Eating Dinner With Your Kids

...may be more important than I thought. Theodore Dalrymple has a long article on the state of British families, complete with several very depressing anecdotes. This secton in particular leaped out at me.

More than four out of ten British children are born out of wedlock; the unions of which they are the issue are notoriously unstable. Even marriage has lost much of its meaning. In a post-religious society, it is no longer a sacrament. The government has ensured that marriage brings no fiscal advantages and, indeed, for those at the lower end of the social scale, that it has only disadvantages. Easy divorce means that a quarter of all marriages break up within a decade.

The results of this social dysfunction are grim for children. Eighty percent of British children have televisions in their bedrooms, more than have their biological fathers at home. Fifty-eight percent of British children eat their evening meal in front of the television (a British child spends more than five hours per day watching a screen); 36 percent never eat any meals together with other family members; and 34 percent of households do not even own dining tables. In the prison where I once worked, I discovered that many inmates had never eaten at a table together with someone else.

Let me speculate briefly on the implications of these startling facts. They mean that children never learn, from a sense of social obligation, to eat when not hungry, or not to eat when they are. Appetite is all they need consult in deciding whether to eat—a purely egotistical outlook. Hence anything that interferes with the satisfaction of appetite will seem oppressive. They do not learn such elementary social practices as sharing or letting others go first. Since mealtimes are usually when families get to converse, the children do not learn the art of conversation, either; listening to what others say becomes a challenge. There is a time and place for everything: if I feel like it, the time is now, and the place is here.

Emphasis mine. We always eat dinner together and never with the TV turned on. I place great importance on the conversation at the dinner table and the standard courtesies of the event. I hadn't thought of the implications of the converse - the long-term effects of the children never eating dinner with anyone else or always eating it in front of the TV.

Mr. Dalrymple is the author of several books, including Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, a book he researched through extensive interviews in prisons and slums. When he talks about the common features of the poor and the failed, he has to be taken seriously.