The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier

A number of studies in the last few years have noted the positive effects of families eating together. Weinstein includes these studies in her book. But the great thing about the Surprising Power Of Family Meals is that this author doesn't just tell you why family meals are important, she also includes practical ways to revive the practice of eating together. For example, she notes that today's moms are busier than ever before, plates full with careers, children's schooling, extracurricular activities, volunteer work, etc. For many families, that translates into eating fast food even when they don't want to. But instead of tut-tutting this reality, she offers a solution: when you get takeout, don't just eat it in the car. Take 20 minutes to seat yourselves around a table at the restaurant and eat together. The blessing is in the company, not just the food itself. This book is an excellent guide for modern-day families struggling to build ties amid busy schedules, competitive academics and the growing atomization of the family unit.

This well written book focuses on the benefits of families eating together. The author's premise is individuals and society will greatly benefit if families would make a greater effort to spend time together at the dinner table. The book explores benefits of regular family meals for everyone, singles, married couples, but the main discussion is on families with children. I was fascinated by all the different ways eating together helped parents and especially children. The author points out that over recent decades we have developed a greater tendency to be increasingly busy. We try to squeeze good things into every hour of our children's day, for example: piano lessons, soccer practice, karate, play dates, in addition to the normal things like school and homework. Over the last thirty years the amount of discretionary time children have has dropped from 40% to 25%. In addition to this, more families have both parents working, and there are more divorced families. These and other factors lead to fewer and fewer families eating together. Some of the benefits of family meals made sense and almost seemed obvious. Many studies have found that "The more often children eat with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use illegal drugs." (page 215) If children have strong connections to their siblings and parents they have less need for artificial ways to make themselves feel better. Along the same lines, often during a meal discussion of the extended family comes up, this helps children to feel greater connectedness. They learn about ways that other family members gotten through hard times, and when they have stress they are much more likely to last without falling apart. One surprising benefit was that children who ate regularly with their families had a much less incident of eating disorders. One of the causes of eating disorders is children don't learn to self regulate. If they don't see good behavior modeled they won't learn to listen to their body and only eat when they are hungry. So families that are always on the run, eating food from MacDonalds between activities, or even those at home who eat separately in front of a TV, the children grow up being out of balance with how they eat. Another surprising benefit was that children learn how to read faster when they have regular meals with their family. The research indicates that children learn vocabulary while talking with their family, so they only have to figure out what word the letters are forming. Children who have a smaller vocabulary have to both learn what word the letters are forming and what the word means. There were many more benefits the author found that come from regular family meals. At the start of the book the author says that in many ways regular family meals is almost like a magic bullet in that it solves a number of problems. As a side note, I liked the feel of this book. The paper was a nice grade of paper, and the book was