to brown the cheese on top. Let stand 5 minutes before serving.

DO-IT-YOURSELF DINNER PARTIES

After participating in community dinners and parent workshops, several families asked us, “What’s next?” In response, we came up with the idea of DIY dinner parties, so that a community of friends could help sustain the practice of family dinners.

You find two other families to share some food, fun, and conversation, and you agree to have three dinners total—one dinner at each family’s house over the course of several weeks. Here is a sample plan for a DIY:

Start with an icebreaker: Ask everyone assembled to tell a favorite family meal memory.

Make an appetizer together: Have one family bring the ingredients to make guacamole.

GUACAMOLE

3 avocados, peeled, pitted, and mashed

1 teaspoon salt

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 lime or lemon, juiced

1 pinch cayenne pepper

Crackers or chips

In a medium bowl, mash together the avocados, salt, garlic, and lime juice. Stir in the cayenne pepper.

Serve with crackers or chips.

Make the main course together: Have one family bring the fixings to make pizzas.

PIZZA (FOR 4 FAMILIES)

2 cups marinara sauce, divided

4 (12-inch) premade pizza crusts

1½ cups Parmesan cheese, divided

Additional toppings (allow for about ½ cup per pizza): pepperoni, peppers, mushrooms, olives, broccoli, spinach, pineapple, or onions

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Spread ½ cup of the sauce over each crust, and then sprinkle each with ¼ cup Parmesan cheese. Add other toppings as desired. Sprinkle the remaining cheese over the toppings on each pizza and then bake for about 10 minutes or until the cheese is bubbling.

Toast: Name one thing you’re grateful for.

Play a game: Charades or Pictionary are possibilities, or another game of your choice.

Include everyone in a conversation: Everyone says a “rose” (the best part of the day) and a “thorn” (the most difficult part of the day).

Make dessert: Have the third family bring the dessert ingredients.

FRUIT AND YOGURT PARFAITS

Nonfat or low-fat vanilla yogurt

Granola

Fresh or frozen berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, or a combination)

Honey

Each guest layers yogurt, granola, and fruit into a small bowl or cup, and then drizzles honey over the top.

Another idea (best in the warm weather) is to text several families or friends in your neighborhood a few hours before dinner: “Bring your dinner to the beach or to a local park, and we’ll all eat together.” Again you are involving your community in the celebration of family dinners.

THE ONLINE PROGRAM: FOUR WEEKS TO BETTER FAMILY DINNERS

Food, Fun and Conversation: 4 Weeks to Better Family Dinners brings together many of the ideas we’ve learned in working with hundreds of families from all over the country. It’s free and available online at thefamily dinnerproject.org.

For each of four weeks, the family is asked to focus on a different aspect of family dinner. The first week is all about making a commitment to family dinners and figuring out what your goals are for better dinners. The second week emphasizes making it simple—or figuring out ways to cut down on the work involved in making dinners. This could include getting everyone to help, pre-making meals over the weekend, or planning meals a week ahead so you can be sure to have all your ingredients on hand. The third week is about making it fun. During this week, families are encouraged to have more fun with cooking and to play games at the table. In week four, families are asked to make it matter, to take advantage of this reliable time of the day when the family can have a group conversation.

We have tracked the progress of about thirty families who filled out a survey before and after their participation in the four-week program.

Overall, this is what we learned:

• The act of signing up for the project was powerful in helping families start to change behaviors. When families felt that they were part of something that involved other people with similar goals, they felt motivated to set goals and stick to them. As one mother put it: “It’s affirming to know that I am part of something, a community.”

• A family’s initial stated goal did not always correspond with the aspect of dinner about which they reported feeling the greatest increase in satisfaction. For example, families that wanted to work on greater food selection and easier dinner preparation ended up feeling best about their improvements in enjoying one another’s company and having fun. Families that wanted to have more fun ended up feeling that they had made the most change in being able to talk about things that matter.

• Nearly every family believed that participating in the four-week program had led to improvements in family dinners.

Since 2010, we’ve helped thousands of families make the changes they want in their dinnertime rituals: Families start to eat healthy dinners where they used to eat only fast food. A parent burdened by making a different meal for each family member learns to engage everyone in the dinner-making process; lo and behold, as a by-product, she gets everyone to agree on eating the same meal. Parents who have grown weary of asking, and kids who have grown weary of answering the same question night after night, discover many ways to enliven the table conversation.

But it’s not only concrete behavioral changes that you can make to your family dinner. You may also want to make some adjustments to repetitive patterns and roles. We’ll turn to these issues in the next chapter.