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.
On this episode of The Family Dinner Project Podcast, we invite Leslie Kimball of Responsibility.org to talk with us about the research demonstrating that family dinners can help prevent substance use, and how she and her team recommend parents and kids communicate about risk behaviors.
Bri, Annie, and Leslie delve into the findings suggesting that a routine of connected, welcoming family meals is one tool parents have to keep kids from engaging in substance use and other risky behaviors. They share strategies to help parents manage and discuss their own alcohol use, engage with other parents around keeping kids safe, and most importantly, create the kind of positive and pleasant family dinner environments that promote open communication. Packed with tips, reassurance, and ideas for food, fun, and conversation, this episode is a must-listen for any parent who wants to help safeguard their children from substance use.
Key Takeaways:
- Go to 3:00 for Dr. Anne Fishel’s summary of the key research into substance use prevention and family meals
- Go to 9:10 for Leslie’s thoughts on how to talk about and model responsible consumption
- Go to 16:35 for tips on making the dinner table a welcoming space for conversation
- Go to 20:05 for tips from Responsibility.org on opening up a discussion about alcohol use
- Go to 31:26 for hands-on food, fun, and conversation ideas you can use at your dinner table
Related Links:
- Responsibility.org and Ask, Listen, Learn
- What to Know About Family Meals and Substance Use with Dr. Timothy Wilens
- Episode 6:Table Trauma
- Episode 2: Is it the Family, Or the Dinner?
- Guess the Emotion
- Raggedy Ann Salad, Origami Dumplings, and Homemade Pizza
About Leslie Kimball and Responsibility.org:
Leslie Kimball is the executive director of Responsibility.org, and prior to becoming executive director, Leslie worked on the organization’s programming and communications campaigns, including the Ask, Listen, Learn, and Parenting influencer programs.
Responsibility.org is a national not-for-profit that aims to eliminate underage drinking, eliminate drunk driving, and work with others to end all impaired driving and empower adults to make a lifetime of responsible alcohol choices. As part of their mission to eliminate underage drinking, responsibility.org developed a free science and evidence-based digital prevention program for kids nine to 13, their parents and educators: Ask, Listen, Learn: Kids and Alcohol Don’t Mix. The program, created in 2003, helps adults start conversations with kids about alcohol and the developing brain to prevent underage drinking, and is the most widely distributed program of its kind.
Full Episode Transcript:
Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to The Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa. Joining me as always is Dr. Anne Fishel.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Great to be with you as always, Bri.
Bri DeRosa: Nice to see you, Annie. And we also have with us today, Leslie Kimball. Leslie is a special guest who’s going to be helping us today with really one of the trickier issues that many parents run across, and she’s going to talk with us about underage drinking and how parents can promote responsible behaviors both in their kids and in themselves.
Leslie is the executive director of Responsibility.org, and prior to becoming executive director, Leslie worked on the organization’s programming and communications campaigns, including the Ask, Listen, Learn, and Parenting influencer programs. Responsibility.org is a national not-for-profit that aims to eliminate underage drinking, eliminate drunk driving, and work with others to end all impaired driving and empower adults to make a lifetime of responsible alcohol choices.
As part of their mission to eliminate underage drinking, responsibility.org developed a free science and evidence-based digital prevention program for kids nine to 13, their parents and educators: Ask, Listen, Learn: Kids and Alcohol Don’t Mix. The program, created in 2003, helps adults start conversations with kids about alcohol and the developing brain to prevent underage drinking, and is the most widely distributed program of its kind.
So Leslie, welcome. It’s great to have you with us today.
Leslie Kimball: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.
Bri DeRosa: It’s great to see you. And as our listeners may have guessed, this means that we are devoting this episode to the intersection between family dinner and the prevention of risk behaviors such as substance use in kids, teens and adults.
So Annie, I wanna kick it off with you because I know that there’s a body of research that suggests that family dinners can play an important role in decreasing the risk of substance use. And we have done a little bit of work on this in the past with our friend and colleague at MGH, Dr. Tim Willens, but I wonder if you could help our podcast listeners out by just giving kind of a short summary of the key points.
What do we need to know about this?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Sure. Well, there’s a body of research that shows, like 25 years of research, that shows that when kids have regular family dinners with their parents, it is very protective. It’s protective against depression, anxiety, teenage pregnancy, and substance use. And the main reason for that is that family dinner is the primary time that kids can connect to their parents.
And when there is a strong connection, that is what’s protective. So. Just getting into the weeds a little bit more from the CASA studies that were done, the Columbia studies about substance use, those studies found that teens who have frequent family dinners are four times less likely to use tobacco, and two and a half times less likely to use alcohol than kids who have fewer dinners, and we’re talking about two or fewer versus five or more.
Then there were surveys of almost a hundred thousand middle schoolers and high schoolers. That found that the low frequency of family dinner was associated with a greater prevalence of high risk behavior, including substance use. And again, the, the key ingredient here is that the frequent family dinners allowed for connection.
And this finding is over and beyond what you’d expect just from thinking, oh, well, families who have dinner are more competent, more organized, more close knit. No. These findings were over and beyond the characteristics of the family. They really were attributed to the family dinners themselves. And then there’s another smaller body of research that shows that there’s something about the ritual of family dinner – how predictable, how reliable, how you know, when we, family dinner is a ritual that kind of creates a boundary, um, around the family. It gives them a sense of this is who we are, and it takes them away from the hubbub of everyday life. And that has been a factor that is really featured in some studies that show that having a ritual like family dinner can interrupt the transmission of alcoholism from one generation to another.
So this was found with families with one alcoholic parent who had, where they had family dinner. They really relied on family dinner, and those children did not develop alcoholic behavior at the same rate as families who were not able to have regular family dinners. So just to kind of stress that there’s something about the ritual of the family dinner that confers an extra protection, uh, for preventing the transmission of alcoholism.
Bri DeRosa: Thanks for that rundown, Annie. And I, I think one thing that’s really interesting when we look at these studies, and this was something that our colleague, Dr. Timothy Willens highlighted for us when we spoke to him about it, was the role of parental modeling here. Right. And on that, Leslie, I know this is something that responsibility.org has done a lot of work on, and I wonder if you can speak a little bit to any research or any findings that you have around parental modeling and what you are doing as an organization to try to boost that protective effect, effectively model the behavior that they want to see.
Leslie Kimball: Absolutely. I love, we, I followed the dinner project for a while and it obviously, it, it affected my raising of my two kids. I have a daughter who’s now 18. She’s just graduated from high school. And then I have a son who’s 15. So we have applied so much of what we’ve learned about having dinners and I was impacted and influenced by you all, so thank you for your great work. And responsibility.org is so grateful for what you all have done. So thank you very much.
And I think what we’ve learned is that parents have the most influence over a kid’s decision to drink or not to drink alcohol. And what I would love for parents listening to know is parents may not know that they have that influence. So when we did a study back in 2025, earlier this year, we learned that the majority of kids, over 50% of kids, cited their parents as that leading influence. But parents, 32% of them said that they were the leading influence. So there’s a disconnect there. So I think what I would love for parents to know is they should have the confidence to know that they should be having those conversations about alcohol and other risky behaviors.
Marijuana, you know, the friends, they keep getting into a car with a risky driver, staying out past curfew. All of those risky behaviors sort of run together, but those parents should be very confident that they are, when they are talking about these risky behaviors, their kids are listening. So keep up the good work.
Bri DeRosa: I think it’s so funny, you know, I think we see that in, in many areas of family dinner research where parents are like, oh, well my kids don’t really want to eat with me. Right? And then if you survey teenagers, especially like 80% of teenagers are like, oh, I wish I could eat with my parents more often, right?
We never think of kids as finding us as important to their lives as they actually do, and so I thank you for highlighting that and I, I wonder what about this line of thinking that if you do choose to drink, as a parent, that it is important to drink responsibly in front of your kids so that they can see what moderate consumption of alcohol looks like.
What are the considerations here? Is that kind of behavioral modeling helpful for all families? What should parents do about self-disclosure in terms of their own alcohol consumption or any even potential issues that they may have encountered with moderation or their use of substances? If kids aren’t asking, do we have to tell and should we be showing them what we think moderate consumption looks like?
Leslie Kimball: I think talking about alcohol and also modeling moderate and responsible drinking go hand in hand. I don’t think that parents should drink in front of their kids to teach them how to drink. I don’t think that’s the reason that a parent would drink. Right. I think if you’re a parent and you choose to have a cocktail glass of wine, beer after your work, if you are doing that, you should do so because you are making a very reflective choice to do so in front of your kids.
You should not do so because you’ve had a bad day. You need a drink, mommy needs to unwind. Mommy needs her drink. Right? That is not what we should be doing in front of our children. And it goes for anything beyond alcohol too. A bag of chips, a tub of ice cream, right? It’s that sort of unregulated or unmindful choice that I think we need to be really careful of in front of our kids. That’s what I would encourage parents not to do. So making really wise choices and modeling good behavior in front of the kids is what I think parents should do.
My husband, we celebrated my birthday recently and we went out to a nice meal and we had our two kids with us. And my husband and I are very careful about talking about who’s driving home, right? So, you know, am I having a cocktail? Is he having a cocktail? We have that conversation in front of our children every single time. And we’ve been doing that for over a decade when they were sort of locked into hearing us talk about those choices. And we do that because we want them…it’s just like putting on your seatbelt. We want them to know that if there’s gonna be a risky behavior taking place, we mitigate it with who’s driving home and make sure our whole family is safe.
So that’s sort of how our family does it. But I do think you have to be intentional about it. You have to be responsible about it. And that role modeling is really about just being a responsible parent. It’s not about modeling alcoholic consumption, I don’t, I don’t think.
Dr. Anne Fishel: I love those two examples that you gave, that first one, the idea of kind of uncoupling drinking with stress reduction, and I would say that maybe going hand in hand with that would be offering some other strategies to kids. Gosh, I had a really hard day. I’m gonna just take a moment and meditate, or I’m just gonna take a moment and read a couple of pages in a novel ’cause I need to escape a little bit.
Or, gosh, it’s just so great to be able to chat with you after a hard day and hear about your day. And it’s making me feel much better, you know, to sort of fold in some other strategies that we can use to make ourselves feel better after a hard day. So I love that as one of the things you’re doing.
And then to be so out there negotiating with your, with your spouse when you have a drink, and who’s gonna drive, I think that that’s such, such good advice. When we spoke with Dr. Willens, one of the things that he said is that if a parent has had a problematic relationship to alcohol growing up, or they grew up in a family where the parents had problematic relationships, that they maybe should be more careful even about moderate drinking at the dinner table. And I wonder what you thought about that.
Leslie Kimball: Absolutely. I mean, there are people who should not drink, period. There are people who should not drink at certain times. I was gonna build on sort of, I’ve been talking lately about my, again, my daughter just went through this process of, in a high school graduation, picking a college and sort of our family discussion was about our nervous system.
You know, are we regulated or are we deregulated? This sort of thing. And we made it a friendly sort of joke, but it was very, I mean, we, it was a deep feeling of, you know, are we stressed? Are we, how are we handling our stress? But we were very open in the way we sort of talked about that. And I, and I do think that there, especially at times of deregulation, choosing alcohol or any other substance to handle that deregulation or that stress is not an effective coping mechanism. It actually can backfire on you, particularly if you have an addictive disorder in your family.
And then I would also add, you know, to echo some of the work that you’ve discussed, you know, if the earlier a child drinks alcohol or has their first onset of consumption, is what we would call that, so your first drink, the more likely they are gonna have an unsafe relationship with alcohol later in life.
So that’s the point that I tell my friends, you know, they’re our, our kids are social, right? The, these kids are exposed to a lot of things. But the one thing I do try and remind our friends is we are, we don’t want our kids to drink, period. Right. It’s illegal. But what we also want them to know is that the longer they wait, the safer they’re gonna be long-term.
And that is the goal of every parent. So I think that’s what I have found has resonated with people, to your point of, we just don’t want them to develop any of these alcohol use disorders later in life.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah. I, I love this whole line of conversation. I, I wanna just underscore a couple of points. One of which is the, the really clear distinction that you’ve made, Leslie, between drinking as modeling and understanding how to model why you have chosen to drink. Right.
These are two different ideas and I would just, you know, I would say that for myself, I do come from a family where there are family members who have had issues with alcohol, and my kids are aware of that. We have not made a secret of that. We have been open about that. As a result, I don’t tend to drink often.
It’s a choice that I have made. I know that I personally don’t have an issue with it, but I’ve also chosen to not have that as part of my life on a regular basis. And when I do drink, it’s very intentional on my part that I’m having this glass of red wine with this meal right now because I enjoy the taste of this wine with this meal, and I’ve chosen to do that because for me it’s pleasant and I enjoy the way it tastes, and I’m going to have the one glass and then I’m going to be done. Right. And so that has been sort of, I walk through that with my kids. They understand that when I do make that choice, it is not coming from that nervous system place. And that’s part of, obviously we’ve had a lot of other types of conversations in our household out of necessity, but that’s part of how we’ve chosen to manage that.
And that parental modeling, the conversational aspect is kind of the whole ball game. So we always say that you should talk to your kids about drinking. And we’re, we’re talking about that right now, but it’s so much easier said than done. And especially when it comes to the family dinner environment, introducing these types of topics, these trickier, more introspective topics can be really, really hard for parents.
And a lot of times we hear from people, oh, my kids would never have that conversation with me. They don’t. They’re just gonna shut down. They don’t wanna talk about it. So I think it’d be really helpful if we could maybe talk a little bit about how parents might set the stage for making the family dinner table a more conversational zone.
Annie, maybe you could help us with that. And then we can transition into, and then what do we talk about?
Dr. Anne Fishel: So obviously you can’t just jump right into a conversation about drinking or sex or death or any topics that we may, may wanna talk to our kids about but are, are charged. I mean, you really have to lay the groundwork over many, many years and many, many dinners where talking is pleasurable, where kids know that what they have to say is not gonna be judged or shut down or made fun of.
And so that’s kind of a, a conversational practice that we hope that families will get in the groove with, that they’ll learn to ask open-ended questions of their kids. They won’t ask questions that just require a yes or no answer. They’ll be interested in their kids’ feelings about all kinds of subjects, what they did at school, what recess was like, and so on.
You know, becoming good practitioners as parents of asking questions that are what I would call window openers rather than door slammers, so that then when there’s time to talk about drinking, kids know that their parents are gonna be open to what they have to say, how they feel, what they’ve heard on the school yard, and the transition to these more difficult conversations will be smoother.
And then kind of following up on the, what we’ve been talking about, regulation, emotional regulation. I think when it feels like it’s the right time to bring up drinking or why I’m having a glass of red wine or whatever it might be, that it’s important for a parent to make sure that they’re in an emotionally calm place to bring it up and not to bring up these charged topics when they themselves are feeling stirred up and charged.
So that would be another kind of, I guess, guideline. You know, monitoring your own emotional regulation for when you time these conversations and then trying to cultivate a curious mindset, being open to what your kids know, what they’ve heard, what questions they might have, those would be the things that would come to mind.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah. I think, you know, our friends, Tai and Juliana from the Resilience Project say, you know, parents need to make things talk aboutable, and that keeps coming to mind as you’re talking, Annie. You know, you can’t have the conversation about the big things if you’re not paying attention to them telling you about what happened on the playground or you know, this will be relatable to a lot of parents. You have to like, stick in there when they’re telling you about Minecraft or YouTube. Right. How to play that video game. Whatever that thing is, you really gotta kind of commit and stick into it because that’s gonna make it easier for them to open up and feel like you’re gonna listen to them when you need to talk about the bigger things.
Leslie, I don’t know if you have anything you wanna add to that or maybe some of the ways that your Ask, Listen, Learn program helps families find entry points into these challenging conversations.
Leslie Kimball: Sure. Absolutely. For, I think for me, you know, I have grown up, or my children have grown up with me doing the work that I do.
So I would sort of challenge back and say, I’m not sure that these conversations about underage drinking or risky behaviors should be seen as hard. Right. So to your point, if, if you’re having these conversations with your kids every day and you are, you know them, it’s just another day in the neighborhood, right?
You’re just talking about something that really matters to your family and your values. So whether or not you hear something on the news, you know, there could be a drunk driving crash, there could be prom coming up. Both of those things are entry points for kids as young as five or six. You know, they, they kind of are aware of what’s happening long before you might think they’re aware. And, you know, you have to build that bubble, that protective bubble around them so that they know your family’s values early on, so that, that you’re just building on it as they age 8, 9, 10 through high school. So I think that’s a good place to start.
I think if, if you’re a family that does keep alcohol in your home, talking about sort of where those products come from. If you have cognac, if you have Irish whiskey, if you have wine, if you have beer or whatever it is. I think you’re talking about sort of what it is. So you could talk about the chemistry of it. That’s not glorifying alcohol. It would be the same thing as talking about aging cheese or skim milk. Right. So I’m in no way saying we’re normalizing it. I’m just saying there are interesting things to talk about with anything in your kitchen as you’re making the dinner. So I think those are just interesting things to say.
And then at our family, I always have asked our kids, you know, I, I try not to say, how was your day? ’cause they don’t answer me.,They shrug at me. They, you know, I don’t get a very good answer. So I ask them a weird question. I’ll say, what was the quirkiest thing that happened? Or, who annoyed you the most today, or what teacher said the most interesting thing, or what, what happened that was silly? I try and make it fun so they have to actually think to answer me and I just get a better answer when that happens.
And then often at our dinner table we do the Rose, Bud, Thorn, and that question, doing our Rose, Bud, Thorn, I think has gotten our family the deepest answers, we’ve gotten to know each other in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise. Right. So that’s my favorite.
And then if a parent, if there is something that’s happened on the news or happened in your community, I mean, there are so many parent text groups and parent community groups that talk about, you know, there might be a homecoming coming up, there might be a middle school dance. That is when the parents really need to hone in and talk to one another about is there gonna be alcohol there? Are they drinking? Are they vaping? What are they doing? All of that is ripe for those conversations, and that’s where you would go in and use Ask, Listen, Learn, because we do have those conversation starters for not only with your kids but also your fellow parents.
Because again, it’s confidence. Going back to our first question, it’s the confidence of parents being armed with this knowledge of, you have to keep alcohol out of these kids’ hands, and making sure that other parents also know, you know, they’re not doing it. My kid’s not gonna do it. Let’s all be aligned on this.
Dr. Anne Fishel: I used to do this, to my kids’ horror, but I would call, if they were going to a party, I would call and make sure that there was gonna be an adult there. And what was their policy about underage drinking?
Leslie Kimball: Yes, and my kids do not like that either. And that is fine.
That is not, our job is not to make them as popular as they can be. We want them to be socially stable, of course. But our job is to protect them and make sure that they graduate high school and go on to live a fulfilling life.
Bri DeRosa: So wrapped up in all of this is, you said confidence, right? And that leads me to thinking about, as a parent, confidence is actually not always easy to come by. And we second guess ourselves a lot.
Some of us may feel more, more comfortable and connected to our kids than others. There are lots of reasons why families don’t talk or connect as much, right? There are lots of things in our own histories sometimes that make it hard to know how to, how to really reach out and have those conversations with our kids. And not everybody’s great at those open-ended conversation starters, and they get stuck on the one word answers and they feel like, oh, nobody wants to talk. Right? \
There’s a huge mental health piece here I think that we really wanna get at. And so I wonder, can we talk a little bit about that? It’s a core piece of this, Leslie, you have some new resources in Ask, Listen, Learn that relate to mental health, and can you talk a little bit about those?
And then Annie. what would you add on to build our kind of parental and family toolkits, I guess?
Leslie Kimball: Mental health has obviously been in the news. It’s a, it’s a growing body of work. It’s extremely important and I’m thrilled that Ask, Listen, Learn has added this into our toolkit.
We started talking about underage drinking. We felt like we had a good history of sort of being able to develop this amazing program that’s been around for over 20 years. We added in sort of in guiding parents on how to talk to their kids about underage marijuana use, because many states were passing or legalizing marijuana. And you know, counselors and school nurses that we work with, parents that we work with, were like, well, can we talk about that too?
Yes, we can absolutely talk about that too. But I think we’d be remiss to not add in this product that we’ve just released about mental health, where we talk about mental health at home. We talked about that throughout this recording, modeling positive mental health behavior. You know, how are you coping? Have you had a good day? Are you emotionally regulated or deregulated? And how you’re gonna get back to stable.
And then recognizing if your kids are having a mental health struggle and what to do about that. And going to the confidence, some parents don’t know what to do, but there are resources out there that can help. And I think it’s, it’s having the confidence to reach out and realizing that you can’t do it alone sometimes. You really do need to sort of look for support. And then some of the things we do talk about. So I mentioned asking questions about what was the silliest thing that happened or who annoyed you. You know, talking about those emotions as we talk about these conversations over dinner is very important, to sort of name those emotions, to understand what your family members are going through.
And then using, being conscious of how you sort of talk about your day. And if you’re stressed and mad and sort of describing that the best you can, so your kids also know that it’s okay to have a frustrating day. You know, your, as a parent, you don’t have to be perfect and to, so sometimes show those vulnerabilities. Your kids are like, okay, well my mom had a bad day, or my dad had a bad day, or my grandmother had a bad day, and they got through it, and we’re resilient and I can do that too.
So teaching those coping mechanisms. Flexing those muscles. It’s a muscle to be flexed and, and reused, I think is building strength and really does help that parent-child relationship.
Dr. Anne Fishel: I think that that’s just got so many pearls of wisdom in there, and I think Rose, Bud, Thorn sort of fits right in there because it, it forces everybody at the table to, to say something that was fun and interesting and easy, but also something that was challenging and difficult, and for parents to do that as well I think models that, you know, we all have the good and the bad in a day, and so I just wanna sort of underscore that.
I think parents can also lead the charge or participate in saying what they do when they’re feeling stressed or anxious and what kind of help they’ve looked, looked for. I mean, if a parent has been in therapy, yes, it’s, you know, a private matter to have been in therapy, but it’s also really powerful to share with a child that you’ve been in therapy and it’s helped in this way and that way, and you would like this for your child, that they could benefit from it as well.
So kind of sharing all kinds of strategies that a parent has looked to for help in managing hard times. And I think also making room at the dinner table to talk about screw ups and mistakes. And, you know, I wanna tell you about, I sent the stupidest email today and I wish I could retract it. What would you do or, you know, I just feel I’m really being hard on myself, I know, but I just can’t stop thinking about it. Just to make it permissible also for children to, to share their mistakes and not to feel like they have to be perfect, which is, you know, can really do a, a number on a child’s mental health, to feel they have to be straight A perfect all the time. So those would be some things.
I think also, you know, making room at the dinner table to talk about times that we faced as a family that have been difficult and what we’ve learned from those and what we did to get over them, whether it was getting through the pandemic or the death of a pet or, or a bad day. Just sort of having that be a through line in the family conversation is a way of shoring up resilience.
Leslie Kimball: I sometimes wonder if parents shouldn’t ask their kids, what don’t you wanna talk about at the dinner table? Because your point about the grades and these portals where parents can see in real time whether or not their kid got an 88 or a 98 on a test, and then that’s the first thing we ask them when they walk in the door, or that’s the first thing we ask them at the dinner table, I do not think is very good for a child’s mental health.
So there are some times where I think that talking about. things like those portals and your grades should maybe be off limits, and meant for sort of a different, maybe a more administrative setup of the conversation. But, you know, just, I do think the kids should have some agency in what they’re pestered about at dinner just to again, keep it a healthy, happy place that they wanna come back to every night, you know, just for family stability.
Bri DeRosa: Gosh. Yeah. I think that’s one of the, especially with teenagers, right? I, I mean, kids of all ages, but especially the older the kids get, the more administrative conversations tend to become, right? Because they become really busy and then it’s like everything is like, did you…Because parents are trying to hand off that agency and that responsibility.
So then it becomes management. Did you talk to your soccer coach? Did you turn in your physics thing? How did you do on that test you were studying for? Did you talk to your teacher? And it’s all very transactional, right? And I think that’s such a great point you’re making, Leslie, that we have to set aside transactions and not let our time to connect, become our time to manage the business of life.
And I also, Annie, I wanted to just pick up on, you said something about connecting to the ways that families have gotten through hard times. And I just wanna kinda like underscore that point, because I know that we, we have seen research that shows that resilience is built particularly through kids feeling a sense of connection to their family stories, their history.
And so it’s not even just about what have we personally experienced? But it is also important to spend some time talking about your grandparents, your great grandparents. You know, the stories that have built your family, people who lived through the depression, people who got through hard times, people who you know, immigrated to, to different areas of the world. What did they face? How did they get through that? What are the things, the building blocks of actually our whole family history? That can also be really powerful and protective and interesting for kids far more than what are your grades like?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Well said, Bri. Yeah.
Bri DeRosa: So I think we’re at a great place to provide some food, fun, and conversation inspiration to wrap our episode. And Leslie, this is something we do at the end of every episode. We try to give people something to bring back to their dinner tables to make it a more fun, rewarding, and connecting experience. And so I’m gonna kick us off with the food for today.
And I would say, I was thinking deeply about this. I think sometimes it’s easier to have conversations that may feel a little bit awkward if you’re not looking at each other. We hear that a lot from people. I’d rather have the conversation in the car because there’s no eye contact. So I was thinking about busy work, right?
And keeping your hands busy and doing something physically together while you’re talking, ’cause that can really ease the flow. And so I would recommend things like, you could go as simple as making food collages. We have some examples of those on the site. We have a recipe called Raggedy Ann Salads, which is something my great grandmother taught me when I was a kid, and building these little dolls out of the ingredients for a salad on the plate. That can be really fun and tasty. A good thing for younger kids particularly.
And then as kids get older, things like making your own pizzas, putting the toppings on while you’re talking, or we have a recipe for origami dumplings, and learning to fold the dumplings. Right. So you can kind of progress in difficulty or interest as kids age. But that hands-on, making dinner, making something together can really help facilitate just everybody’s comfort level with opening up.
Annie, what is a suggestion that you have for a table game or two that would help practice some of the concepts that we’ve talked about today, and make the table feel welcoming?
Dr. Anne Fishel: So I’m thinking about a game that I have played as a family therapist, but I’ve also played at the dinner table, and it’s called Guess the Emotion. And it goes like this: One family member steps away from the table for a minute while the other family members pick an emotion, and they could just pick any emotion, or you might have selected a list of maybe 10 emotions, you know, anger, joy, surprise, worry, and so on.
So you might pick one of those, and then the family member who stepped away comes back and they listen in on a conversation that the family members are gonna have, imbuing that conversation with the emotion that they chose. So if it’s excitement, you know, they might say, I can’t wait to get an ice cream cone tomorrow with my best friend. And then the family member tries to guess what the emotion is.
And you could play it without words. You could just try to convey the emotion with nonverbal body language or facial expressions. But I think of this as sort of the building block of emotional intelligence, being able to identify in yourself and in others what emotion is at play.
And it’s sort of the start of emotional regulation as well, but it’s, you know, it’s lighthearted.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah. That it’s a really fun one, I think, and it’s one that I often forget about, but I love that idea of being able to kind of test out how well can we read each other, even? And in a family, that can be really important. Sometimes, you know, it’s valuable to step back and recognize, that’s how my child conveys anxiety. That’s how my child behaves when they’re stressed.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah.
Bri DeRosa: And so, Leslie, can you finish us up with a favorite conversation starter that you would recommend for families, that they can bring to their family dinner table tonight?
Leslie Kimball: Sure. I was gonna add, for a, Annie had a very good one, but I was gonna add sort of, if there’s a game night that you would have, a game that you would play afterwards. And ours that we would do is, it’s a game called Anomia. And the reason we love that game is we laugh and laugh and laugh so much, like it inevitably, the kids, the teens like it, my husband and I enjoy playing with them, and then the grandparents like it.
So I, I think a family dinner that could lead into a family game night on a Saturday is super fun. And I guess that would be my conversation request for them is, you know, what do we wanna do as a family this weekend or this evening? Just to, again, continue sort of that togetherness if they’re able, even if it means going to a, you know, a soccer game or a basketball game or a violin concert. You know, even if it means stopping to get some ice cream afterwards, just something that you’re sort of doing more togetherness. I think that laughter and togetherness is what we all need more of.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Agreed. Yeah. So a question that really emphasizes connection as a family. Absolutely. You put it better than I did.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah. I think we could not possibly end on a better note than that. So thank you, Leslie, for being with us today. We are going to drop the link to responsibility.org in the show notes. And how to get the Ask, Listen, Learn program, and then obviously links to the recipes, games, ideas, conversation starters that we’ve talked about today will also be there.
Listeners, if you have questions about any of this, please reach out. You can reach out to us. If you have specific questions about substance use, reach out to Leslie and her team at Responsibility.org. Please go forth and connect with your family tonight. We’ll see you next time on the Family Dinner Project Podcast.