Five years ago, we visited the Drummond family, who always ate dinner together. Read the story: HERE.
If you jump head-first off the bed, you will hit your head on the floor. And if you hit your head on the floor, it will hurt.
The immutable law of cause and effect is the most important lesson that all children must learn.
At first, it comes instinctively: “If I cry, I get a bottle.”
Unfortunately, we soon grow out of it. Like the peach fuzz on a baby’s head, it just disappears.
And we spend the rest of our lives relearning it, over and over, usually the hard way.
Age 3: “If I throw my toy train across the room, the train breaks.”
Age 16: “If I watch TV instead of doing homework, I’ll flunk chemistry.”
Age 25: “If I forget to pay the water bill, the shower won’t turn on.”
By the time we become professors at a prestigious university, we need federal grants and national surveys to figure out cause and effect.
In a recent New York Times op-ed, two scientists debunked the long-held theory that family dinners make a lot of difference in a child’s life.
Eating together as a family was supposed to make kids better-behaved, more successful at school and less likely to drink or do drugs, according to previous studies.
Yes, children seem to do better if they routinely sit down to dinner with their parents, a phenomena confirmed by the latest research.
But the cause and effect becomes a chicken-and-egg question.
Do family dinners make well-adjusted children? Or do families with well-adjusted children have dinner together?
When researchers factored in other family characteristics – income, education and so forth – the effects of eating together became statistically insignificant.
What matters is the amount of time parents spend with their children, whether it’s having dinner or not, the researchers concluded.
Hang out together and you’ll get along together. Simple cause and effect.
“So if you aren’t able to make the family meal happen on a regular basis,” the researchers wrote in the Times, “don’t beat yourself up: just find another way to connect with your kids.”
Read the report:
HERE.
