Dinners with Daughters
Posted on July 22nd, 2008 – 7:49 AMBy May Chen
It’s started already.
Me: What did you do at school today, Zoe?
Zoe: (Long pause) Nuzzing.
Four years old and already she sounds like a sullen teenager at dinner.
But we shall persevere. Especially with this new research coming out of the U of M today about how adolescent girls who eat regular family meals are much less likely five years out to drink, smoke or use marijuana.
The study didn’t find the same effect for boys though and researchers are at a loss to explain why. Click here for the story.
7 Responses to "Dinners with Daughters"
I find that asking things like ” what was your favorite thing you did today” or starting with my own experience first gets a lot more information out of them. I love that visual of the sullen four year old!
I get the same response when I ask my almost 5 year old daughter. She’s even got the whole eye-roll thing down to go with it! I thought this wasn’t supposed to happen until the teen years!? I have found that if I ask her to tell me her 3 favorite things that she did that day, she’ll talk. It’s been working so far. 
I’m not sure that I believe that it just benefits girls to have family dinners. I think it benefits everyone. And I don’t think that it has anything to do with food but rather the fact that if you are taking time to sit down with your kids and talk and spend time together you are generally good parents and care about what your kids are doing. This is what greatly reduces the odds of them getting into trouble. Even now with a 4 year old and an 11 month old we try to sit down every night to dinner and talk, no T.V. It just gives us a designated time to be together and discuss our days.
I love this article! I’ve been telling my husband how important I think our nightly meals are and how important I think they will be for our children, but I don’t think he really understands why I think it’s so important. So I just printed this article for him to read tonight
It’s interesting the difference in impact from girls to boys in the study. But I do agree with Shannon in that is has to mean a lot to boys as well and impact them in many positive ways.
Same thing at our house. With our Zoe.
That’s one aspect of being a parent who works outside of the house that does bum me out. I think the kind of info we crave is the kind of info that’s shared off-handedly while doing completely unrelated things and not from direct questioning. Like while they’re helping you put away the laundry (ha! what an idealized view of staying home w/my kids I have!), etc. At least that’s how it seems to come out on the weekends.
We have family meals primarily because logistically we can and because that’s the way we both were raised. However, I’m afraid I’m one of those kids who was raised on family meals and still managed to be led astray…
We’ve been getting the same response from our son for as long as he could talk. What did you do today? Nussing. Who did you see at school today? Nobuddy. Did you do anything special at school today? No. What was your favorite thing? Nussing.
For a while we were worried - like either he was really bored or he was hiding something! So we asked his teacher, and she said that this is very common with children. Many kids view their school day as being very separate from home — kind of like a special place where they have control. They feel the more info they give out, the less it becomes their special place where parents do not get to tell them what to do. (I’m not totally crazy about the ramifications of that explanation, but I’ve decided not to push it too much.)
One thing that sometimes works for us is that I will occasionally ask my son to “swap stories” — I tell him one interesting thing about my day, and he tells me one about his day. I have to admit that sometimes it’s hard to come up with an interesting thing about my day — not to mention one that is understandable by little ones! Usually when he tells me one interesting thing about his day it’s about how some other kid did something bad. So I rarely get anything useful out of him anyway!
Like Sherry, I was also “led astray,” hehe.
And like Tobi, my son (who is 5) loves to tell me when other kids do bad things or when another kid pees/poops his/her pants or does something else embarrassing. He does tell me about other things, though, too…and the first thing he usually asks me as we’re walking to the car when I pick him up is, “So, how was your day?” Wonder who he got that from. 
