March 20, 2025 • 36 mins
It's the International Day of Happiness! It's a chance to talk about happiness and what we can all do to be happier. March 20th also sees the release of the World Happiness Report. A big finding of 2025's report is that more of us are dining alone - and that's bad news.
The report's editor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve talks us through the stark figures showing that shared meals are in decline - while Dr Anne Fishel of The Family Dinner Project gives us her tips on how to dine better with friends, families and colleagues.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Happy. International Day of Happiness. The world has been
marking March twentieth as a day dedicated to happiness for
over a decade, part of a worldwide push to get
governments to take happiness more seriously and to enact policies
that improve our well being. International Day of Happiness also
(00:37):
marks the release of the World Happiness Report, and Happiness
Lab has been given early access to all the new
research this report contains, and over the next two episodes,
we've got lots of highlights, including things you can do
right now to improve your life. The most famous headline
grabbing part of each year's World Happiness Report are the
country rankings. People around the world are asked, on a
scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you with
(00:59):
your life? The crown for the happiest people usually goes
to a country somewhere in Scandinavia, and this year the
happiest country.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Is Bendland again, followed by Denmark and Iceland and Sweden
and the Netherlands.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I think this is yan. Emmanuel Denev, professor of economics
and behavioral science at the University of Oxford, an editor
of the World Happiness Report. During the years he studied
these country data. He's knowniced some changes. The rankings used
to be dominated by the big rich nations, but all
that's changing.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Mexico and Costa Rica entered the top ten hugely, exciting
a kudos to them. Eastern European countries continued their ascent,
and that goes at the expense of the large industrial powers.
So Germany tumbles out of top twenty, the UK tumbles
out of the top twenty, and the US drops the
twenty fourth wow. And then at the very bottom Afghanistan
still and this time average life satisfaction in Afghanistan SETAI
(01:54):
one point thirty four out of ten.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
As I said before, the country rankings tend to grab
the headlines, but scientists like Yan and I are even
more interested in what's causing these differences in life satisfaction,
and one of the big factors might involve eating. There's
been a ton of discussion about what we eat, but
the World Happiness Report takes a different approach. It focuses
on who we're eating with. We tend to eat fourteen
(02:19):
big meals a week. Who are we spending time with
during all those lunches and dinners. Well, it turns out
that the answer to that question seems to have a
big impact on our well being because the World Happiness
Report found that some people share meals with others, while
some folks are going hungry for company. So why focus
on sharing.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Meals the extent to which people share meals together as
a proxy for the quality of our social connections and
the quantity of social connections that we have, essentially our
social capital, if you will, in the last seven days,
over the past week, how many of your lunches and
dinners were shared with somebody else? So about one and
six people approximately in the United States we're dining alone
(02:57):
in the early two thousands, two thousand and three to
be precise, and that's going up to one in four
people is dining alone in the United States by about
twenty twenty three, So that's a fifty three percent increase
or so in dining alone, but strikingly mostly youth, to
be really precise. Youth are almost twice as likely to
be dining alone today as compared to two decades ago.
(03:18):
And I thought, wow, these.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Findings are huge because eating alone is pretty bad for you,
and a lot of us are finding ourselves having winter
dinner by ourselves. Even when we have families around us
at home, colleagues at work, or peers at college, it's
so easy to end up eating alone. So I've turned
to an experienced clinical psychologist, family therapist in an advocate
for shared meals. For advice, you.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Could set the clock by my father walking through the
door at seven o'clock and dinner started at ten after seven.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
This is doctor Ann Fischel, Associate professor at the Harvard
Medical School.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
He would get out of his suit and put on
his play clothes and we would sit down, my mother,
my father, and my sister. We didn't really do any
other rituals. We didn't have Thanksgiving, but dinner was sank
or sangd and my mother didn't like to be stuck
in the kitchen, so every meal she made was super quick,
(04:12):
so quick. The years later, when I hosted my first
dinner party, I put a chicken, a roast chicken in
and took it out after thirty minutes, because I'd never
seen her spend more than thirty minutes in the kitchen.
And of course it was a bloody mess. But anyway,
those dinners were really important to me as a child,
and looking back, I realized that a lot of the
(04:34):
things that I know now about being a family therapist
I learned around my childhood dinner table. You know how
to diffuse conflict, how even if somebody's quiet, it doesn't
mean that they don't have a lot of things on
their mind. How important it is to draw everybody out
so everybody has a chance to talk. How fun it
(04:54):
is to hear stories about family members, to hear gossip
about people in the building or the neighborhood. So all
of that I learned at my dinner table.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
And such a believer in the virtues of us all
eating together that she helped found the Family Dinner Project.
I asked her to explain a little bit about it.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
So I was one of the co founders in twenty ten,
and the mission is to build on the research based
benefits of family dinner, the benefits that come from regular
family dinners that bring nutritional, cognitive, and mental health benefits.
I define family really broadly. Family is anybody who makes
(05:34):
you feel like home. Family is anywhere that you find community.
That could be people who aren't related to you. I'm
starting to work with patients with dementia, and I would
say part of their family are the other residents in
the memory care unit as well as the caregivers. It
can be college age kids eating together in a cafeteria.
(05:57):
It can be friends coming over for a tired Wednesday
night dinner. And what we found was that ninety percent
of most American families think that family dinners are a
great idea, but more than fifty percent of families are
eating dinner together. So the Family Dinner Project was designed
to bridge that gap, to make it easier, more doable, simpler,
(06:20):
more fun, more meaningful, so that more families could harness
these research back benefits of family dinner.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
And so let's talk about why family dinners are so important.
Maybe starting with the physical health benefits. How can our
physical health benefit from kind of having more family dinners.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
So, there are a lot of nutritional benefits that come
from home cooked meals, even if you're not trying that hard.
Portion size tends to be smaller than the restaurant equivalents,
which may account for lower OBCD rates associated with regular
family dinners. But also home cooked meals tend to be
lower in sugar and salt and fat, and higher and
fruits and vegetables and other nutrients. It's also associated with
(07:00):
better cardiovascular healths in young teens and also associated with
lower asthma symptoms, which may be a little puzzling. Maybe
it speaks because sometimes asthma's associated with anxiety, which is
lowered if the dinner is relaxing and not so stressful.
Maybe it's because parents can remind their kids to take medication.
(07:21):
So these are some of the health benefits.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
So your anxiety comment also reminds me that there are
lots of mental health benefits to family dinners. What are
some of those.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
There really are? I mean, there's so many that as
a family therapist that sort of joke, I could almost
be out of business if more families had regular family dinners.
So they're associated with, on the part of kids, lower
rates of anxiety and depression, lower rates of substance use
and teenage pregnancy, lower rates of eating disorders, and on
(07:51):
the upside, with more resilience, more self esteem, and kids
reporting that they feel more connected to their parents when
they have regular family dinners. And then it turns out
their mental health benefits for adults too, lower rates of
depression and anxiety for adults who eat with their kids,
but also adults who eat with other adults I can
(08:11):
get very, very excited about the mental health benefits.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Another benefit that was surprising when I first started reading
your work is this idea that they're also especially for kids,
these cognitive and academic benefits that come from family dinners.
What do we know about those?
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Yeah, so for young kids or preschoolers and toddlers, the
language that they hear around the dinner table as their
parents are sort of casually catching up about the day,
those little stories contain ten times more unusual or rare
words than would be expected for a two year old
or a three year old to know, and ten times
(08:46):
more unusual words than would show up in picture books
that kids are read to. I think why that's significant
is that kids who have larger vocabularies read earlier and
more easily than kids who have slimmer vocabularies. I was
just quoting this research to my son, who has a
two year old grandchild, and she was saying, to her parents,
(09:06):
what are you two talking about? I said, that's so great.
You know, I hope you told her what you were
talking about, because that's going to give a little booster
to her vocabulary.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
So it seems like they're all these benefits but it
seems like sometimes when families think about figuring out a
family meal, it sometimes feels just totally overwhelming. Sometimes families
even treat it with dread. Is this the kind of
thing that you hear in the Family Dinner Project too?
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Absolutely? I mean, we are such a busy, tired, harried people.
You know, most of our kids are doing so many
extracurricular activities that it can just feel like one more
thing on the to do list. And that is the
number one challenge or obstacle. You know, we're too tired,
our schedules don't mesh up, and so at the Family
(09:52):
Dinner Project, we've spent a lot of time talking to
hundreds of thousands of families across the country to find
out some workarounds for this common challenge.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
So let's talk about some of the barriers you hear
about most often. I just think the biggest one is
just time.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Right time, being too tired, picky eaters, whether that's a
partner or a child. You know, what's the point of
going to the trouble of making a meal if not
everybody's going to eat it. I don't want to be
a short order cook and make four different meals I
go to the trouble of making the meal, and then
all we do is fight or nobody talks. I can't
get people to talk. Conflict and tension at the table.
(10:29):
Budget worries healthy food is so expensive? How do I
get my dollar to stretch so that I can feed
my children unprocessed healthy food? Distraction at the table. My
kids turn on their gadgets, and I guess we do too.
What do we do about technology at the table? So
I'd say those are the recurring obstacles that I hear
(10:49):
about over and over.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
When we hear these barriers, it seems really like hard
to get to dinner. But you've argue that part of
the barriers comes from our minds. We have these misconceptions
about the things that count as family dinners. And so
let's go through some of these misconceptions and see if
we can kind of like clear the air right. One
of the misconceptions is this idea that for a family
dinner to really count as a family dinner, everybody has
to be there, everybody has to be there for the
(11:11):
whole time. Is this really the case? How should we
think about this differently?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
First off, I want to say this isn't a nostalgia project.
You know, we're not trying to go back to the
spotless kitchens of the nineteen fifties where mother was home
all day baking a I don't know, a pork loine.
Fortunately that ship has sailed. So family dinner is less
about the food than about what happens once the family
(11:35):
gathers around the food. So really best to focus on
the atmosphere around the dinner table, conversation, having a good time.
You know, I call that the secret sauce of dinner,
and you're absolutely right. Family dinner doesn't have to be
the whole family sitting down. As one family said to me,
we have a rule no one eats alone. This is
(11:56):
a family with five sons, and they did kind of
split shift dinners, so they would have two people eating,
and then later on maybe one of those people would
join another and so on, and they would have one
meal that could be reheated, maybe a stew or soup.
So that's another myth. It doesn't have to be everybody.
It doesn't have to be dinner. For some families, dinner
(12:18):
time is just beyond the pale. It's just too hectic.
It could be family breakfast. It could be a fabulous
Sunday brunch with extended family. There are really sixteen opportunities
in a week, seven breakfasts, seven dinners, and two weekend lunches.
And then they're also intentional snacks, you know, push away
(12:38):
from your computer, come down to the kitchen table at
ten o'clock and let's have apples and hot chocolate. And
then it doesn't have to be family. It could be
you and a best friend. It could be a Tuesday
night group that gets together to talk about books over food.
It could be elders at an assisted living breaking bread together.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
It seems like one of the reasons that meeting together
to have these meals is so challenging is we put
these like ridiculous restrictions on ourselves. We get kind of
perfectionistic about it, and it seems like you're go with
the family dinner project is just to say we don't
have to do this perfectly. We just should do this
a little bit more often. So it's kind of family
dinner with a bit more grace than we usually give ourselves.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
I love the way you put that perfect is really
not our friend. Here. Dinner with a toddler might be
five minutes. That's fine, that's something to build on. You know,
the average American dinner is only twenty two minutes. Doesn't
have to be food made from scratch. It doesn't have
to be heirloom tomatoes, doesn't have to be a perfectly
roasted chicken, doesn't have to be perfect manners. Yes, let
(13:36):
go of the perfect and give yourself some more grace.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
So eating meals with family, friends, and colleagues has a
ton of benefits. We're going to take a quick break now,
but when we get back and we'll have more tips
on how to overcome all the obstacles that stop us
sharing meals. Before the break, doctor Anne Faschel took us
through a lot of the things that stop us from
(14:01):
enjoying shared meals, be that eating with our loved ones
at home, having friends over, or sitting down with others
during our lunch break at work. I asked ant to
down those obstacles and offer some concrete solutions.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
For a lot of families, it just feels like another
thing on their to do list. And you know, partly
I like to, without being too preachy, I hope to
say family meal time is really the most reliable time
that we have to look eye to eye, to have fun,
to relax, to share stories about our day. You know,
(14:34):
we don't sit around campfires telling stories. We don't write
letters with stories. So just reminding families what a rich
opportunity this is and how it packs really such a punch,
and then you know, really trying to come up with
some meals that are very very easy that you could
(14:54):
almost make in your sleep, food that you have in
your pantry, like a pasta with tomato sauce, or what
I call my yoga eggs that I can make when
I get off work at six and have to be
out the door by six thirty that are just quick
sauteed vegetables with eggs on top. So coming up with
those and getting a list of meals from your family
so that you won't get belly aching. You'll have it
(15:17):
like a rotating list of meals you know are acceptable
to every Maybe they don't all adore every meal, but
they'll eat them and you can get onto the more
fun things about family dinner and taking stock of weather.
Dinner is really the best time of day for your family.
Maybe it's breakfast. Years ago, Cheerios came to us and said,
(15:37):
we know you're the family dinner project, But how about
the family breakfast project? And we came up with breakfast
that took seven minutes, because that's the amount of time
if you don't press your snooze alarm, you can get
seven minutes of your day back. And so we built
easy meals with a game to play at the breakfast
table and a conversation starter. And they were all about
(16:00):
anticipating the day rather than reviewing it. If you came
up with a weather analogy for the day, what would
it be, and then we might check it at the
end of the day. Or what are you most looking
forward to? Or what are you worried about? Or let's
write some notes and put them in each other's lunch
boxes or lunch bags. So that's another thing for very
(16:20):
busy families, is to pivot to something else.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
You've also mentioned the possibility of engaging in what you
called flexible courses, and this is particularly for families that
might not have everybody home at the same time. How
does this work and why is it so effective?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, so I'm thinking about it at different stages of
the life cycle. You know, if a family, if a
couple has a toddler who goes to sleep at seven
and they want to have a family meal, but they're
really not ready to eat, So maybe they enjoy some
cut up vegetables or some cheese with their toddler while
the toddler has her family dinner. They put their toddler
(16:55):
to bed, and then they have the rest of their
family dinner. Or if you've got kids as they get older,
coming home late from sports practices, you might have a
big nutritional snack with them at five o'clock. Book, and
that's really the time that one parent and a child
plays games as conversation starters, enjoys that meal.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
But then when the child comes home.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
At eight o'clock, maybe they join in the family dinner
and they have dessert with the other family members. So
it's the idea of sort of flexible courses. Depending on
the age and stage of the child and how busy
the different schedules are, you can sort of mix and
match who eats what with whom.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
When you've also argued that one of the things we
need to do to fight against these busy schedules is
to really push back on as culture of commitment. I
thought this was a really important one.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
What do you mean there, Yeah, so there's a colleague
of mind named Bill Dougherty who's also a family therapist
in Minnesota, and he mounted a kind of statewide pushback
program where he would organize parents to go together to
talk to the coaches or the director of a play
and say, we love what you're doing. Our kids love
(18:08):
being involved in soccer and Macbeth, but family dinner is
really important to all of us for all these different reasons.
Could you adjust the rehearsal schedules. Could you make them
a little bit later, have them and earlier so our
kids can get home for dinner. That was so much
more effective than having one squeaky wheel going and to
(18:29):
go to the soccer coach to say please, please change
the schedule. So, you know, I think that parents really
have that power to influence extracurricular activities, and I think
they don't deploy it very often.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
So those are some strategies we can use to push
back against this barrier of time, right, get a little flexible,
maybe have some short breaks, push back against some of
these commitments. What about strategies for people who just think
that the cooking is too much work, that the overwhelming
part is really figuring out the dinner part. How can
they deal with that?
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Yeah, so I would say our website, the Family Dinner Project,
has a ton of great easy recipes that are eight
ingredients or less, take thirty minutes or less, and families
can sign up and get a Dinner Tonight which has
a recipe and then a conversation starter and a game,
(19:18):
and we have budget friendly which but they're about two
dollars and ten cents per person. So there's that. There's
also maybe making double or triple batches over the weekend
and freezing half of them or two thirds of them
so that next week you have you can just defrost
a stew or a soup and you've got most of
your dinner made. You can ask other members of your
(19:40):
family to help out. You know. That's I think a
really important part of making dinner more enjoyable is getting help,
whether it's with the grocery shopping or cooking part of it,
or cleaning up or setting the table. Kids and partners
of course can participate in this. We've done quite a
bit of work with military families who tell us about
(20:01):
doing dinner swaps when their spouses are deployed and they
are single parents. And what they do is they make
four time one meal, and then they meet and they swap,
and they come away from the swap with four different
meals that they can deploy for the rest of the week.
So that's something else.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
I love that I did so much because I feel
like this happens when friends have new babies, Like I've
been involved in lots of these kind of Oh, someone's
really busy, they have a new baby. Let's you know,
I just make an extra batch of my lasagna to
give to them, and other families do the same thing,
but we forget that we don't necessarily need a newborn
to be able to use a strategy like that, Like
a bunch of families can do that every single week
and get multiple different interesting meals for like a bunch
(20:41):
of families.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Yeah, absolutely, or it could be done. I mean, you
maybe have to be a military family to be that organized,
but you could do it once a week with a
friend or a neighbor. So I think there's some sort
of lower hanging fruit there.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
This also strikes me as another spot where just kind
of giving ourselves grace and maybe not going for the
most perfectionist meals possible can be helpful. Like I think
sometimes we end up putting so much pressure on ourselves
that we never or do the kind of thing that
we want to do. Whereas if we just agreed to
do it, you know, seventy five percent awesome family dinner,
as we'd wind up doing it much more often than
(21:17):
if we were trying to do it perfectly.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yes, and doing some shortcuts, you know, getting vegetables that
have been pre cut, or a rotisserie chicken, you know,
not making a salad, but putting all the different accouterments
for a salad out plus some tuna fish or some
egg salad and asking family members to assemble their own
and that can be done with tacos with creps. That's
(21:39):
also nice strategy for selective eaters if you've got very
different tastes in the families. It's a way to have
people be able to customize and choose what they want.
But it's also kind of a quick dinner, like a
charcuterie board kind of dinner.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
And so those are all ways to kind of fite
this barrier that cooking feels like it's too much work.
How about the barrier of technology, especially the fact that
it's harder and harder for us to put our tech
devices away, even for just you know, twenty minutes over
the dinner table. What are some solutions there.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yeah, I did a survey a few years ago and
found that parents were twice as likely to use their
gadgets at the dinner table. So my first bit of
advice is to ask the parents to kind of model
the good behavior that they want from their kids. Some
families have a very strict no technology policy. You know,
everybody put their phones in the middle of the table
(22:30):
and anybody who goes to reach for it has to
do the dishes. And then some families have a more
flexible version of that, and it might look like we
can check our gadgets if it's to check a detail
that we're having a fight about, like who won the
World Series in nineteen eighty four. And then some families say, well,
I want to be able to share a picture I
(22:52):
took or a funny email I got, And that seems
to have a kind of a different spirit because it
keeps the focus on connection at the table. So for
those families, the rule is we can't use our phones
to connect with people who aren't there, so no texting
with others or taking phone But it's okay to share
things that came up on your phone today, as long
(23:13):
as it's to the rest of the table. And then
there's even some games that can incorporate technology, like a
hot Potato selfie. You set the timer and you pass
it around, and when the timer goes off, you take
up selfie, and then you set the timer and you
pass it around until everybody has taken a selfie, and
then you know you have a funny little collection of
photos from that dinner.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
It's time for a quick break, but we'll be back
with more tips from Ann, including advice on how to
diffuse the dinner table disagreements that can mess up so
many meals. The Happiness Lab will be right back. When
I think of shared meals with friends and family, my
mind usually goes to meal prep, what ingredients do I need?
(23:57):
And why should I turn the oven on? But doctor
Anne Faschell thinks we should actually put more thought into
preparing the dinner table. Conversation games and prompts are a
great way to do this. It could be old favorites
like twenty questions or would you rather? Or a suggestion
from Anne's Family Dinner Table Project website, a game of guess,
the ingredients. Just like a meal needs salt and pepper,
it also needs playfulness and fun.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
I think we all need more play in our lives,
and games are a really great way to do it.
I play games in family therapy, often the same games
that I play at the dinner table. I don't love
competitive games at the dinner table, but games often lead
to laughter. They often lead to conversation. Let's go around
the table and say a rose something funny or positive
(24:44):
that happened to thorn, something difficult or unpleasant, and a
bud something we hope will happen tomorrow. Or let's tell
two truths and a lie, you know, tell two stories
about something that happened this week and one thing that's
just a bold faced lie, and others will try to
guess which is the made up thing. So ways to
get kids to share more without just asking them how
(25:05):
is your day? And then I think food itself has
so much many different properties that we can play with.
You know, it can be slippery, it can have different smells,
It has different colors, and so we can play with color.
Ask our kids, what meal could we make that's all
red or all green? Or what's a rainbow meal? And
(25:26):
that way we can eat our colors, which itself is
a very nutritious way to eat. Or let's play with space.
Let's switch seats because families often sit in the same
seats night after night. Or let's have a picnic, or
let's have a dinner in bed. Food is to families
like legos are to elementary school kids, as music is
to adolescents. It's the source of play. It's one of
(25:49):
the few things that we can do with our hands
and all our senses, and we can make something together.
How rare is that in twenty first century America that
we can create something together, And that, to me is
just really fun.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Think I'm channeling some busy parent friends of mine who
have toddlers and little kids, And as you're talking about
playing with dolls and playing with foods, I'm hearing in
my head what they might say, which is like, oh
my gosh, it's going to be messy, and I don't
have time to clean up. Any advice for kind of
making games that avoid the like kind of cleanup worries too?
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, I mean, I tend to have a really high
tolerance for mess which I mean, so here's just a
small example to have small kids smear olive oil on
vegetables that that get roasted at a high temperature will
pretty much ensure that those kids will eat those vegetables
(26:42):
because they've put their sticky little hands on it, and
then the vegetables come out pretty crispy. Young kids tend
not to like slimy foods, so yes, it's going to
be messy. Your kids are going to be covered, hopefully
just their hands in oil. But think about the trade off.
They're going to eat something really delicious and healthy that
you can eat too, and.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Partly they're learning how to cook to right. You're also
kind of weaving in a cooking demonstration while they're doing it.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
That's this could pay you back big time when they're
a little bit older, and maybe we'll do a little
cooking for you.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
We had a whole series of podcasts about parenting and
parenting strategies, and one of the things we often heard
is that anthropologists who study parents and other cultures often
find that they have kids getting more involved in things
like cooking and cleaning and so on. And I think
in the US, we sometimes don't want our kids to
do that because we think they won't do it. Perfectly
or kind of mess it up. But then we lose
these really interesting opportunities for teaching our kids because we
(27:38):
don't have them involved. It seems like dinner time is
yet another domain in which we could be doing this
a little.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Bit more absolutely. It reminds me of two parents, Eileen
and Mary, who had a little four year old boy,
and one of the moms really did not like mess
at all and didn't really like the idea of playing
with food and all of that, and they would get
their vegetables from a co op each week, and one
week they got a squash. They opened it up and
(28:04):
the little boy exclaimed, oh my goodness, it's so different
inside compaired to outside. And that was this amazing jumping
off point for talking about all the different ways you
can't know judge a book by its cover. Sort of
an analogy. I think for family dinner that there are
all kinds of surprises that lie around the table, so
(28:25):
it can be the launching pad for lots of interesting conversations,
not just about the food.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
I think this idea of sharing meals as an intimate
experience gets to yet another barrier I see coming up
not so much with families, but with maybe single folks
or friends who want to get together for meals, which
is I think we're often worried about having people in
our personal space, right. You know, I think about even tonight,
having someone over for dinner, and my head instantly goes
to like, oh, my gosh, I didn't put that stuff
away that's in the living room where the kitchen is
(28:51):
kind of a mess. Like anyways to give ourselves grease
and just allow our people into these intimate spaces so
we can get the benefits of sharing meals even outside
the family.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Yeah, I mean, I think one way is to invite
a friend over when you haven't completed making the dinner,
so that you're bringing them into the making of the dinner.
You know, often, particularly on a casual Wednesday night, a
friend would like to help. They'd like to help you
cut up those last salid ingredients. And I think that
(29:21):
creates more of a feeling of we're all in this
together and this is a shared meal, rather than you're
a guest coming into it. I used to when I
would have guests over and they say what can we bring?
And I would say, oh no, no, no, no, don't
bring anything. And then I realized that that was kind
of selfish and kind of controlling and kind of perfectionistic.
If I could ask them to bring a course, they
(29:44):
already would feel more included, and I would also feel
less burdened by having to make a meal. I think
there's so many different ways to involve outsiders or friends.
I think of a military mother who wrote a book
called Dinner with Smilies, and her husband was deployed for
a whole year, and every month they would invite somebody
(30:04):
from their neighborhood or community to come to dinner and
sit in the fall there's chair. One week it was
a coach, one week it was the governor of may
and I'm sure they failed the pressure to clean up
for those, but it added such an interesting variation on
their regular family dinner. And then I think of a
family I worked with a single mom who often felt
(30:27):
like there wasn't enough liveliness at the table because it
was just one adult. And so her friends and her
relatives knew that every Wednesday night was an open dinner night,
and they never knew who would drop by, and she always,
you know, made extra for that dinner.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
I've heard a similar suggestion where it's like you just
have one night where it's like, you know, Wednesday is
the open night, and maybe you don't even make extra dinner.
It's like, as a friend, you can come over, but
bring your own like bring a leftover, you can microwave it.
Don't expect me to be perfect, right, you know, but
this is a night where like doors open and you
can show up. It also reminds me of a suggestion
that I got from the journalist Oliver Berkman, who talks
(31:03):
about all these things we can do to kind of
manage our time with less perfectionism, and he has this
idea that he calls scruffy hospitalality, which is kind of
like you were saying, like you invite people over, but
it's like you're going to have to do the dishes,
You're going to have to tell me chop these vegetables.
The house is not going to be clean, and we
just sort of accept that at the beginning, that like
we're going to have some hospitality, we're gonna have some
shared meal time, but it's going to be pretty scruffy.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Right, Yeah, like set the expectations where they should be.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
And it seems like that's just a message for all
of this work, Right, there's so many benefits if we
could find more ways to share meals broadly, even beyond
our family. But to do that, we really just have
to set our expectations a little bit less perfectionistically.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Yes, one thing that we've been doing for well fifteen
years at the Family Dinner Project is hosting big community dinners.
And these are anywhere where families gather, libraries, military bases,
homeless shelters, clinics, teaching kitchens. They're often groups of families
who don't know each other, but who come to know
(32:00):
each other in a ninety minute dinner where we cook together,
we eat together, we play games, we have conversation jars
on the tables, and people reach in and ask whimsical
or silly or serious things of one another. And then
I talk to the parents or the caregivers and say,
what do you do well when it comes to family dinner,
(32:21):
and what are your obstacles? And now let's take some
of those obstacles and use the wisdom in this group
to share our workarounds and hacks. That's really where I've
learned probably the most, about how families find ways to
have dinner, even though it's really not that easy.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
It's another barrier. Lots of families face, is it? Sometimes
around the dinner table, there's tension, you know, maybe big
tension we have, you know, political disagreements, but even like
little tension. I'm just like pissy at you, mom for
that thing you said to me. Any strategies for diffusing.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
That, Yeah, So I want to start with a piece
of research on that, which I conducted during the pandemic.
One of the only good things I can say about
the pandemic is that it gave a naturalistic opportunity to
study what happens when families have more dinner with one another.
So something like sixty percent seventy percent of families shared
(33:15):
family dinners during the pandemic. And what I found was
that as frequency increased, the positive qualities of family dinner
also increased. So parents reported that they talked more about gratitude,
they laughed more, they talked about their identity as a family.
They also shared more conversation about the news and public events,
(33:37):
they used zoom to connect with friends and family. But
they also had more conflict and tension at the table.
And at first I was sort of upset by that finding,
and then I thought, well, of course, if you're spending
more time with your family. But dinner is a canvas.
It's an opportunity to do what families do, and one
(33:57):
of the things they do is have conflict and fight.
And I will say that the positive qualities increased way
more than the negative ones. So the first thing I
would say is some conflict and tension is to be expected.
And I know growing up we had drag out fights
about politics. I love those fights and I think my
parents did too. So you know, for some families, those
(34:19):
kinds of philosophical or political fights are really part of
their identity as a family. But in general, I think
there are ways to minimize conflict. Probably not the best
time to bring up topics, you know, our hot button
issues for your kids. Maybe don't talk about that d
they got in chemistry. Maybe go easy on teaching table
(34:40):
matters that makes everybody tense. Just focus on the manners
that matter that everybody can do better, you know, not
interrupting each other or maybe not talking with a mouthful
of food, But who cares about the elbows on the table.
Other things that kind of mitigate against conflict is having fun,
playing games, having conversations that make us laugh or think.
(35:01):
And yes, there can be guidelines that are offered, like
we have a role at the dinner table. Let's just
remember that when one person is talking, other people don't
talk over them or interrupt. Gosh, this is getting a
little heated. Let's just step away for a moment and
take a break. Or let's do a quick breathing exercise
(35:21):
and just calm down for a minute. I thought about
conflict a lot, and often do at Thanksgiving, which is,
of course after elections. And in twenty sixteen I was
worried about my own conflict at the Thanksgiving table, and
I came up with a game that I've now played
every Thanksgiving that I call the hat game. And as
(35:43):
people come in, I have a hat and post it's
at the table, and I have a prompt, and I
ask everybody to answer the prompt anonymously. So that first year,
it was what character in a children's book did you
most identify or do you most identify with or want
to be? Or what toy did you most love as
a child or love now as a child And people
(36:06):
would answer them. And then I brought the hat to
the table and pull out the post its, and each
person tried to guess which person went with which answer,
and then that person could expound if they wanted. But
it meant that for like ten or fifteen minutes, we
had a light hearted, interesting, conflict free conversation.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Thanks to doctor Anne Fichell and Yan Emmanuel denv for
walking us through the importance of sharing meal time with
other people. In the next episode, we'll examine another topic
raised by the report. Are we becoming less trusting and
what does that mean for our well being? All that
next time on the Happiness Lab with meet doctor Laurie Santos.
Pushkin Happy. International Day of Happiness. The world has been
marking March twentieth as a day dedicated to happiness for
over a decade, part of a worldwide push to get
governments to take happiness more seriously and to enact policies
that improve our well being. International Day of Happiness also
(00:37):
marks the release of the World Happiness Report, and Happiness
Lab has been given early access to all the new
research this report contains, and over the next two episodes,
we've got lots of highlights, including things you can do
right now to improve your life. The most famous headline
grabbing part of each year's World Happiness Report are the
country rankings. People around the world are asked, on a
scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you with
(00:59):
your life? The crown for the happiest people usually goes
to a country somewhere in Scandinavia, and this year the
happiest country.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Is Bendland again, followed by Denmark and Iceland and Sweden
and the Netherlands.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I think this is yan. Emmanuel Denev, professor of economics
and behavioral science at the University of Oxford, an editor
of the World Happiness Report. During the years he studied
these country data. He's knowniced some changes. The rankings used
to be dominated by the big rich nations, but all
that's changing.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Mexico and Costa Rica entered the top ten hugely, exciting
a kudos to them. Eastern European countries continued their ascent,
and that goes at the expense of the large industrial powers.
So Germany tumbles out of top twenty, the UK tumbles
out of the top twenty, and the US drops the
twenty fourth wow. And then at the very bottom Afghanistan
still and this time average life satisfaction in Afghanistan SETAI
(01:54):
one point thirty four out of ten.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
As I said before, the country rankings tend to grab
the headlines, but scientists like Yan and I are even
more interested in what's causing these differences in life satisfaction,
and one of the big factors might involve eating. There's
been a ton of discussion about what we eat, but
the World Happiness Report takes a different approach. It focuses
on who we're eating with. We tend to eat fourteen
(02:19):
big meals a week. Who are we spending time with
during all those lunches and dinners. Well, it turns out
that the answer to that question seems to have a
big impact on our well being because the World Happiness
Report found that some people share meals with others, while
some folks are going hungry for company. So why focus
on sharing.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Meals the extent to which people share meals together as
a proxy for the quality of our social connections and
the quantity of social connections that we have, essentially our
social capital, if you will, in the last seven days,
over the past week, how many of your lunches and
dinners were shared with somebody else? So about one and
six people approximately in the United States we're dining alone
(02:57):
in the early two thousands, two thousand and three to
be precise, and that's going up to one in four
people is dining alone in the United States by about
twenty twenty three, So that's a fifty three percent increase
or so in dining alone, but strikingly mostly youth, to
be really precise. Youth are almost twice as likely to
be dining alone today as compared to two decades ago.
(03:18):
And I thought, wow, these.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Findings are huge because eating alone is pretty bad for you,
and a lot of us are finding ourselves having winter
dinner by ourselves. Even when we have families around us
at home, colleagues at work, or peers at college, it's
so easy to end up eating alone. So I've turned
to an experienced clinical psychologist, family therapist in an advocate
for shared meals. For advice, you.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Could set the clock by my father walking through the
door at seven o'clock and dinner started at ten after seven.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
This is doctor Ann Fischel, Associate professor at the Harvard
Medical School.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
He would get out of his suit and put on
his play clothes and we would sit down, my mother,
my father, and my sister. We didn't really do any
other rituals. We didn't have Thanksgiving, but dinner was sank
or sangd and my mother didn't like to be stuck
in the kitchen, so every meal she made was super quick,
(04:12):
so quick. The years later, when I hosted my first
dinner party, I put a chicken, a roast chicken in
and took it out after thirty minutes, because I'd never
seen her spend more than thirty minutes in the kitchen.
And of course it was a bloody mess. But anyway,
those dinners were really important to me as a child,
and looking back, I realized that a lot of the
(04:34):
things that I know now about being a family therapist
I learned around my childhood dinner table. You know how
to diffuse conflict, how even if somebody's quiet, it doesn't
mean that they don't have a lot of things on
their mind. How important it is to draw everybody out
so everybody has a chance to talk. How fun it
(04:54):
is to hear stories about family members, to hear gossip
about people in the building or the neighborhood. So all
of that I learned at my dinner table.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
And such a believer in the virtues of us all
eating together that she helped found the Family Dinner Project.
I asked her to explain a little bit about it.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
So I was one of the co founders in twenty ten,
and the mission is to build on the research based
benefits of family dinner, the benefits that come from regular
family dinners that bring nutritional, cognitive, and mental health benefits.
I define family really broadly. Family is anybody who makes
(05:34):
you feel like home. Family is anywhere that you find community.
That could be people who aren't related to you. I'm
starting to work with patients with dementia, and I would
say part of their family are the other residents in
the memory care unit as well as the caregivers. It
can be college age kids eating together in a cafeteria.
(05:57):
It can be friends coming over for a tired Wednesday
night dinner. And what we found was that ninety percent
of most American families think that family dinners are a
great idea, but more than fifty percent of families are
eating dinner together. So the Family Dinner Project was designed
to bridge that gap, to make it easier, more doable, simpler,
(06:20):
more fun, more meaningful, so that more families could harness
these research back benefits of family dinner.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
And so let's talk about why family dinners are so important.
Maybe starting with the physical health benefits. How can our
physical health benefit from kind of having more family dinners.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
So, there are a lot of nutritional benefits that come
from home cooked meals, even if you're not trying that hard.
Portion size tends to be smaller than the restaurant equivalents,
which may account for lower OBCD rates associated with regular
family dinners. But also home cooked meals tend to be
lower in sugar and salt and fat, and higher and
fruits and vegetables and other nutrients. It's also associated with
(07:00):
better cardiovascular healths in young teens and also associated with
lower asthma symptoms, which may be a little puzzling. Maybe
it speaks because sometimes asthma's associated with anxiety, which is
lowered if the dinner is relaxing and not so stressful.
Maybe it's because parents can remind their kids to take medication.
(07:21):
So these are some of the health benefits.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
So your anxiety comment also reminds me that there are
lots of mental health benefits to family dinners. What are
some of those.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
There really are? I mean, there's so many that as
a family therapist that sort of joke, I could almost
be out of business if more families had regular family dinners.
So they're associated with, on the part of kids, lower
rates of anxiety and depression, lower rates of substance use
and teenage pregnancy, lower rates of eating disorders, and on
(07:51):
the upside, with more resilience, more self esteem, and kids
reporting that they feel more connected to their parents when
they have regular family dinners. And then it turns out
their mental health benefits for adults too, lower rates of
depression and anxiety for adults who eat with their kids,
but also adults who eat with other adults I can
(08:11):
get very, very excited about the mental health benefits.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Another benefit that was surprising when I first started reading
your work is this idea that they're also especially for kids,
these cognitive and academic benefits that come from family dinners.
What do we know about those?
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Yeah, so for young kids or preschoolers and toddlers, the
language that they hear around the dinner table as their
parents are sort of casually catching up about the day,
those little stories contain ten times more unusual or rare
words than would be expected for a two year old
or a three year old to know, and ten times
(08:46):
more unusual words than would show up in picture books
that kids are read to. I think why that's significant
is that kids who have larger vocabularies read earlier and
more easily than kids who have slimmer vocabularies. I was
just quoting this research to my son, who has a
two year old grandchild, and she was saying, to her parents,
(09:06):
what are you two talking about? I said, that's so great.
You know, I hope you told her what you were
talking about, because that's going to give a little booster
to her vocabulary.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
So it seems like they're all these benefits but it
seems like sometimes when families think about figuring out a
family meal, it sometimes feels just totally overwhelming. Sometimes families
even treat it with dread. Is this the kind of
thing that you hear in the Family Dinner Project too?
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Absolutely? I mean, we are such a busy, tired, harried people.
You know, most of our kids are doing so many
extracurricular activities that it can just feel like one more
thing on the to do list. And that is the
number one challenge or obstacle. You know, we're too tired,
our schedules don't mesh up, and so at the Family
(09:52):
Dinner Project, we've spent a lot of time talking to
hundreds of thousands of families across the country to find
out some workarounds for this common challenge.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
So let's talk about some of the barriers you hear
about most often. I just think the biggest one is
just time.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Right time, being too tired, picky eaters, whether that's a
partner or a child. You know, what's the point of
going to the trouble of making a meal if not
everybody's going to eat it. I don't want to be
a short order cook and make four different meals I
go to the trouble of making the meal, and then
all we do is fight or nobody talks. I can't
get people to talk. Conflict and tension at the table.
(10:29):
Budget worries healthy food is so expensive? How do I
get my dollar to stretch so that I can feed
my children unprocessed healthy food? Distraction at the table. My
kids turn on their gadgets, and I guess we do too.
What do we do about technology at the table? So
I'd say those are the recurring obstacles that I hear
(10:49):
about over and over.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
When we hear these barriers, it seems really like hard
to get to dinner. But you've argue that part of
the barriers comes from our minds. We have these misconceptions
about the things that count as family dinners. And so
let's go through some of these misconceptions and see if
we can kind of like clear the air right. One
of the misconceptions is this idea that for a family
dinner to really count as a family dinner, everybody has
to be there, everybody has to be there for the
(11:11):
whole time. Is this really the case? How should we
think about this differently?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
First off, I want to say this isn't a nostalgia project.
You know, we're not trying to go back to the
spotless kitchens of the nineteen fifties where mother was home
all day baking a I don't know, a pork loine.
Fortunately that ship has sailed. So family dinner is less
about the food than about what happens once the family
(11:35):
gathers around the food. So really best to focus on
the atmosphere around the dinner table, conversation, having a good time.
You know, I call that the secret sauce of dinner,
and you're absolutely right. Family dinner doesn't have to be
the whole family sitting down. As one family said to me,
we have a rule no one eats alone. This is
(11:56):
a family with five sons, and they did kind of
split shift dinners, so they would have two people eating,
and then later on maybe one of those people would
join another and so on, and they would have one
meal that could be reheated, maybe a stew or soup.
So that's another myth. It doesn't have to be everybody.
It doesn't have to be dinner. For some families, dinner
(12:18):
time is just beyond the pale. It's just too hectic.
It could be family breakfast. It could be a fabulous
Sunday brunch with extended family. There are really sixteen opportunities
in a week, seven breakfasts, seven dinners, and two weekend lunches.
And then they're also intentional snacks, you know, push away
(12:38):
from your computer, come down to the kitchen table at
ten o'clock and let's have apples and hot chocolate. And
then it doesn't have to be family. It could be
you and a best friend. It could be a Tuesday
night group that gets together to talk about books over food.
It could be elders at an assisted living breaking bread together.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
It seems like one of the reasons that meeting together
to have these meals is so challenging is we put
these like ridiculous restrictions on ourselves. We get kind of
perfectionistic about it, and it seems like you're go with
the family dinner project is just to say we don't
have to do this perfectly. We just should do this
a little bit more often. So it's kind of family
dinner with a bit more grace than we usually give ourselves.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
I love the way you put that perfect is really
not our friend. Here. Dinner with a toddler might be
five minutes. That's fine, that's something to build on. You know,
the average American dinner is only twenty two minutes. Doesn't
have to be food made from scratch. It doesn't have
to be heirloom tomatoes, doesn't have to be a perfectly
roasted chicken, doesn't have to be perfect manners. Yes, let
(13:36):
go of the perfect and give yourself some more grace.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
So eating meals with family, friends, and colleagues has a
ton of benefits. We're going to take a quick break now,
but when we get back and we'll have more tips
on how to overcome all the obstacles that stop us
sharing meals. Before the break, doctor Anne Faschel took us
through a lot of the things that stop us from
(14:01):
enjoying shared meals, be that eating with our loved ones
at home, having friends over, or sitting down with others
during our lunch break at work. I asked ant to
down those obstacles and offer some concrete solutions.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
For a lot of families, it just feels like another
thing on their to do list. And you know, partly
I like to, without being too preachy, I hope to
say family meal time is really the most reliable time
that we have to look eye to eye, to have fun,
to relax, to share stories about our day. You know,
(14:34):
we don't sit around campfires telling stories. We don't write
letters with stories. So just reminding families what a rich
opportunity this is and how it packs really such a punch,
and then you know, really trying to come up with
some meals that are very very easy that you could
(14:54):
almost make in your sleep, food that you have in
your pantry, like a pasta with tomato sauce, or what
I call my yoga eggs that I can make when
I get off work at six and have to be
out the door by six thirty that are just quick
sauteed vegetables with eggs on top. So coming up with
those and getting a list of meals from your family
so that you won't get belly aching. You'll have it
(15:17):
like a rotating list of meals you know are acceptable
to every Maybe they don't all adore every meal, but
they'll eat them and you can get onto the more
fun things about family dinner and taking stock of weather.
Dinner is really the best time of day for your family.
Maybe it's breakfast. Years ago, Cheerios came to us and said,
(15:37):
we know you're the family dinner project, But how about
the family breakfast project? And we came up with breakfast
that took seven minutes, because that's the amount of time
if you don't press your snooze alarm, you can get
seven minutes of your day back. And so we built
easy meals with a game to play at the breakfast
table and a conversation starter. And they were all about
(16:00):
anticipating the day rather than reviewing it. If you came
up with a weather analogy for the day, what would
it be, and then we might check it at the
end of the day. Or what are you most looking
forward to? Or what are you worried about? Or let's
write some notes and put them in each other's lunch
boxes or lunch bags. So that's another thing for very
(16:20):
busy families, is to pivot to something else.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
You've also mentioned the possibility of engaging in what you
called flexible courses, and this is particularly for families that
might not have everybody home at the same time. How
does this work and why is it so effective?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, so I'm thinking about it at different stages of
the life cycle. You know, if a family, if a
couple has a toddler who goes to sleep at seven
and they want to have a family meal, but they're
really not ready to eat, So maybe they enjoy some
cut up vegetables or some cheese with their toddler while
the toddler has her family dinner. They put their toddler
(16:55):
to bed, and then they have the rest of their
family dinner. Or if you've got kids as they get older,
coming home late from sports practices, you might have a
big nutritional snack with them at five o'clock. Book, and
that's really the time that one parent and a child
plays games as conversation starters, enjoys that meal.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
But then when the child comes home.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
At eight o'clock, maybe they join in the family dinner
and they have dessert with the other family members. So
it's the idea of sort of flexible courses. Depending on
the age and stage of the child and how busy
the different schedules are, you can sort of mix and
match who eats what with whom.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
When you've also argued that one of the things we
need to do to fight against these busy schedules is
to really push back on as culture of commitment. I
thought this was a really important one.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
What do you mean there, Yeah, so there's a colleague
of mind named Bill Dougherty who's also a family therapist
in Minnesota, and he mounted a kind of statewide pushback
program where he would organize parents to go together to
talk to the coaches or the director of a play
and say, we love what you're doing. Our kids love
(18:08):
being involved in soccer and Macbeth, but family dinner is
really important to all of us for all these different reasons.
Could you adjust the rehearsal schedules. Could you make them
a little bit later, have them and earlier so our
kids can get home for dinner. That was so much
more effective than having one squeaky wheel going and to
(18:29):
go to the soccer coach to say please, please change
the schedule. So, you know, I think that parents really
have that power to influence extracurricular activities, and I think
they don't deploy it very often.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
So those are some strategies we can use to push
back against this barrier of time, right, get a little flexible,
maybe have some short breaks, push back against some of
these commitments. What about strategies for people who just think
that the cooking is too much work, that the overwhelming
part is really figuring out the dinner part. How can
they deal with that?
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Yeah, so I would say our website, the Family Dinner Project,
has a ton of great easy recipes that are eight
ingredients or less, take thirty minutes or less, and families
can sign up and get a Dinner Tonight which has
a recipe and then a conversation starter and a game,
(19:18):
and we have budget friendly which but they're about two
dollars and ten cents per person. So there's that. There's
also maybe making double or triple batches over the weekend
and freezing half of them or two thirds of them
so that next week you have you can just defrost
a stew or a soup and you've got most of
your dinner made. You can ask other members of your
(19:40):
family to help out. You know. That's I think a
really important part of making dinner more enjoyable is getting help,
whether it's with the grocery shopping or cooking part of it,
or cleaning up or setting the table. Kids and partners
of course can participate in this. We've done quite a
bit of work with military families who tell us about
(20:01):
doing dinner swaps when their spouses are deployed and they
are single parents. And what they do is they make
four time one meal, and then they meet and they swap,
and they come away from the swap with four different
meals that they can deploy for the rest of the week.
So that's something else.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
I love that I did so much because I feel
like this happens when friends have new babies, Like I've
been involved in lots of these kind of Oh, someone's
really busy, they have a new baby. Let's you know,
I just make an extra batch of my lasagna to
give to them, and other families do the same thing,
but we forget that we don't necessarily need a newborn
to be able to use a strategy like that, Like
a bunch of families can do that every single week
and get multiple different interesting meals for like a bunch
(20:41):
of families.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Yeah, absolutely, or it could be done. I mean, you
maybe have to be a military family to be that organized,
but you could do it once a week with a
friend or a neighbor. So I think there's some sort
of lower hanging fruit there.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
This also strikes me as another spot where just kind
of giving ourselves grace and maybe not going for the
most perfectionist meals possible can be helpful. Like I think
sometimes we end up putting so much pressure on ourselves
that we never or do the kind of thing that
we want to do. Whereas if we just agreed to
do it, you know, seventy five percent awesome family dinner,
as we'd wind up doing it much more often than
(21:17):
if we were trying to do it perfectly.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yes, and doing some shortcuts, you know, getting vegetables that
have been pre cut, or a rotisserie chicken, you know,
not making a salad, but putting all the different accouterments
for a salad out plus some tuna fish or some
egg salad and asking family members to assemble their own
and that can be done with tacos with creps. That's
(21:39):
also nice strategy for selective eaters if you've got very
different tastes in the families. It's a way to have
people be able to customize and choose what they want.
But it's also kind of a quick dinner, like a
charcuterie board kind of dinner.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
And so those are all ways to kind of fite
this barrier that cooking feels like it's too much work.
How about the barrier of technology, especially the fact that
it's harder and harder for us to put our tech
devices away, even for just you know, twenty minutes over
the dinner table. What are some solutions there.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yeah, I did a survey a few years ago and
found that parents were twice as likely to use their
gadgets at the dinner table. So my first bit of
advice is to ask the parents to kind of model
the good behavior that they want from their kids. Some
families have a very strict no technology policy. You know,
everybody put their phones in the middle of the table
(22:30):
and anybody who goes to reach for it has to
do the dishes. And then some families have a more
flexible version of that, and it might look like we
can check our gadgets if it's to check a detail
that we're having a fight about, like who won the
World Series in nineteen eighty four. And then some families say, well,
I want to be able to share a picture I
(22:52):
took or a funny email I got, And that seems
to have a kind of a different spirit because it
keeps the focus on connection at the table. So for
those families, the rule is we can't use our phones
to connect with people who aren't there, so no texting
with others or taking phone But it's okay to share
things that came up on your phone today, as long
(23:13):
as it's to the rest of the table. And then
there's even some games that can incorporate technology, like a
hot Potato selfie. You set the timer and you pass
it around, and when the timer goes off, you take
up selfie, and then you set the timer and you
pass it around until everybody has taken a selfie, and
then you know you have a funny little collection of
photos from that dinner.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
It's time for a quick break, but we'll be back
with more tips from Ann, including advice on how to
diffuse the dinner table disagreements that can mess up so
many meals. The Happiness Lab will be right back. When
I think of shared meals with friends and family, my
mind usually goes to meal prep, what ingredients do I need?
(23:57):
And why should I turn the oven on? But doctor
Anne Faschell thinks we should actually put more thought into
preparing the dinner table. Conversation games and prompts are a
great way to do this. It could be old favorites
like twenty questions or would you rather? Or a suggestion
from Anne's Family Dinner Table Project website, a game of guess,
the ingredients. Just like a meal needs salt and pepper,
it also needs playfulness and fun.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
I think we all need more play in our lives,
and games are a really great way to do it.
I play games in family therapy, often the same games
that I play at the dinner table. I don't love
competitive games at the dinner table, but games often lead
to laughter. They often lead to conversation. Let's go around
the table and say a rose something funny or positive
(24:44):
that happened to thorn, something difficult or unpleasant, and a
bud something we hope will happen tomorrow. Or let's tell
two truths and a lie, you know, tell two stories
about something that happened this week and one thing that's
just a bold faced lie, and others will try to
guess which is the made up thing. So ways to
get kids to share more without just asking them how
(25:05):
is your day? And then I think food itself has
so much many different properties that we can play with.
You know, it can be slippery, it can have different smells,
It has different colors, and so we can play with color.
Ask our kids, what meal could we make that's all
red or all green? Or what's a rainbow meal? And
(25:26):
that way we can eat our colors, which itself is
a very nutritious way to eat. Or let's play with space.
Let's switch seats because families often sit in the same
seats night after night. Or let's have a picnic, or
let's have a dinner in bed. Food is to families
like legos are to elementary school kids, as music is
to adolescents. It's the source of play. It's one of
(25:49):
the few things that we can do with our hands
and all our senses, and we can make something together.
How rare is that in twenty first century America that
we can create something together, And that, to me is
just really fun.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Think I'm channeling some busy parent friends of mine who
have toddlers and little kids, And as you're talking about
playing with dolls and playing with foods, I'm hearing in
my head what they might say, which is like, oh
my gosh, it's going to be messy, and I don't
have time to clean up. Any advice for kind of
making games that avoid the like kind of cleanup worries too?
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, I mean, I tend to have a really high
tolerance for mess which I mean, so here's just a
small example to have small kids smear olive oil on
vegetables that that get roasted at a high temperature will
pretty much ensure that those kids will eat those vegetables
(26:42):
because they've put their sticky little hands on it, and
then the vegetables come out pretty crispy. Young kids tend
not to like slimy foods, so yes, it's going to
be messy. Your kids are going to be covered, hopefully
just their hands in oil. But think about the trade off.
They're going to eat something really delicious and healthy that
you can eat too, and.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Partly they're learning how to cook to right. You're also
kind of weaving in a cooking demonstration while they're doing it.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
That's this could pay you back big time when they're
a little bit older, and maybe we'll do a little
cooking for you.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
We had a whole series of podcasts about parenting and
parenting strategies, and one of the things we often heard
is that anthropologists who study parents and other cultures often
find that they have kids getting more involved in things
like cooking and cleaning and so on. And I think
in the US, we sometimes don't want our kids to
do that because we think they won't do it. Perfectly
or kind of mess it up. But then we lose
these really interesting opportunities for teaching our kids because we
(27:38):
don't have them involved. It seems like dinner time is
yet another domain in which we could be doing this
a little.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Bit more absolutely. It reminds me of two parents, Eileen
and Mary, who had a little four year old boy,
and one of the moms really did not like mess
at all and didn't really like the idea of playing
with food and all of that, and they would get
their vegetables from a co op each week, and one
week they got a squash. They opened it up and
(28:04):
the little boy exclaimed, oh my goodness, it's so different
inside compaired to outside. And that was this amazing jumping
off point for talking about all the different ways you
can't know judge a book by its cover. Sort of
an analogy. I think for family dinner that there are
all kinds of surprises that lie around the table, so
(28:25):
it can be the launching pad for lots of interesting conversations,
not just about the food.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
I think this idea of sharing meals as an intimate
experience gets to yet another barrier I see coming up
not so much with families, but with maybe single folks
or friends who want to get together for meals, which
is I think we're often worried about having people in
our personal space, right. You know, I think about even tonight,
having someone over for dinner, and my head instantly goes
to like, oh, my gosh, I didn't put that stuff
away that's in the living room where the kitchen is
(28:51):
kind of a mess. Like anyways to give ourselves grease
and just allow our people into these intimate spaces so
we can get the benefits of sharing meals even outside
the family.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Yeah, I mean, I think one way is to invite
a friend over when you haven't completed making the dinner,
so that you're bringing them into the making of the dinner.
You know, often, particularly on a casual Wednesday night, a
friend would like to help. They'd like to help you
cut up those last salid ingredients. And I think that
(29:21):
creates more of a feeling of we're all in this
together and this is a shared meal, rather than you're
a guest coming into it. I used to when I
would have guests over and they say what can we bring?
And I would say, oh no, no, no, no, don't
bring anything. And then I realized that that was kind
of selfish and kind of controlling and kind of perfectionistic.
If I could ask them to bring a course, they
(29:44):
already would feel more included, and I would also feel
less burdened by having to make a meal. I think
there's so many different ways to involve outsiders or friends.
I think of a military mother who wrote a book
called Dinner with Smilies, and her husband was deployed for
a whole year, and every month they would invite somebody
(30:04):
from their neighborhood or community to come to dinner and
sit in the fall there's chair. One week it was
a coach, one week it was the governor of may
and I'm sure they failed the pressure to clean up
for those, but it added such an interesting variation on
their regular family dinner. And then I think of a
family I worked with a single mom who often felt
(30:27):
like there wasn't enough liveliness at the table because it
was just one adult. And so her friends and her
relatives knew that every Wednesday night was an open dinner night,
and they never knew who would drop by, and she always,
you know, made extra for that dinner.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
I've heard a similar suggestion where it's like you just
have one night where it's like, you know, Wednesday is
the open night, and maybe you don't even make extra dinner.
It's like, as a friend, you can come over, but
bring your own like bring a leftover, you can microwave it.
Don't expect me to be perfect, right, you know, but
this is a night where like doors open and you
can show up. It also reminds me of a suggestion
that I got from the journalist Oliver Berkman, who talks
(31:03):
about all these things we can do to kind of
manage our time with less perfectionism, and he has this
idea that he calls scruffy hospitalality, which is kind of
like you were saying, like you invite people over, but
it's like you're going to have to do the dishes,
You're going to have to tell me chop these vegetables.
The house is not going to be clean, and we
just sort of accept that at the beginning, that like
we're going to have some hospitality, we're gonna have some
shared meal time, but it's going to be pretty scruffy.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Right, Yeah, like set the expectations where they should be.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
And it seems like that's just a message for all
of this work, Right, there's so many benefits if we
could find more ways to share meals broadly, even beyond
our family. But to do that, we really just have
to set our expectations a little bit less perfectionistically.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Yes, one thing that we've been doing for well fifteen
years at the Family Dinner Project is hosting big community dinners.
And these are anywhere where families gather, libraries, military bases,
homeless shelters, clinics, teaching kitchens. They're often groups of families
who don't know each other, but who come to know
(32:00):
each other in a ninety minute dinner where we cook together,
we eat together, we play games, we have conversation jars
on the tables, and people reach in and ask whimsical
or silly or serious things of one another. And then
I talk to the parents or the caregivers and say,
what do you do well when it comes to family dinner,
(32:21):
and what are your obstacles? And now let's take some
of those obstacles and use the wisdom in this group
to share our workarounds and hacks. That's really where I've
learned probably the most, about how families find ways to
have dinner, even though it's really not that easy.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
It's another barrier. Lots of families face, is it? Sometimes
around the dinner table, there's tension, you know, maybe big
tension we have, you know, political disagreements, but even like
little tension. I'm just like pissy at you, mom for
that thing you said to me. Any strategies for diffusing.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
That, Yeah, So I want to start with a piece
of research on that, which I conducted during the pandemic.
One of the only good things I can say about
the pandemic is that it gave a naturalistic opportunity to
study what happens when families have more dinner with one another.
So something like sixty percent seventy percent of families shared
(33:15):
family dinners during the pandemic. And what I found was
that as frequency increased, the positive qualities of family dinner
also increased. So parents reported that they talked more about gratitude,
they laughed more, they talked about their identity as a family.
They also shared more conversation about the news and public events,
(33:37):
they used zoom to connect with friends and family. But
they also had more conflict and tension at the table.
And at first I was sort of upset by that finding,
and then I thought, well, of course, if you're spending
more time with your family. But dinner is a canvas.
It's an opportunity to do what families do, and one
(33:57):
of the things they do is have conflict and fight.
And I will say that the positive qualities increased way
more than the negative ones. So the first thing I
would say is some conflict and tension is to be expected.
And I know growing up we had drag out fights
about politics. I love those fights and I think my
parents did too. So you know, for some families, those
(34:19):
kinds of philosophical or political fights are really part of
their identity as a family. But in general, I think
there are ways to minimize conflict. Probably not the best
time to bring up topics, you know, our hot button
issues for your kids. Maybe don't talk about that d
they got in chemistry. Maybe go easy on teaching table
(34:40):
matters that makes everybody tense. Just focus on the manners
that matter that everybody can do better, you know, not
interrupting each other or maybe not talking with a mouthful
of food, But who cares about the elbows on the table.
Other things that kind of mitigate against conflict is having fun,
playing games, having conversations that make us laugh or think.
(35:01):
And yes, there can be guidelines that are offered, like
we have a role at the dinner table. Let's just
remember that when one person is talking, other people don't
talk over them or interrupt. Gosh, this is getting a
little heated. Let's just step away for a moment and
take a break. Or let's do a quick breathing exercise
(35:21):
and just calm down for a minute. I thought about
conflict a lot, and often do at Thanksgiving, which is,
of course after elections. And in twenty sixteen I was
worried about my own conflict at the Thanksgiving table, and
I came up with a game that I've now played
every Thanksgiving that I call the hat game. And as
(35:43):
people come in, I have a hat and post it's
at the table, and I have a prompt, and I
ask everybody to answer the prompt anonymously. So that first year,
it was what character in a children's book did you
most identify or do you most identify with or want
to be? Or what toy did you most love as
a child or love now as a child And people
(36:06):
would answer them. And then I brought the hat to
the table and pull out the post its, and each
person tried to guess which person went with which answer,
and then that person could expound if they wanted. But
it meant that for like ten or fifteen minutes, we
had a light hearted, interesting, conflict free conversation.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Thanks to doctor Anne Fichell and Yan Emmanuel denv for
walking us through the importance of sharing meal time with
other people. In the next episode, we'll examine another topic
raised by the report. Are we becoming less trusting and
what does that mean for our well being? All that
next time on the Happiness Lab with meet doctor Laurie Santos.
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