Monday, January 29, 2007
For time-starved families, a quest for family dinner
The Journal News: "'We don't have a traditional schedule,' said Cat Cohen, a mother of three from Nanuet. Cohen works two part-time jobs as a copy editor and legal assistant. Her husband, Jonathan, leaves at 4 p.m. for his job as a stagehand on Broadway. Their oldest son, Michael, finished college and moved to Brooklyn, and their second-oldest, Daniel, gets home from football or wrestling practice at 7. By then, the youngest, 8-year-old Emily, has had dinner and is doing her homework. That leaves Sunday and Monday as the only nights when family dinner is even a possibility."
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2 comments:
I agree that eating as a family can be important, however it is true that it is far from an easy thing to do. When everyone has a different schedule, it is hard to accomodate everyone's lifestyle. I know that my family would generally have dinner as a family during the week, but Friday through Sunday was more of a free for all. A find your own food type deal. Leftovers. I think that worked out well because it incorporated the idea of family meals while allowing for some give and take.
However, if you don't have meals as a family, I don't think it is as tragic as this article makes it out to be. It is a nice idea, but not crucial to survival.
This article can go both ways. Though having family dinner all the time can get nerve racking depending on the relationships between family members, I think it's important to have a sort of connection to eachother at some time during the day. Like Katie said, it's not necessarily crucial to survival. It's almost taboo to have family dinner in a lot of families because they're so strongly opposed to anything that's "traditional" and "old fashioned." A shame in many ways and directions, there should be some sort of family time or connection but if you don't eat with your family, aside from unavoidable scheduling issues, what DO you do together other than sleep under the same roof and wait for eachother the get the hell out of the bathroom?
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