When it’s that time of year for the girls to have their yearly physical, I am always sent a questionnaire to fill out about their growth and so on. One question I get every year is how often we have the opportunity to sit down for family meals. I always thought this was an interesting question to ask. I also wondered how many people had the ability to sit down for a family meal every day. I grew up in a big family where both parents worked and siblings who were much older than I and had lives of their own. I remember sit down family meals revolving around holidays or when we had visitors, not so much a regular everyday occurrence. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy eating together, we just never all seemed to be in the same place to be able to do so. Being the youngest I would often eat with my grandparents or one or two of my siblings, otherwise our family was more of a ‘eat whenever you get home’ type of family.

Things changed when I was in high school, my siblings were all married and living in different states and it was just me and my parents. My mom no longer worked and with just the three of us, we ended up eating together a lot more often. Back then, I never really saw the significance of that time together but now, thinking back, I really miss those after school snacks and chats with my mom.

Now, being a mother myself, that is something I have been working on doing with our own family. With both of us working its easy to get into that same routine of eating whenever we can. Feed the girls their lunch while I eat lunch at my desk since I am working. We started implementing family dinners whenever we could and surprisingly, the girls loved it. They loved having our undivided attention and being able to talk and ask questions. It wasn’t until I first saw this that I understood why that question is on the yearly questionnaires from the pediatrician, there’s even been studies on the impact of family meals, which I won’t get into because this is not that type of blog but you can look into it.

Now that our hours are different, sometimes we aren’t able to do those family dinners as often as we had been doing. To combat this we decided to change things up and have family breakfasts and it has been going surprisingly well. Starting the day off with some family time is a great beginning to your day. In fact on one of the days when my husband and I were running late and unable to have that sit down family breakfast, my youngest called it a ‘lonely breakfast’. Even when they don’t vocalize it, they crave those family moments together. This might mean getting up a little bit earlier to get breakfast ready, or you can work together to get it done faster. But the effort you put in, is worth it.

If you’re one of those busy families that is always a grab and eat type of family try shaking things up this week and see how it changes. Start small if you’d like. Pick one day this week and one meal, sit down together and enjoy your meal together. I also strongly recommend putting the phones away for this meal and give each other that undivided attention.