You can! Improve your family's dinner time with 3 easy-to-follow steps
The conventional model of a family dinner (you know, the kind you used to see on sitcoms like "The Brady Bunch" way back when) is lovely in theory-but it's getting more and more challenging to achieve in an era of two working parents, kids with increasingly jam-packed activities and social schedules, and things like Blackberries and Facebook to distract us all. Before you give up completely, check out these tips we picked up for maximizing mealtimes at home.
Make Your Own Traditions. Start small: Eating dinner together seven nights a week probably isn't realistic, but pencil in at least a few all-together, home-cooked, around-the-table meals (Sunday seems like a no-brainer, when life just feels more calm and you can prepare and eat at a more leisurely pace) and build from there. Serving dinner at the same time for the nights you're staying in helps reinforce the sense of ritual, and planning a regular activity-like having each family member mention one good thing that happened to them that day (see below)-creates a sense of bonding.
Snap Out Of The Recipe Rut. While it's easy to get into the habit of sticking to the foods you can make on autopilot, it's more fun for you and everyone else to deviate from the same old routine. Get the kids involved in meal planning by having them choose a region or type of cuisine. Recipe research, trips to the grocery store, and even kitchen prep will feel like a lot less of a chore as a group activity. Remember, you don't need to make an elaborate spread to enjoy the meal-some of the tastiest dishes involve very few components (which also end up being the healthiest and quickest to get on the table too). Gourmet's Five Ingredients is an excellent resource for recipe ideas in this vein.
Power Off. Anything with an on/off switch should be off limits at the dinner table-no cell phones, no video games, no TV-which keeps the focus on each other. It never hurts to have conversation starters, even among family members. One idea: choose a word of the day from the dictionary and assign it to your kids to use the following day at school, and ask them to share stories of how they used it that evening. Or ask a specific question like, "What's the best thing that happened to you today?" and take turns responding around the table. Try to keep the conversation relatively light (i.e. save the disciplining or hardcore debates for later), or else kids-and grown-ups-might feel less inclined to rally around the table.
