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Weeknight Family Dinner Won’t Make or Break Your Children
Time management expert Laura Vanderkam debunks the notion that dinner together seven days a week is the key to parenting
Laura Vanderkam, the time management expert who wrote Off the Clock and Juliet’s School of Possibilities, is here to answer your scheduling questions. Check back every week for more advice, and send your own productivity problems to asklaura@medium.com. (Your name will not be used.)
Dear Laura: I keep reading about how important family dinner is for kids. But between work schedules and kid activities, we almost never sit down together for a home-cooked meal during the week. Will my kids be ruined for life?
For something as simple as gathering a group of people around a table, family dinner can be a fraught topic. Parenting books and articles tout statistics claiming that eating dinner together regularly is associated with better school performance and lower rates of drug use. A busy-and-feeling-guilty-about-it parent might easily conclude that the opposite is also true: Skip those dinners and your kids will drop out of school and turn into delinquents.
But any claims that this or that parenting behavior will define how kids “turn out” should be greeted with skepticism. It’s…
