Finding time to eat meals together as a family is a simple way to improve your family bond and, beyond that, reap significant benefits to your health and quality of life. Contrary to popular belief, many American families do make the time for family meals. A Gallup Poll revealed that 53 percent of adults with children younger than 18 years say they eat dinner together at home six or seven nights a week. This averages out to 5.1 dinners together as a family per week.¹

If your schedule or lifestyle currently does not allow for family meal times (remember that the benefits are gleaned by eating together at any time of day, even breakfast or lunch), tweaking your activities, work schedule and meal planning to do so will pay off in spades.

Why Eat Together as a Family?

Writing in the Archives of Iranian Medicine, researchers described family dinner as a “proxy of family connectedness,” one that may influence mental health.² In fact, children who ate dinner together five or more times a week were less likely to suffer from mental disorders as well as obesity.

“Such simple recommendations for consuming family dinner for families may be feasible, sustainable and effective for health promotion and disease prevention,” they wrote. Indeed, it’s not the first time such significant effects have been linked to dining together.³

In 2010, “The Importance of Family Dinners VI” report from CASAColumbia at Columbia University revealed that teens who have frequent family dinners (five to seven per week) were less likely to engage in risky behaviors than those who had less than three family dinners per week. Specifically, teens who did not eat frequent family dinners had double the likelihood of using tobacco, nearly double the risk of having used alcohol and a 1.5 greater likelihood of having used marijuana.⁴

Teens who did not eat with their families often were also much more likely to say they could access marijuana or prescription drugs to abuse in one hour or less, while teens who ate frequent family dinners had no such access. Teen parents may be surprised to learn that 72 percent of the teens surveyed said they think of frequent family dinners as very or fairly important.