We’re thrilled to announce our latest venture: The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our 30-minute episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel will talk through tough topics related to family meals. Pull up a chair and grab a plate — we’re serving up real talk about family dinner! If you missed our first two episodes, you can get caught up on Episode 1: Home for the Holidays? and Episode 2: Is it the Family, or the Dinner?

In Episode 3, “Family Dinner During May Madness,” we’re talking about one of the busiest times of year – the end of the school year, when family calendars overflow and dinner is the last thing on anyone’s mind. Bri and Dr. Fishel chat about some of the concerns with overscheduling, as well as the benefits of allowing kids to explore extracurricular activities and interests, and how this time of year can be an opportunity to look at family time differently.

They also discuss the pressure to do it all and be a perfect parent, and how to start pushing back against the increasing overwhelm, including smart conversation starters to help everyone in the family gauge how they’re doing with managing stress. And of course, they share practical tips and ideas to help families get a “family dinner” experience on the busiest nights, whether that’s sharing food, fun, and conversation at the local ice cream shop; splitting dinner up into shifts; sharing a snack at a more opportune time of day; or scheduling a family meal in advance so everyone can plan for it.

The episode wraps up with food (make-ahead and freezer friendly meals), fun (a photo caption contest on the go), and conversation ideas (If you were free to do anything you wanted tomorrow, what would you do?).

Episode Transcript:

Anne Fishel: Welcome to the Family Dinner Project podcast, produced by the Family Dinner Project, a non profit program based at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Psychiatry Academy. Decades of research show us why family dinners are important. They’re great for the bodies, the brains, and the mental health of kids and adults.

Bri DeRosa: But they’re not always easy. We’re here to talk about the messy business of how to make family dinners happen. So pull up a chair and grab a plate. We’re serving up real talk about family dinner.

Welcome back to the Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa, content manager for the Family Dinner Project, joined by my lovely favorite colleague, Dr. Anne Fishel. 

Anne Fishel: Hello there. Great to be with you, Bri. 

Bri DeRosa: Great to have you back here in the studio, Annie. And today we are talking about something that I think a lot of families are probably feeling right now, which is the, what I call May Madness.

It’s that end of school year, spring into summer, absolutely banana pants calendar thing that happens. I feel like every year, no matter what I try to do to safeguard our calendar and keep some white space there, this time of year brings absolute chaos. And it’s like the number one time of year when people just, I feel like, opt out of family dinner altogether.

Do you see that? I mean, you, you work with families all the time. You’re a family therapist. Do you see this happening? 

Anne Fishel: I do, but I, I want to just not let you get off the hook quite so fast, because you’re really our, our family dinner expert on what it’s like to live through May Madness, and I’ve known you since your kids were in elementary school, so I’ve experienced a lot of end of years vicariously with you.

And I wonder if you would describe what it’s like in your family with two adolescents. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, so… yes, I have one child who’s an athlete and one child who’s a very serious musician, and so over the years those activities have kind of piled up, right? No matter how much we’ve tried to say, no, no, no, no, no.

Things have come onto the calendar in droves. And you’ve also got, as they get older, the end of year academic things, and you’ve got the, like, awards ceremonies, and you’ve got the National Honor Society induction, and you’ve got the this meeting, and the that meeting, and the school committee honors, and the thing.

And all of those seem to come at the last minute. And then, you know, for my oldest, there are concerts, there are just, he, there are constantly, he’s in like five different ensembles at any given time, and there’s the end of year concerts, and there’s the thing, the the rehearsals for the concerts, and the younger one has practice three nights a week for his sport, and then there’s end of year tournaments. Right now, he’s got travel tournaments, like, you know, three times a month throughout the spring and, you know, my husband and I were looking at the calendar and we were like, wow, there’s a travel tournament on Easter, on Mother’s Day, on Father’s Day, right? I mean, there’s just absolutely no break, and it’s a lot. 

Anne Fishel: I’m exhausted just listening to it, but I’m also hearing the kind of excitement of this time of year, which I don’t want to lose, and there’s some extra family time, I think, built in, that takes place outside the home. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I, that, absolutely, yes. It’s an, it’s an exciting time of year, generally, particularly for the kids.

And of course for parents, right? It’s fun to watch your kids do the things that they love to do. Hopefully, hopefully, I’m going to say right up front, fellow parents, hopefully the things that are clogging your calendar are meaningful things, right? And if they’re not, maybe that’s the first thing we need to talk about.

But hopefully they’re mostly meaningful things, and places where your child or children feel that they are shining and you can watch them shine and you can feel really good about that. And yes, that does bring some outside the home family time, but it also inevitably happens at the dinner hour. 

Anne Fishel: Right.

Bri DeRosa: So, whatever that like normal ritual is, you don’t have it. You don’t have it. The routine in the household gets blown to smithereens at this time of year, and you’re just not having that grounding thing where it’s like, okay, it’s 6pm, it’s time to make dinner, and everybody’s kind of powering down for an hour before they do homework or go off to their evening practice or whatever.

There’s not that cohesion, right, because you’re usually two different parents in two different directions with two different kids and maybe you’re going to come back together later, or maybe not. Maybe, you know, somebody’s getting home at 10 o’clock and you’re like, okay, it’s bedtime, right? 

Anne Fishel: So it’s, I think it’s really a time to kind of reinvent some of those family rituals, so that they’re way more flexible than they are during the rest of the year.

So maybe it’s one parent and one child. It’s the split shift dinner. You know, you just throw out the idea that we’re all going to gather for dinner. Maybe one parent who’s taking the child to practice can have a hearty snack with that child before they go off to sports practice. And the other parent can save some of their meal to eat with the child who comes home at 10 o’clock from a rehearsal.

And that’s a way to keep some parent child contact and continuity and ritual and a facsimile of a family dinner. And maybe there’s one night, or one brunch a week during this time, that we can predictably sit down. And that will be our, our kind of time we can count on as a family. 

Bri DeRosa: You’re inspiring me to make the point that one of the kind of unexpected benefits of not being able to have the family dinner routine at this time of year is that we all start to miss it. So it is a nice time to kind of, to your point, remember that the connection is important, and that there are ways to do that, even if it’s just like, you know, there have been May madness moments in the past where, you know, I’m driving one kid home from like the 50th thing of the week, and I’m like, Hey, you know what? The ice cream shop opened for the summer. We’re going to be driving past. Why don’t we just stop and get a cone? We have, we can take 15 minutes and sit by the water and like, have an ice cream cone and, and connect. Right? Sometimes that’s the best you can do. 

Anne Fishel: That sounds pretty good, Bri.

Bri DeRosa: I feel really validated by that because as, you know, as a family therapist and like a family dinner guru, I do feel validated when you tell me, no, that’s, that sounds like the right thing to do. 

Anne Fishel: I think of the, one of my favorite quotes, this is from a playwright, Tom Stoppard, and he says, happiness is equilibrium, shift your weight.

And I think that’s kind of a, a bit of a mantra during May Madness, like look for the places where you can rebalance things so that there’s still some family connection, doesn’t look the way it does in the dreary months of January and February, when we’re all kind of hunkered down at home. But there’s still opportunities.

And it sounds like you find all kinds of ways to do that, to adjust your weight. 

Bri DeRosa: That’s such a good quote. Happiness is equilibrium, shift your weight. That’s amazing. And so I think, you know, let’s talk a little bit about the shifting of the weight, right? Because, you know, we beat this drum all the time that in a very fast paced and generally disconnected society, I, you know, I hate to say it, but that’s kind of the way we’ve trended in the world, finding that time as a family is more important than ever.

Being connected as a family is harder to do. And it’s more important. So the kind of, the stakes feel like they’re a little higher than maybe they were 30 years ago around finding these moments. What do you see around this, like, this feeling of disconnection and connection and that pull? How do we shift our weight?

Anne Fishel: Certainly in the last 30 years, there’s been, you know, skyrocketing of mental health challenges in young people from, you know, 11 to 24. There’s been much less time spent as a family, you know, family dinners, maybe they’ve gone down, but what we do know is that family time is protective. And a chance, you know, it’s really important for kids every day to have a chance to check in with their parents and vice versa.

So you know, the worry is that an overscheduled child will have less time to do that. On the other hand, you know, the outside activities, if they’re meaningful, as you were saying at the beginning, give an opportunity for kids who maybe don’t love school to find other things that they do love in the arts or athletics. It’s also a chance to have fun and to be with other people, you know, be with other kids, to make connections with other kids. Scheduled activities outside of school are also important. And again, it’s finding that, that balance so that that doesn’t tip over so far that then there’s no time to do nothing, to hang out with family. If kids are busy, busy, busy all, all day long that they’re losing out, you know, on all kinds of things.

So, I’m certainly concerned about that, but I don’t want to go overboard and say, you know scheduling activities outside of school is a bad thing. No, you know, in, in moderation, and if it’s activities that are meaningful to the kids that aren’t imposed on them by well- meaning parents to pad their resumes, or because it’s things that they like to do when they were kids and get some vicarious satisfaction out of seeing their kids on the soccer field, even though their kids have 2 left feet, you know you know, as long as the activities are things that are important to the kids. And that is, parents check in on that each year to make sure those activities continue to be meaningful. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. So that’s, and that’s such a great point too, like, I kind of, I felt a little cringe happen when you just said, like, you know, as long as it’s not something that the parents are vicariously or that the parents are imposing. Right? And I think those are… those are places where we as, as parents actually really need to examine ourselves and our motives, right, and constantly kind of be asking ourselves and checking in with our kids, not in an obnoxious way, but just in an observational way, even.

All of that aside, let’s assume that all of us are experiencing May Madness that is productive. That is meaningful. That is, let’s, let’s go there. Okay, so we’re all happy with the balance of things, but we’re not maybe happy with the crazy crunch of the end of the year, and it’s just something we have to manage. Let’s talk about how to manage it, right? 

Because the split shift dinner thing is a great idea, right? We talk about this all the time. It’s, it’s still a family dinner if it’s just 2 of you, right? But, people are still going, Alright, that’s, is that the drive thru every night? Like, how do we do it? 

Anne Fishel: Right, so sometimes it’s the drive thru. Sometimes it’s a picnic outside the sports practice. Sometimes I think it’s a snack. Maybe it’s a meal that can really, literally be thrown together, like assemble your own sandwich, where the ingredients are just laid out, and you catch as catch can. So it’s, it’s not much work for a parent, and it’s not much work for a child. 

Bri DeRosa: I feel like boards and platters are the name– boards, platters, and bowls are the name of the game in my house at this time of year.

We recently, I posted on, I think it was our threads account, when I made a bagel board for my kids. It was a Friday night. Everybody was in a million different directions. So like, we got a bunch, we got a bagel bundle from like a local bagel place that, you know, you could just run and pick up. And it has the cream cheese and everything with it.

And I sliced up bagels, and I put out the cream cheese, and I put out some like Peanut butter and some honey and some fruit and some yogurt and some, you know, all the different kind of like toppings. Right? And you can make a bagel board. 

We do the make your own sandwich or make your own wrap board frequently. Right? You just throw stuff at it. You can do, you know, make some rice. And you can even, you can buy microwave rice now, right? Like you don’t even have to cook a pot of rice if you don’t want to. You know, here’s some rice, here’s some like shredded rotisserie chicken, here’s some veggies, and you can make, you know, Asian style bowls. You can make Mexican style bowls. You can make, right? Like whatever, just throw it all in a, in a bowl and whatever you want is like what you’ve got. Right? 

So I, I think I would encourage people to think in that vein as much, you know, as much as they can. That kind of idea of throw it all on the counter and let everybody go. It’s not, you didn’t actually sort of cook dinner, but you cooked dinner. You made dinner, right? 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. You assembled dinner. You got the building blocks out.

Bri DeRosa: You assembled dinner. Yeah. Right, right. 

Anne Fishel: I think for some families, making like triple a chili or a hearty soup and then putting two batches in the freezer, knowing that for the next two weeks you’ve got dinner basically made. Maybe just add a salad and you’re good to go. I think that’s also a good thing. Can really help during this time of year. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, absolutely. That kind of like meal prep thing. If you’re, if you’re the type of person who can think ahead and do that kind of thing, right? And it, and it isn’t more, you know, whenever I make roast chicken for my family, if I have time to make a roast chicken, I make two.

And people are like, why are you making two chickens for four people? And I’m like, because it’s not harder. It doesn’t, it doesn’t take more time to put two chickens in the oven. Right? But now I have options. I have a meal. Right? For tonight. And I have all of this leftover chicken for sandwiches, for bowls, for throw it on pasta, throw it in a salad.

I can, you can freeze it. Like, there’s lots of things you can do if you have that extra food made, right? To your point. 

Anne Fishel: Yep. Pasta with pesto and chicken. 

Bri DeRosa: Right. Easy. Yeah. Throw some, throw some grape tomatoes and some little mozzarella balls in there and like, you know, I’m happy. I’ll eat that four times a week. Right. It doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. 

So the point being that there’s any number of ways to do this. And I, I think, you know, I also encourage people, salad kits have come a long way. So even when we’re talking about, sometimes when I say like, Oh, we do like an at home salad bar. People are like, I hate all the chopping and all the prep and all that.

And I’m like, no, no, don’t even worry about it. You can get the, they make them in all different flavors now, right? You can get like Asian salad kit, Southwestern salad kit, Caesar salad kit. And it has like everything. It has the dressing. It has the whatever. If you’re not a make your own dressing person, if you’re not a chop the vegetables person, you can literally just dump that in a bowl and be like, Hey guys.

Like, here’s dinner, here’s– You didn’t even have to, like, break a sweat. You just open a package, like I feel like I want to say to people, it’s okay, you have permission to make it that easy. 

Anne Fishel: Right. You know, it’s really not about the food, as we say, probably in every episode. It’s, food is what brings everybody to the table, but you don’t have to sweat it.

I was also thinking how cooking can also be very relaxing during periods of stress. I remember one of my kids during the end of the year when, you know, very, very crazy time. This would be the time when he would want to try making a new meal. And this was the time of year he would experiment with making a souffle or a chicken pot pie, or a pasta with bolognese sauce. And, you know, we all benefited. And I was thinking, well, you know, didn’t we all do that during the pandemic too? We, you know, a lot of us turned to baking cause it was calming and gave us some control over a crazy world. 

Bri DeRosa: You know, it’s such a good point. And actually there are, there are two things I want to say about that, that you’ve inspired me to say.

One is that. You know, if you are an adult who, who doesn’t hate cooking, right and you sort of miss having that grounding thing at the end of the day, you know, I, I personally find that there are moments during this time of year where, like, I might cook dinner on a Sunday morning, right?

I actually, I actually might have an hour, you know, between 10 and 11 on a Sunday, where I can spend that time getting into the kitchen and making something and popping it in the fridge for later, or to your point, putting, you know, making a big batch of something and freezing it. And that, that does help because it feels like, oh, right, this is a thing that I do that, you know, is ritual. It is routine. And I feel good about the fact that I’m getting us set up for later, right? I feel like it’s one little way to pull back from the chaos and feel like I’m in control of it. 

And then the other point that you’re making about teenagers or, you know, kids of, look, I think kids are capable at much younger ages than people want to admit. And even if your kid isn’t a really accomplished chef who’s going to put together a souffle, necessarily, this might be an opportunity for some of that independence and autonomy and life skills building to actually start to emerge. Can they, you know, can they make their own grilled cheese sandwich or grilled cheese sandwiches for the family?

Right? Can they, like, you know, put together their own pot of mac and cheese? Can they make scrambled eggs and toast and fruit for everyone? 

Anne Fishel: I want to also give a little bit of a shout out to the kinds of things that parents might talk to their kids about during this time of year that, that kind of encourage, you know, parents might talk to their kids about during this time of year that, that kind of encourage.

Parents to model how they handle stress and the kinds of things that give them some calm or some strategies that they use, you know, so, you know, parent could ask, what are the early signs that you’re feeling starting to feel overwhelmed or need support? Or what’s one thing that helps you with your well being? What sounds or sights make you feel calm? 

And I think, you know, this is a time of year when it’s not just the kids who are feeling kind of overwhelmed. Parents are as well. And we can kind of use this as an opportunity to talk about strategies for knowing that we’re, you know, get getting in over our head, or we need to take a step back, or we need to say no to somebody or no to a request. And I think that can start with parents, you know, kind of modeling that for their kids.

Bri DeRosa: I think that’s such an important point, and it also brings up that this, although this time of year is completely nuts for a lot of families, almost nothing is non negotiable. I want us to like, also think about the places where we’re saying yes, because we feel obligated in some way to say yes. You know, oh yes, I’ll bring the 24 cupcakes for the school picnic, right?

When you don’t, you literally, you can’t, you don’t have that, you know, that, that cupcake request crushed you, right? And yet some part of you was like, sure. 

Anne Fishel: Oh, that’s really hard. There’s, you know, a lot of pressure to be a perfect parent. And it’s not so easy to say no to making the 24 cupcakes, particularly when people know what a good baker you are.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I might be projecting.

Anne Fishel: But yes, it’s a, it’s an important life skill to be able to know when you’re, you’ve reached a limit or you’re getting close to that limit of being, starting to get irritable, starting to get tearful, starting to feel burnt out, feeling like the things that usually give you joy and pleasure aren’t, cause it’s just too much.

And knowing this is a time to say, Hmm, I’m, I’m not going to come to that dinner, I’m, I’m going to stay home. Or I’m going to go to bed an hour early tonight because I really need to catch up on some sleep. And I think modeling that there are choices, and one can choose what is important, is an important lesson or series of lessons that can emerge during May madness, as I think you’re really demonstrating so nicely, Bri. 

Bri DeRosa: Well, thank you, Annie. And again, always feel so validated talking to you. We’re not all messing it up all the time. And I would say the, the last thing too, is, you know, for people who do have older kids and teens, one thing that we’ve started employing at these very busy times of years is calendar invites.

When your kids are old enough to have, you know, an online calendar, we have a shared online family Google calendar, that everybody has their own color. And, you know, we, we use it to communicate. But I’m using it now sometimes to communicate in a different way where I’m, you know, maybe sending an invitation to my oldest, who’s really trying to find time to learn how to cook more things, right. Get more independent. I might send him a calendar invite where I’ve really looked carefully and I know that he can join me on a Saturday at 5 o’clock. 

And I’ll send him a little invite, and you have to be careful how you do it, right? So I, I do it with a little question mark. Cook dinner with mom? Question mark. So he knows it’s an option, right? I’m not putting it on his calendar, I’m literally inviting him. And I might put in the description, you know, one of his favorite foods that he doesn’t know how to cook. So that I’ve kind of upped the ante a little bit, like, hey, if you can make this hour of time, I’m going to show you how to make this favorite dinner and we’re going to have that experience together and then you’re going to get to eat your favorite things, you know. Sneaky, but it’s a thing you can do where like, when things feel really busy, sit down, look, find the pocket of time, you know, invite the whole family.

Hey, Sunday brunch together? And look, we have nothing on the calendar, guys! Or hey, want that pizza and movie night or pizza and game night that you’ve been asking me about? Look, I found the time! And put it on, like literally put it on the calendar, and make it as much of an appointment as everything else that is taking up your time. 

Anne Fishel: Yeah. It’s sort of a, if you can’t beat them, join them. So should we do our end of the podcast food fun and conversation? 

Bri DeRosa: I think we should. I think it’s, I think it’s time. And so I’m going to, I’m going to let you take the lead on food this time, Annie. I’ve, I’ve given a few of my own strategies here. What do you have?

Anne Fishel: Well, I’m gonna, I guess, go back to something I had suggested earlier on today, which is the making a triple batch of chili, turkey chili, beef chili, vegetarian chili, and then freezing it in two extra batches so that the next two weeks you’ve got a meal that is really ready to go. 

Bri DeRosa: I love that. And I also, you can do a lot with chili actually, right? You don’t even have to just eat chili in a bowl. People, you know, a lot of people in different parts of the country like to make walking tacos or things like that that you can take on the go with chili. You can make chili cheese burritos. You can, you know, we have a breakfast tostada recipe on the site, and a home ec teacher at one point contacted me and said she loved that recipe and she and her husband added chili to it. If they had homemade chili, they would add a heap of chili with the, on the tostada. And I thought, Oh, that’s a really cool idea. So there are actually lots of things you can do, right? Use it to make nachos, whatever. You can do a lot of stuff with the chili. It’s a great idea. 

Anne Fishel: And how about the fun, the game?

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. So if you’re gonna be kind of busy and disconnected and running in different directions, I think this is a perfect opportunity to employ some digital fun strategies, digital connection strategies. Again, if you can’t beat them, join them. 

So I think a photo caption contest is great. And you can do this in a couple of different ways, but one way to do this at this time of year that helps you feel like you still know about each other’s day is you can, either if you’re together at the table or if you’re apart, you can have a group text going maybe, and you could say, Hey, Send me a photo that sums up your day.

And it could be a photo that somebody took, right? Or it could be a funny photo that they find on the internet, a meme or whatever. Right. And, but importantly, one without a caption. And say, okay, we’re all just going to send our photos to this group text, and then we’re going to have a caption contest. We’re all going to try to come up with a funny caption that we think sums up what these photos show about each other’s day.

And it can be really, it can be really fun and relaxing and enjoyable. And then later on, when you actually see each other, you can be like, okay, what was the real scoop on that photo? Like, what, what were you and Isabel doing in that photo? And you get the real story, but it’s just a fun, funny way to, to connect at this time of year. 

And by the way, if you’re having a family celebration, because May Madness also includes Mother’s Day and graduations and all kinds of great things, you can also do this in a, in a non digital way at a family party, where you can put up like old photos of the family or whatever, and you can have people put up post it notes, right? And write down their funny captions. And it’s just another way to add a layer of enjoyment and lightheartedness to your family time. 

So you also, you talked about conversation, Annie. And those, you had some great conversation starters earlier about kind of stress and managing things this time of year. What, what would you leave us with as a conversation idea? 

Anne Fishel: Okay, so I’m going to go in a different direction, which is a little less clinical, a little less, you know, about resilience and how to manage the stressful time, and I’m going to veer into fantasy here. 

So. Here’s my question. If you were free to do anything you wanted to do tomorrow, what would you do? Which I think is a nice antidote to this time of year, when there’s so many things that you have to do. And maybe it starts a conversation about the things we miss doing that we would do to bring back into our life, or maybe it sparks a conversation about some things we could, you know, still find some time for now that we’re remembering how we love to read a novel or take a walk around the neighborhood or go get an ice cream or whatever it might be.

So that’s my, my conversation starter for this, this time of the year. 

Bri DeRosa: I love that. I love that. And it’s a great opportunity, as you said, to not only remember what we like to do and, and to get a read on what our kids are feeling like is missing when they’re so busy. But a great opportunity to also, as parents, squirrel that away in the back of our heads and go, You know what? Okay, as soon as this busy, busy time is over, I’m going to make sure that we, we have that outing. I’m going to make that happen. Right? 

Well, I feel a little bit more relaxed and in control of this upcoming moment of madness. So thank you, Annie, as always for helping put things in perspective and helping frame things out for us.

Anne Fishel: And thank you for all the creative ideas, all the workarounds that you’ve come up with. I just, I think there’s so much possibility there. So many great ideas for families to, maybe there’s one or two that they would like, took note of and thought, yeah, I could do that. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, yeah, I hope so. And I just, you know, I’ll just leave our listeners with solidarity, fellow parents. Solidarity, because this time of year is really challenging. 

But we will all get to the other side, and hopefully we’re going to get to the other side feeling happy and fulfilled and ready for the summer. So tune in in a couple of months. We will be back. Speaking of the summer, we will be back in June with another episode. So stay tuned for that. 

And we look forward to hearing from you with your questions and ideas for the next several episodes of the Family Dinner Project podcast. So. See you next time.

Anne Fishel: Bye bye.