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Helpful Resources & Recent Studies

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Here are some websites that will help you learn more about the importance of family meals.

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, has conducted nationwide studies for more than a decade, and launched Family Day — A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children™, a national movement to remind parents that Dinner Makes A Difference! Family Day is celebrated annually on the fourth Monday in September. To learn more about Family Day, visit our website.
http://www.CASAFamilyDay.org

Find out how one suburban community took matters into their own hands. They chose "…..to make conscious decisions about ways we can foster a balance between family time, unscheduled time, and outside enrichment activities."
http://readysetrelax.org

The University of Minnesota conducted a comprehensive study of teenagers. They found that, "….kids who reported eating more family meals per week reported significantly less substance use and significantly better academic and mental health than those eating fewer meals with family." Interestingly, "…each additional meal per week conferred some additional benefit."
http://apa.org/pi/cyf/fam4.html

USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine has studied what happens when fifth and sixth-graders watch TV during dinner. "Overweight children reported eating 50 percent of their dinner meals while watching television, compared to just 35 percent by normal-weight children."
http://kidsnutrition.org/consumer/archives/tveating.htm

KidsHealth, from the Nemours Foundation, offers a good overview of the importance of family meals for overall health.
http://kidshealth.org/parent/nutrition_fit/nutrition/habits.html

For more detailed figures about family meals, check out the Child Trends Data Bank. "More than six out of ten foreign-born adolescents age 12 to 17 ate with their families six to seven days a week in 2003, compared with four out of ten adolescents who are native-born with native-born parents."
http://childtrendsdatabank.org/indicators/96FamilyMeals.cfm

Time magazine ran a good overview of the subject in its story called The Magic of the Family Meal. "…on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such communication acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of harm."
http://time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200760,00.html