Welcome to Season 2 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our 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! You can get caught up on older episodes here.
It’s a New Year, and we’re not talking about resolutions. In this episode, Bri and Annie explore the idea of setting intentions for the family dinner table, to help families get the most out of their shared meals. They delve into the recent research on how families adapted their mealtimes during COVID, and how those experiences have shaped attitudes and ideas about eating together ever since. The research shows that what we most often set resolutions around — nutrition and healthy eating habits — actually isn’t what matters most to us.
What do families want out of their dinners? Relationships, connection, and bonding. Bri and Annie share lots of ideas to help build on those principles, as well as other aspirations individual families might want to pursue. They talk about how to approach the idea of setting an intention or two for your mealtimes this year; how to talk to kids and fellow household adults to get everyone involved in the process; and how to handle a reluctant partner who may not share your goals. They also offer wisdom on what to do with competing priorities, how to get started if you just feel stuck, and how to reframe your thinking around common challenges like picky eating. The episode ends with suggestions for meal planning, theme nights, and some fun activities to help improve your family meals this year.
Like this content? Check out these additional links and related episodes:
- The Family Dinner Project Podcast Episode 5: Labor of Love?
- The Family Dinner Project Podcast Episode 4: Picky or Problematic?
- Dinner and a Movie ideas
- Book-related dinner ideas
- Research Shows Family Dinner Improves Literacy (plus games and conversation starters)
- The Humming Bee Breathing exercise
- The 5,4,3,2,1 Activity
- The Family Dinner Project Podcast Episode 2: Is it the Family, or the Dinner?
Listen Now:
Episode Transcript:
Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to the Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa, and joining me as always is Dr. Anne Fishel.
Anne Fishel: Great to be with you as always, Bri.
Bri DeRosa: Great to see you, Annie, and Happy New Year.
Anne Fishel: Same to you.
Bri DeRosa: We are not going to talk about resolutions today, although I’m sure that’s what a lot of people are thinking about right now when they think about family dinners and, and food and nutrition and all of the things. We’re not going to talk about that.
What we are going to talk about is how to get a little bit more intentional about the way that we show up at the family dinner table this year. And this was actually the topic of our January newsletter. Right? The setting of intentions as opposed to resolutions. And the difference in my mind is, the resolution is this big grand goal and you think, Oh, I have to do this.
Whereas the intention is more about stepping back and taking a broad view of what do I want my family dinner experience to be like? And just to think of a word or a phrase or a single thing that you associate, aspire to feel or achieve and then just kind of get a mindset around that, right? It’s not about doing a specific set of things or having to go hard at something, but it’s about over the course of a year thinking, gosh, I really intend for things to feel a little bit more connected or a little bit more calm, or I intend to feel like we get more variety. Whatever that is that you’re thinking.
Anne Fishel: We want to be a family who tries new things. We want to have adventure. We want it simpler and easier and lighter.
Bri DeRosa: Exactly. I wanted to invite you to actually kick us off with reminding our listeners a little bit about what’s so important about family meals in the first place. We’ve got a lot of research that we sum up at our benefits of family dinners section on our website. But I also know that you have done some recent research into dinner habits during the pandemic, which yielded some pretty interesting findings about what seems to really matter to people. And I wondered if you would enlighten us a little bit about what did you find?
Anne Fishel: Sure. So the pandemic wasn’t good for much, but it was good for creating a naturalistic opportunity to see what happens when families are forced to eat more meals together, you know, lockdowns with restaurants closing, with work from home, a majority of American families did have more family dinners. And so my co researcher, Melinda Morill, and I asked the question, What happens to those dinners, even when they’re not chosen, when it’s sort of a forced option?
What happens when families have more family dinners than they did before? And it turned out that for most families, even though they didn’t choose this, they found that the quality of those family mealtime experiences improved. They laughed more, they expressed more gratitude, they had more opportunities to feel that this is who we are as a family, and they felt more connected.
And actually the biggest finding, or the finding that was attributed to the most people, was the use of remote technology during mealtime to connect with far flung loved ones. That that was also kind of a silver lining of the pandemic. And it also turned out that when asked, you know, After the pandemic, would you return to normal? Most families said no, they would continue to use remote technology and they would continue to keep the greater frequency of family dinners.
And I think that the, the main takeaway is didn’t really matter the number, back to your point about resolutions. You know, it doesn’t matter if families say we’re going to commit to five meals a week. No, it’s more of the point that just doing more. Whatever that looks like, whether it’s going from one meal, family meal, to two family meals, from one family breakfast to a family breakfast and family dinner, that increase seems to bring dividends to the, the quality, the warmth, the connection at the dinner table.
Now, fair, there was also an increase in negative interactions as people had more family dinners. I can’t, we sugarcoat this, I mean, family dinner is a canvas of family life, so you get the good with the bad, but in our analyses we found that the positive interactions very much outweighed the negative ones.
Bri DeRosa: Well, and so, and there are two things about that, right? I mean, one is that it was the pandemic. So there was kind of an opportunity for more negative interactions to blossom. The more people were stuck at home, right, the more you were forced into each other’s faces, there were any number of reasons why people were cranky.
Anne Fishel: Good point.
Bri DeRosa: So, you know, I, I would, I would maybe also just parse that out, but it’s a fair point, right? The more time we spend together, the more opportunity there is regardless of the condition that you’re going to have some conflict because that’s part of human nature. But what I find really interesting about all of this, and going back to sort of the idea of resolutions versus intentions and how do you approach things in a new year, is that people did not talk very much in your research about like food and nutrition and, you know, people tend to to approach family dinner thinking about the food, thinking about the fruits and the vegetables and the menu and the what are– you know, is it a high fat content, is this good for us. The real revelations were the relationships.
Anne Fishel: Yes, that’s right.
Bri DeRosa: And so this, to me, is like the big flashing neon sign. Hello, people! We don’t do family dinner, broadly speaking, we don’t do family dinner to make sure that our children eat their peas. Okay, that’s great if you can get them to eat their peas. But we do family dinner because it helps us interact and connect and build relationships.
And in talking about that, sort of using zoom or other applications to reach far flung family members. A lot of times that was also an antidote to loneliness, right? And people are continuing to want to use that because let’s say you’ve got, you know, an older relative who’s across the country from you who doesn’t have that typical family meal interaction in their life anymore. You’re actually helping prevent some potential mental and physical health problems in terms of the loneliness crisis by meeting with them online, having that meal interaction together. And I feel like that’s part of what people recognized, right? Even if they wouldn’t have said it that way.
Anne Fishel: Right. Yeah. Zoom suddenly became something really viable and vibrant. It wasn’t just, oh, that’s technology, you know, we’re gonna poo poo that because it’s not as rich, it’s not as interesting as being in person. I mean, it’s not, but it’s still really meaningful.
Bri DeRosa: Oh yeah, I mean, it’s so much better than not interacting, right?
I wonder, though. People said they intended to continue the Zooms. Right. They said they intended to not go back to normal. They said they wanted to continue these newfound family dinner experiences, both in person and digitally. And I’m wondering if we think that that has actually happened, because I know for a lot of the families in my orbit, there has been a real tension between what we wanted to continue and what has actually been possible as things have gone more back to business as usual.
What do you think? What have you seen, and what have you heard in your practice especially?
Anne Fishel: Yeah. Well, I’d love to do another study to really find out scientifically whether it’s true. So all I have are anecdotes at this point. So I’ve, I’ve been hearing a lot about that, family dinners, in my practice. I’ve also been hearing about them more in the families I supervise, I supervise child psychiatrists and it’s sort of amazing to me how often I’m hearing about families wanting to improve their family dinners, continue with the family dinners they had before.
But it does seem that there was something about some families discovering the pleasures of eating together during the pandemic and wanting to continue it. And now finding it’s a little bit more difficult and bringing it up in therapy.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, so it’s a little discouraging, right, to realize that we live in a society, in a cultural context wherein we actually need to be forced locked down at home by a global catastrophe in order to eat dinner with our families with the frequency and leisure that we find most rewarding. Like there’s something really upsetting about that. But that also, you know, I don’t want us to be downers because that doesn’t mean that you can’t have family dinner, right?
So what are some ways that we might recommend people approach the intentional family dinner in this new year, knowing that they can’t necessarily do everything that they might want to do, right? But how do we take a moment to pause, really think about our intentions, reset a little bit and look to at least recapture the elements of family meals that matter the most to us?
Anne Fishel: Yes. Yeah. I mean, it’s a great question. And because we’re talking about family dinners, it’s really important to involve the other members of the family.
You know, I don’t think it’s enough for just one member, usually the, maybe the head cook to say, I’m going to set the intention of whatever, more peace at the table or more adventurous food. You really need to get the buy in or the different perspectives of everybody in the family. And so, I wonder, with some kids, you might say, New Year, I’m wondering as we look back, what were some of the best family dinners or family meals we had, and maybe we could build on what went well in those, during those family meals.
That might be one thing. One way to start to get at the conversation. I think sometimes, kids sometimes don’t have the words for that, or they can’t, they might say what I really liked was the time that we had steak and that’s not probably going to build into an intention. So one thing that I think can kind of be a workaround is for a parent or parents to give almost a menu of the kinds of things we could set as our intention, and to ask which of those really resonate with different family members. So, I might say, you know, I was thinking we might want to have more fun. And I thought we could play some games, or maybe we could be a little more adventurous. And I, you know, we could pick some foods from other cultures that we’ve never tried before, or maybe we could simplify, make it just easier, and have a few, maybe one breakfast or two breakfast dinners that would, you know, make it really easy those nights or maybe we want to be more hand, all hands on deck. And so maybe each person wants to pick a night of the week that they’re going to be in charge, particularly with older kids. So I wonder if any of those ideas are interesting to any of you and sort of take it from there.
Bri DeRosa: I love that approach of kind of seeding the ideas.
And I wonder, there’s also in my, in my head, there’s another kind of way to get at this, especially if you’re feeling maybe a little bit more stumped for ideas, you know, that you’re trying to get at something, but you’re not really generating that like, Hey, maybe we could, you know, have dinners from other cultures or whatever, you know. And that in my mind, I’m wondering about maybe saying to your family or maybe even just starting with your adult partner, saying hey, I really… I really like it when our family meals feel, Whatever. I really like it when our family meals feel relaxed. I really like it when our family meals feel calm. And then oh, yeah, I do too. You know, I like it when our family meals feel exciting, right?
And whatever, put the word to it and then try to think of what was a time when we sat together and I felt that way. What went into that, right? And you might discover that it’s, you both feel like it’s really important for the family meals to feel relaxed and calm, and that that has never happened on Wednesday night, right? Because of whatever the things. But that you frequently find it happens Sunday brunch. Okay. So maybe that’s a clue that we need to lean more into making sure that we have Sunday brunch together and that we worry a little bit less about forcing everybody to the table for 10 minutes on Wednesday night when we know it’s going to feel like, you know, a firestorm of trying to get everybody out the door.
Anne Fishel: Yeah. Yeah, I like that approach a lot, Bri. So starting with the intention and then reflecting back on when it happened and when it didn’t happen.
Bri DeRosa: So maybe it’s just having the amount of time, right? Yeah. That you have, oh, we feel more relaxed when we have an hour to cook.
Anne Fishel: Yeah.
Bri DeRosa: We feel more relaxed when we haven’t just sat down after rushing in the door.
If we give ourselves 20 minutes to decompress before we have to sit at the table, gosh, we feel better. Whatever that, it could be any number of things. It could be that you lit candles. It could be, you know, whatever the thing is.
Anne Fishel: Right. The humming bee breathing exercise.
Bri DeRosa: The humming bee breathing exercise or the 5,4,3,2,1 exercise or any one of these things that just kind of helps you calm down and get ready, you know, or maybe you, maybe, like I said, maybe the feeling is, I like it when things feel more exciting.
Okay. Well, what were the conditions that went into that? Right. Was it that we tried new food? Was it that we played a game? Was it whatever?
Anne Fishel: We invited other families over.
Bri DeRosa: Exactly. Exactly. So, these are two different approaches to trying to find your kind of place of intention for the year and figuring out what are maybe some of the elements that can help you get there a little bit more frequently.
Anne Fishel: I mean, I could see some family members wanting some family dinners that were super relaxing and other family members who would like more excitement. And there could be a way to have some of those.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, you could have more than one intention. Yes. Certainly. And as long as they’re not in direct conflict with each other, you can even pursue both things at the same time.
Now, relaxing and exciting are two examples of things that maybe feel a little bit more in conflict, but if you think about it, you can also envision that you could come into a more enlivened, exciting family meal experience from a place of feeling rested and relaxed, if you understand what those dynamics are that help you both get there. So they might not always be as oppositional as they seem.
What if, let’s say you can get kids on board, you can get, you know, okay, fine. But what if say, two adults in the household are really at odds around what they want family meals to be?
Anne Fishel: Or whether they want family meals at all.
Bri DeRosa: Or whether they want family meals at all.
What do you do?
Anne Fishel: Yeah, I mean, I think taking the example of 1 adult who thinks family meals are just the cat’s pajamas and wants to throw herself into them and the other partner who hated family dinners growing up, wants none of it, finds it tedious and repetitive and whatever. I think that’s more of a values conversation.
It’s more of a understanding each other, the experiences that each one has had that have led them to this place of conviction and passion and to really interview each other and to listen with an open heart about what each one’s experience was with family dinners growing up and how that informs what they see now.
And maybe it turns out that the person who does not want to have family dinners experienced some trauma or some great, you know, was bullied at the table or there wasn’t enough food to go around and was often hungry at the end of dinner. And, you know, sometimes I think having compassion for that perspective from your partner can open things up.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s so important, right? To, to recognize if there is resistance to family dinner or to some component of family dinner, that that doesn’t just happen in a vacuum, right? Nobody is out there walking around going, I just absolutely hate family meals and think they’re stupid, but I have no underlying experience that has led me to that place of belief. But just, we all, whether we know where it came from or not, we all are a product of our experiences.
And so there’s something there that is making this person feel really oppositional to the experience. Right? So, to your point.
Anne Fishel: And that could be in the present. I mean, I was, you know, we’ve been focusing on childhood dinners, but it could be that a woman, for example, feels like this is not, should not be the default position that she’s in, should not be up to her to plan and cook, and she doesn’t, you know, she doesn’t come by it naturally, and why does her partner expect that this will all fall to her? And so maybe the conversation reveals a kind of a gender issue that needs to be talked about.
Bri DeRosa: Right, or it might reveal, you know, you might have, let’s say, a partner who is neurodivergent and grew up with very calm, quiet, focused, structured family meals that worked really well for them.
And maybe now, you know, they’re a co parent in a family where the kids are loud and messy and the other parent feels like, this is great! They’re really participating and having a great time at family dinner, but it’s a sensory overwhelm for this other parent. Right. It’s, it’s a feeling of, oh my gosh, I can’t, I can’t focus and eat my meal and feel relaxed and feel okay with this amount of activity going on around me, something needs to change. And so there’s any number of reasons.
Anne Fishel: Right.
Bri DeRosa: And, and I should point out, we don’t have time in this episode to go down this rabbit hole, but I should point out that we have on our website and on our social media pages, we have lots of different conversation starters for couples in particular. Or it could be, by the way, any adults, adult heads of household who are working together, right? It could be a multi generational household. It doesn’t have to be a romantic partnership, but adults in a household to really come together and have these conversations. We have some of those prompts available and we’ll link some of them in the show notes as well.
I just want to point out that some of what we’re talking about could feel really intriguing to people, but could also feel really frustrating because they might, there might be people out there who have identified the way that they want their family meals to go and just feel like they’re stuck. They can’t get there, right? Or they’re so stuck in a rut with family meals that they can’t even imagine a different way to go. So before we kind of offer our food fun and conversation to close out this particular episode, I’m wondering if we have any final words of wisdom for those people who just feel stuck and frustrated and like, nothing’s ever going to change.
Anne Fishel: Yeah, I mean, I think this is so maybe obvious, but to start as small as possible, you know, if the intention is more relaxation, to just pick one thing, and then to see did that lead to the feeling of being more relaxed, like, don’t try to reinvent the whole kit and caboodle all at once.
But do it as kind of, you know, a series of experiments and check in with each other to see, did this make it more relaxing, less relaxing, no change at all? Do we want to keep this little change or should we move on and try something else? And I think with, with picky eaters, it’s sort of the same idea. Like if you try to conquer picky eating, that’s going to be doomed.
But if you say, all right, let’s try to cook a favorite food in a different way. And see if that gets some, some love or let’s just try having a food that, you know, person doesn’t like to eat, but maybe could tolerate having at the table. That would be a, a win. So breaking things down into smaller parts and trying them and then reevaluating.
Bri DeRosa: So to your point about picky eating, yeah, you might feel really defeated and discouraged by that, but also maybe you’re going to try just serving what you serve, but always having one safe food on the table and seeing if that takes the pressure off. Right? So you’re not even addressing necessarily the picky eating at that point.
You’re not trying to change that child’s eating habits. What you’re doing is taking the pressure off you to have to provide for that child’s eating habits in a way that makes it more stressful for you to feed the rest of the family, right? So there’s also that mindset too of like, yeah, what are you trying to change? Are you trying to change the picky eating? Or to your point, are you just trying to feel more relaxed and grounded at family dinner? And by not trying to change the picky eating, does that actually make it better?
Anne Fishel: Yep. That’s a great, a great example.
Bri DeRosa: So, all right. I think it is time for us to move on to food, fun, and conversation.
I can’t believe how fast this conversation has gone. And as we’re talking about picky eating, it seems like a great time to step off the ledge and say, what about food, Annie? I’m going to let you take the lead on this. What do you recommend people think about when they consider what matters about the food component of family dinners?
Anne Fishel: I’m going to take a page from you, Bri. Something I’ve learned from you over the years that I wish I had known when I was a working mom with two little kids, or two teenage kids, that are now grown up. For me, every night was like whirling dervish. What am I going to make tonight? And I would just try to scramble my way through my refrigerator and put something together in as creative, tasty a way as I could, didn’t ever plan. And I’ve learned a lot about planning from you, and now I do it with my husband.
And so this is my suggestion about food, is to take advantage of your last week’s self. In other words, to make three times the amount a couple times a week, three times the soup, three times the chili, three times the seafood stew. These are three of my go to’s. And freeze half of it, or two thirds of it, so that next week, and even the week after, you are dining out thanks to your younger self, younger self of a week ago. And it feels like I’m getting a little more help, makes me feel a little calmer, because I know I’ve got some things ready to go if it’s a particularly tiring or busy night of the week.
So that’s my suggestion, is to find a few recipes that are easy to double or triple and that also freeze well.
Bri DeRosa: I love that, and I’m so glad that you’ve been inspired by my, my meal planning. And I’m just going to piggyback on that idea, Annie, really quickly for those people out there who are like not really proficient at planning and they feel really daunted by planning but they might want to try more of it.
Two places to start if you’re feeling really overwhelmed. One is to just assign a specific theme or ingredient per night for a week, to get you kick started. So, for example, you might decide that, you know, every Thursday night, we’re going to have pasta. Every Monday night, we’re going to have chicken, whatever, and just provide yourself at least that much structure. And you might be surprised how much easier it is to then generate ideas and plan ahead.
The other is to not do it alone. You can, you can ask your partner, your kids, whoever, you can have like a Google calendar even where people can put in their ideas. And everybody just suggests one meal idea. And if that means there are four of you, you get four meal ideas, that’s great. The other three nights, you know, one night could be leftovers. One night could be takeout. One night could be a choose your own adventure. It could be just that easy.
So that’s my other kind of like note on meal planning since you brought it up. But I love, you’re so right about if you are cooking, just make extra. Just make extra and have it. Then you don’t have to cook another night. That’s, that’s genius, and I feel like nobody does it enough.
Anne Fishel: Thank you for that, Bri. I don’t know. I wish you had been around when I was younger and saved me a lot of that whirling dervish.
Bri DeRosa: So, all right, I’m going to handle the fun part. And I guess one thing that I was thinking of when I was trying to come up with some fun for this year was this idea of like, We don’t even know where to start. We just feel stuck in a rut. We just, you know, need to shake things up and, and one page out of my family’s book that has been really successful lately in getting us out of a rut has been like not a regular, but every month or so kind of, exciting theme night.
So for example, my kids are teenagers. They love the show, Bob’s Burgers, and we have the Bob’s Burgers cookbooks. It was really, you know, it’s really easy for us to crack open the Bob’s Burgers cookbook, choose a couple of burgers that we can make and taste test together and watch the show. So we had a little like holiday Bob’s Burgers marathon, taste tested some Bob’s Burgers together and it was really fun.
It was really light hearted. It took care of the, what are we going to eat? Took care of the, what are we going to talk about? And so you can do this in a lot of ways. And I know Annie, you have great suggestions on our website for ways to do this with books, for example. Pasta like Streganona or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs dinner, right?
Anne Fishel: Green Eggs and Ham, yeah.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, green eggs and ham. You know, there are so many great literary references at all ages and stages. So try to think of a book or a movie or a TV show or a country of the world that you might want to explore together, or do an iron chef or a chopped challenge if your kids are competitive, or even, you know, preschoolers might like dinners that revolve around a specific color or a letter of the alphabet. You know, today we’re eating only foods that start with B. That kind of thing.
It’s not as hard as it seems when you first think of a theme night, but it can be really fun and just shake things up in a way that makes dinner feel more unexpected, more joyful and less stressful for a night.
Anne Fishel: Yes, I mean, just to piggyback on that, we have a lot of great dinner and a movie ideas on the website.
Bri DeRosa: We do.
Anne Fishel: That have themes, conversation starters, foods that go with some wonderful movies for kids of all different ages, and that That could be just a fun variation on this theme that we’re talking about.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, absolutely. No, such a great point.
And then, so wrapping us up, what about conversation? Annie, do you have a few ideas to leave us with around how to talk to the family about identifying some priorities, figuring out what they want out of dinner this year?
Anne Fishel: Yeah, I was thinking maybe each person would write down on a post it. What’s one word that you would like to describe family dinners this year? Or, what’s one word that describes some of the best family dinners we’ve had? And then we’ll pull out the post its and try to guess which word goes with which person.
That’s a little bit of a fun thing. And then let’s take one word, let’s take relaxing. And can we talk about what, what are some ideas that people have to make it more relaxing, to make it more adventurous, to make it sillier, to whatever the word is, and to sort of do that for each word that’s been generated.
Bri DeRosa: I love that. I love that. It’s a great conversation starter, but also to your point, kind of a fun game. So I think, I feel like I’m ready to enter the new year with new intention around family dinner. And it sounds like you are too. And I hope that our listeners also feel similarly more prepared to go into 2025 with new intention around the family meal and the family table.
So thanks for listening. Come back next time ,and in the meantime if you wanna check out any of our resources or get in touch with us, you can find us at thefamilydinnerproject.org. You can find us on social media, at Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and you can always drop us a line. There’s a contact button on our website. Take care.
Anne Fishel: Thanks, Bri. Happy New year.
Bri DeRosa: Happy New Year.