Do Your Children a Favor: Eat Dinner Together as a Family
September 26, 2006
Did your family eat dinner together yesterday? Since 2001, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) has been celebrating Family Day on the fourth Monday in September. Family Day is a “national effort to promote family dinners as an effective way to reduce substance abuse among children and teens.”
CASA’s full-page ad in Sunday’s Washington Post says in part:Family dinners are more than just sharing a meal. Research by [CASA] consistently finds that the more often children eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs. . . .
The conversations that go hand-in-hand with dinner help parents learn more about their children’s lives and better understand the challenges they face.
I find the Family Day campaign especially encouraging for two reasons. First, the campaign and its underlying research acknowledge that families, in particular parents, play a vital role in the moral education and edification of our young. Why is that apparently obvious fact so important, you may wonder? Generally speaking, it runs directly counter to a key presupposition driving the cultural revolution of The Sixties, when young people were encouraged to throw off the oppressive traditions and morality of their parents (and other social institutions, including government, church, etc.). Youth was celebrated, and escaping the oppression of established institutions was held up as the way to recovering human integrity. Family Day is one small indication that we are realizing or remembering the inherent value of at least one of our social institutions.
Second, the Family Day campaign presupposes that truth – rather than simply being subjective, personal and relative – can be objective, universal and absolute. We hear a lot these days that there is no truth of this latter kind – only self-interest, prejudice and power dressed up as such. Yet, here is a truth claim: children are less likely to smoke, drink or use drugs, the more often they eat dinner with their families. CASA goes farther than that, trying to persuade parents toTell your child the truth—that drugs, alcohol and tobacco may make them feel good for a while (by activating brain chemicals). Unfortunately, that feeling is brief and no one can know the true potency or lifetime effects of these substances.
Next year, I would like to see CASA provide parents with advice on how to answer the sophisticated, postmodern teen who responds to this truth claim by arguing, “That may be true for you (or some other kids), but not for me.”
