On my birthday last year, we didn’t bother to organise a dinner out. We were busy and tired, so my husband cooked one of the family’s favourites at home, and for something different we actually cleared the junk off the dining table and sat down to eat together.
The conversation that followed is going to sound made up, but I swear it’s true. As we called the kids to the table, my seven-year-old son excitedly exclaimed, “Wow! We’re having dinner at the table like a family! I wish we could eat dinner like a family every night!”
Yeah, so to say at that moment we felt like total failures as parents would be an understatement.
I mean, we sit down to a meal as a family so seldom that my kids are actually excited about it. What kind of family are we? I gave it a lot of thought before posting about the conversation on Facebook, as I feared others would agree that yes, we’re terrible parents.
Instead, the responses were quite reassuring. Well, as long as you don’t think that the fall of the family dinner is the first horse of the apocalypse.
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We are a blended family with 6 boys, with ages ranging from 10 to 20. On any given night there may be two people for dinner, or eight (5 of the boys spend time with their respective other parents). There may also be a collection of additional teenagers. The two eldest work at a grocery store, often until 9pm, my partner does shift work which includes night shifts. There is no physical way that we can all eat together every day. We do aim to, about 2-3 times a week, and we don't do too badly at that. But we also play board games together, do jigsaw puzzles, do geocaching and play Pokemon Go. We dont do all these activities with all of the kids, it just doesn't work.
When my children were younger, they would often eat dinner before my ex-husband got home, again scouts, music and sports made it impossible for everyone to eat at the same time. My kids all have good table manners, they can all cook, they can hold conversations and I have a good relationship with them. I think you do what you can for your family, as long as you make time, it doesn't matter when that time is, that is the most important thing.
Family dinners every night don't happen in our household - between sports training, music classes, work or travel commitments etc, it's not feasible. But on average, we do have them most nights and when we are all at home, we eat together. We usually eat at 6pm (in the Netherlands where I live, you don't ring someone's doorbell at 6pm because everyone's eating dinner with their families - it's pretty much a tradition here, especially if you have kids still living at home). Of course, if you have babies, it can be different because of sleeping routines etc, but in the case of our kids, once they could sit up, then we made it a practice to eat dinner together. Now our kids are in their preteen and mid-teen years, it's really the only time of the day that we're all together and we use it to stay connected and talk about what's going on at school or work, dramas, disagree about stuff, argue or whatever. Depending on the day of the week and evening commitments, dinners can last 20 minutes or even up to three hours. For our family, dinner together is a long-standing tradition and now it just happens if everyone is home. As our kids get older, it's one of those things that I am grateful for and I always look forward to hearing about what's happening in their lives or what they are interested in at the moment. Different families come with different routines (on non-routines), but for us, the family dinner is a part of life.