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Weeknight Family Dinner Won’t Make or Break Your Children

4 min readNov 14, 2019

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An illustration of wine glasses, spatulas, oven mitts, and several stacks of plates all falling over.
Illustration: Michael Rubin

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?

FFor 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…

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A former publication from Medium on personal development. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Laura Vanderkam
Laura Vanderkam

Written by Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management books including Off the Clock and 168 Hours. She blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

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