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There Really Is a Family Day

Back in 1996, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, known as CASA, was trying to find ways to keep kids from destructive behaviors (the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco.) They ran a study to see what, if anything, differentiated the kids who engaged in these actions from those who did not. They talked to about twelve hundred teens, aged twelve to seventeen, and to a similar number of parents. They included all kinds of variables, and factored out race, class and ethnicity. In fact, more than a decade of CASA's research has found that the more often kids eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink, or use drugs.

CASA has conducted varieties of these surveys every year since. And every year, eating regular family suppers tops the list of variables that are within our control. Kids who eat more family dinners do better than those who eat a few. Kids who share a few dinners weekly do better than the ones who have none at all. In 2003, CASA described the case this way: the number [of teens] who have regular family dinners drops by 50 percent as their substance abuse risk increases sevenfold.

In 2001, CASA launched Family Day – A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children™, a national movement to remind parents that Dinner Makes A Difference! This year, it falls on Monday, Sept. 22nd. This year, they ask parents to commit to becoming Family Day STARs at www.CASAFamilyDay.org. As a Family Day STAR, you can commit to:

• Spend time with my kids by having dinner together
• Talk to them about their friends, interests and the dangers of drugs and alcohol
• Answer their questions and listen to what they say.
• Recognize that I have the power to help keep my kids substance-free!

Family Day has grown in notoriety with each passing year. It's attracted national sponsorship, including The J.M. Smucker Company, and participation from a Presidential family-- the Bushes. In a television PSA, President Bush joked that, when he was growing up, their family had dinner together, except when his mother was cooking. His mother, of course, let him know his place: "It's not good making fun of your mother, even if you are President."

She continued, "But, it IS good to have dinner with your kids a lot. We know the more often children have dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink and use drugs. And getting to age twenty-one that way, means they likely never will. So, simply having dinner together can help your kids forever. Even if you're not a great cook."

Here's what CASA's Chairman Joseph A. Califano, Jr., former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, had to say: "If I could wave a magic wand to make a dent in our nation's substance abuse problem, I would make sure that every child in America had dinner with his or her parents at least five times a week."

Celebrate Family Day in your house, or in your town. Get more information from www.CASAFamilyDay.org.

*The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University is neither affiliated with, nor sponsored by, the National Court Appointed Special Advocate Association (also known as "CASA") or any of its member organizations, or any other organizations with the name of "CASA".