Recently, I found myself going through a very familiar ritual: Opening the color-coded family calendar in my phone, and carefully cross-referencing several other schedules to plot in dates and times. When do each of my kids have their first day back at classes? What nights of the week will my younger son have sports practice this year? When are their breaks, important exams, and special events? And, in the midst of all of those dates and times, who will be home for dinner on any given night, and what will be the optimal time for us to eat together?
Yep. It’s definitely back-to-school season again.
In my experience, back-to-school always ends up feeling a little bit like back-to-dinner season, just because of the way the school year schedule impacts our home life. And no matter how many times I’ve gone through this transition, it’s different every year. It’s not just that the calendar changes; it’s that from year to year, my kids change, too. Their likes and dislikes change, they might have different dietary needs (hello, teen athletes!), and as they grow, they need us to take a new approach to things like dinner conversations and responsibilities as well.
The way my family, and our family dinners, have had to grow and evolve over the years is a lot like the way The Family Dinner Project has grown and evolved, too. We’ve learned so much in our 16 years of working with families, and now we’re happy to share that we’ve updated one of our very first programs to better meet your needs. This back-to-school season, we’re proud to reveal the new version of our free 4-Week Program, Four Weeks to Better Family Dinners.
The program will guide you through how to make the commitment to having more frequent and meaningful family meals, despite the challenges of the calendar; make dinner work for you, even when planning and cooking feel like an impossible chore; make sitting down together fun and enjoyable for everyone, so you all want to keep coming back to the table; and make your family meals matter, through better conversations and resilience-building rituals you can build on through the years.
In the new Four Weeks to Better Family Dinners, you’ll see a new focus that reflects what we’ve heard from families, shifting the original “Make it Simple” week to “Make it Work.” We know that “simple” isn’t really a word that seems to fit when it comes to trying to get dinner on the table despite the many challenges of daily life, so instead, we’re providing ideas and solutions to make things work just a little better on the busiest nights. The program now includes a lot more resources for meal planning and quick dinner ideas, as well as a wealth of fun and conversation tools you can use to make your time at the table meaningful. We looked at the past 16 years, pulled out some of our best and most popular materials, and added them to the program along with new and exciting ideas. All of those things are now easily available in one place, for you to try with your family and return to again and again as you decide what works best for you.
You can listen to us talk more about the program and what excites us about this new, updated version in our latest podcast episode, then click through to discover the four weeks for yourself. And of course, you can always grab even more resources for this time of year at our Back to School hub.
Here’s to better family dinners this school year!
Take a sneak peek at one of our new 4-week program resources: The Sheet Pan Meal Builder!
Never run out of ways to play our most popular game – get 110 Would You Rather? Questions you can use this year.
110 Would You Rather? Questions
Wondering how to keep the conversation going? Try some of our Conversation Deepeners to help move things forward.
