Why You Need to Make It Home for Dinner

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Dinner Time

One Father's Day, I wrote my father the list of "Things I Learned from My Dad." I worked on the list for several months. When it came time to send it, I realized something that I had not written. The greatest lesson he taught me was that he made it a priority to be home for dinner every night. Sadly, I did not take that to heart. As I reflect on lessons I have taught my own children, I think, "Dad thinks he is really important at work and is too busy for us" would be close to the mark. When I grew up I pursued a career similar to my father's profession. None of my children want anything to do with a career that I allowed to suck me away from way too much family time. That says it all.

KCH of MO @ Jul 10, 2008 19:25:11 PM

Family Dinner and Family Time Together

I believe that having dinner with my family when my brothers and sisters and I were growing up made a huge difference in our lives. I think that I would have felt like my parents did not care for me as much if they had not made that effort to spend that dinner time together with us children.

Spending time reading or playing sports with my family also bring back some of my fondest memories. I wish we would have had even more of those family together times.

I don't know if a doctor who works with dying patients ever said this, but I've head that one such doctor commented once that of all his years working with dying patients, he never heard any of them ever say: "Oh, I wish I would have spent more time in the office..." The regrets are always those of not having spent enough time together.

Alex of UT @ Jul 09, 2008 22:06:17 PM

Family Dinner Makes Kids Smarter

Another reason to make it home for dinner, from Barbara Kingsolver in her recent book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: "A survey of National Merit scholars--exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class--turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table."

Amy WB of IL @ Jun 26, 2008 10:03:50 AM

Lots of things have fed into helping to fix this, for many types of jobs: broadband access at home, company-provided laptops, teleconference bridges, BlackBerry devices and other PDAs, and so on. It's now common for people who wind up working 70 hours a week to do much of it at home. Unless someone schedules a 6 p.m. meeting -- which is sometimes necessary when folks are working together across many time zones -- you can probably be at the dinner table most of the time, if you want to be.

Of course, there are jobs where that's not possible. And even when it is, it causes its own conflicts, if much of the time you're home, you're absorbed in work. We have tools, but we still have to use 'em responsibly.

Barry Leiba of NY @ Jun 25, 2008 22:32:31 PM

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