It’s Season 3 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel talk through tough topics related to family meals and parenting. Missed our first two seasons? You can check out all of our episodes here.

In this episode, Bri and Annie take some time to talk about the new and improved version of our  4 Week Program: What it is, why we changed it, and what families can expect from the latest version, just in time for back-to-school season.

Episode Highlights:

• Go to 2:47 for some background on our original 4-week program and why we developed it to help families
• Go to 6:16 for a discussion of the reasons why we felt families needed and deserved an updated version of the program
• Go to 11:24 to hear why “Make it Simple” became “Make it Work”
• Go to 18:15 for an in-depth rundown of our favorite food, fun, and conversation highlights from the new program

Related Links:

• 4 Weeks to Better Family Dinners
• The Benefits of Family Dinner
• The Welcoming Table (resources for families with special needs)
• Back t0 School Hub

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: Hello, so great to be with you. 

Bri DeRosa: Great to have you back, Annie. And I can’t, I can’t believe it, but we’re already doing back to school season. I personally feel like my kids just finished the school year, so I have no idea how we’re here already.

Dr. Anne Fishel: I know. It’s a, a trick of time 

Bri DeRosa: And back to school season is like a thing in your family right now because don’t you have a granddaughter starting preschool or heading back to preschool this year? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Heading back to preschool, but not for a month, or about six weeks. 

Bri DeRosa: So her parents are gonna be in planning mode pretty soon.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Absolutely. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. And so that’s, this is the perfect time for us to talk about some of our back to school resources. We always kind of see families gearing up for dinner time. Like, I know people in my life are always bookmarking new recipes around this time of year and thinking about, you know, they’re starting to get the sports calendars.

I just did it the other night. My younger son is gonna be on a new team this fall, and so I was putting all of the nights that he has practice in the calendar and making sure that he’s got that shared to his phone and everybody knows where everybody’s gonna be. It’s a lot. So we actually have a whole back to school hub on thefamilydinnerproject.org just for that.

But this year, we also have something new that we are very excited to talk about today, right? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Absolutely. We’ve been hard at work at this for several months now. 

Bri DeRosa: It feels like, yeah, I think we’ve been kind of working at it off and on for probably six months, just trying to get things ready and get things the way that we want them because we are rolling out our brand-new version of the Family Dinner Project’s four-week program, which is Four Weeks to Better Family Dinners.

And I know that the four-week program was one of the very first things the Family Dinner Project established back in the day, like before I was on the team, like right when, when the project started. So Annie, you were on the inaugural team. You were one of the co-founders of the Family Dinner Project. Can you talk a little bit about why the four-week program, what it was like, how it worked, what made you guys do this?

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. So this Family Dinner Project started in 2010, and it took us a while to kind of get our feet on the ground, I would say. But we started to realize that there were three elements of a great family dinner. Of course, you had to have food, because that’s what brings everybody to the table, but it needed to be fun so that people would enjoy it and wanna stay.

And since it’s the main time that families gather, we thought it would– was also the place to talk about things that matter, whether it’s your school day or things going on in the news or what was important to them as a family. So we wanted to come up with some sort of do it yourself program, some free program that would help families dig deeper into those three different, three elements of a great family dinner.

And so we came up with the idea of the four-week program. And the idea was and is that families could download it for free off our website. And the first week was about making a commitment, then making it simple, which we’ll say more about that, make it fun, and make it matter. And the make the commitment was really introducing families to the research about all the benefits of, the nutritional, the academic, and the mental health benefits.

So we were…also wanted to make sure that it was a, it was not just our idea that, you know, came out of collective heads. We wanted to find out what families thought about it. And so there was quite a bit of research for the original four-week program. We enlisted about 32 families who did it for four weeks.

We followed them, we interviewed them for up to a year during and after the four-week program, and then we collected survey data as well. And I would say the main takeaways from that is that in our group of 32 families, they were already having pretty frequent dinners, three to four, I think, a week. But they weren’t really enjoying their family dinners.

They weren’t talking much. On a scale of one to five, nothing really went above a three. They didn’t, they didn’t enjoy the food. They didn’t make food together. They didn’t laugh. They didn’t, didn’t talk about the news. They didn’t talk, or they talked rarely or sometimes, but it was not, the atmosphere around the dinner table was not as positive or fun as it might have been.

And what we found is that after the four-week program, there were changes in the atmosphere around the table. So they reported reducing distractions, like turning the TV off or getting gadgets off the table, telling more funny stories about their day, having fun preparing food together, creating a fun and inviting atmosphere, and creating meals in advance.

Those were the change items over the four-week program. And I think the other more subtle takeaway for me was that each family took what they needed. Hmm. So each– nobody did it in a prescriptive, followed the prescription exactly, but they sort of grabbed what they needed. And I think we ran with that idea a lot in the new version of the four-week program.

So we’ve continued to use it, and it’s, it’s felt a little outdated. It’s felt a little too prescriptive to me, even though families figured out workarounds. So anyway, tell us about the idea for the new, newfangled, much improved four-week program. 

Bri DeRosa: Well, we hope it’s much improved. So we’ve just passed our 15-year anniversary milestone, right?

And one of the things that you and I started to do was just look retrospectively at everything that has happened, which is a lot, and the whole body of the work, and what we really think we want to keep providing or provide more of to families now. And we looked at the program and felt like, you know, it was nice, but it– a lot changes in 15 years.

You know, 15 years ago, there wasn’t a lot of talk about things like kids with ADHD or kids on the autism spectrum and how that changes a family meal. The difference between picky eating and sensory sensitivities. You know, there wasn’t a lot of, as much talk about, like, the way that kids’ sports schedules change the family dynamic, or drama club, or dance, or whatever it is, right?

All of that has ramped up significantly over the past 15 years. And we also know a lot more about the benefits of family dinners. We know now that eating together makes you happier. We didn’t know that until this year, right? There’s a body of worldwide research that tells us that. We know much more about the effects of family dinners on older adults, on people across the lifespan, on loneliness at all ages.

So there’s just so much, and technology has changed too, and that’s a huge, huge thing. Right. The way that families interact with technology is totally different now. So all of those things we felt like we had to take into consideration as we looked at a four-week program that would really help families, right?

What are you, as the co-founder of the project, what are you most excited about sharing with families from this new iteration? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Guess what I’m most excited about is that we’ve kind of pulled out our greatest hits. So it’s not only that there have been all these changes, and I agree with every one that you mentioned, but also we’ve been churning out new content every single month.

And I know from talking to families across the country and to, when I do trainings, that all that content can be a little overwhelming. 

Bri DeRosa: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: It’s just like an embarrassment of riches sometimes. And what the four-week program does, among other things, is it curates that content. And what families can look forward to is kind of a smorgasbord, like a rich buffet of really delicious offerings, like some of our best games for preschoolers, and best games for tweens, and best games for adolescents.

And conversation starters, um, you know, hun- hundred different ways to ask, “How was your day?” But other conversation starters that we’ve kind of pulled out to elevate and to kind of highlight so families don’t have to sift through thousands and thousands of resources that are now on our website. But they can go to this four-week program, and there’s a ton of material, but it’s been sort of pre-selected for them.

We know that the one– the things that are on the four-week program have been road tested by many, many families, and we’ve gotten good feedback on all of them. And so I guess that’s what I’m excited about, a kind of- pulls together and highlights 16 years of great content. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I agree. It was something that I know I was keeping in mind as we were developing this.

You know, just really thinking about, we know that we have a few things specifically that we reach for again and again when we want to help a family, when we want to put our best foot forward. But those things all existed scattered in different places, right? And now this was an opportunity for us to put those things together and put them in front of a family and say, “Hey, if you’re really looking for conversation resources that you can use right now and not have to think about which ones do I pick, these are the ones that we know we would h- take off the shelf and hand to you, right, for a first go.”

And, you know, you said before, like, the old program was, it was very easy to follow, but it was very prescriptive. You know, do this, then do this, then do this, then do this. And the new program is a little bit more tailored to the fact that, you know, we find nowadays families are much more likely to say, “Well, yeah, but that might work for my neighbor, but it’s not gonna work for me.”

So we wrote the program this time around a little bit more with that in mind, that you could try this or you could try this. Just pick something, right? And if it doesn’t work, there’s plenty of other stuff that you can choose and try again. So I think let’s dig in a little bit to what people can expect.

So the four weeks, as you said, used to be make the commitment, make it simple, make it fun, and make it matter. And now they’re almost the same, but we’ve changed them slightly. We changed make it simple to make it work, and I wanna be clear about why we did that. You know, one of the things that I felt really strongly about was that simple sounds great, but the reality is that for a lot of people, that is just not realistic.

And that week really goes at how do you get dinner happening? How do you get the meal on the table? And like you and I, we work for the Family Dinner Project. We’re probably pretty good at this, right? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: But you’re better than I am, but yes. 

Bri DeRosa: I think you’re, you’re also very good at this, right? Like making the dinner happen.

And it’s not simple, right? For us, it’s not simple. So I feel like if it’s not simple for me, I, I like meal planning. I’m really good at meal planning. I really like to cook. You really like to cook. You’re good at being creative on the fly with what you have. Like, but if we don’t find those things simple, even if they’re enjoyable and relatively easy for us to do versus the way that they feel to somebody else, then I didn’t wanna call it simple, and I don’t want families to expect that it should be.

But what it should be, or I hope it will be, is a little bit easier, a little bit less effort, a little bit more supportive, right? That you feel like, “Okay, I can walk away from this, and I have some tools to help me practice, and I will get better.” 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. Yeah. I, I think I would just add to that, that I think we often skip over the food part because– And we’ll say to families, “Food is the least important part of family dinner.”

Mm-hmm. You know, it’s what happens around the table that brings most of the benefits. And I think I’ve been hearing from families, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that may be true, but we’re not– I can’t make family dinner happen if I can’t get the food to the table, and that is really hard. So tell me about that.” And I, I think- There are just a ton of really helpful ideas that you’ve worked on.

You know, what to do if you have 30 minutes to cook. What if you have 15? What if you have no time? What can you do? And I think that alone is, that tool alone is, it could be a game changer for a lot of families. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I, you know, I hope so, and I, you’re so right that the food is the least important part, but it often feels like the biggest roadblock, and, you know, there’s no amount of, like, saving recipes that’s going to help you out if you don’t have time, or if you don’t have great cooking skills, or if you have five members of your family and they all like different things.

Uh, like, all of those are just a challenge. But then, you know, we have make it fun and make it matter, and we’re really looking at ways that you can, once you’ve got those, those first two weeks dialed in, right? Why and how you’re gonna make family dinner a more prominent part of your life. Then the last two weeks become almost the most important, right?

Now, how are you gonna make it something that you wanna do? And something that carries through in the way that you want it to, that, that your family is gonna not look at every night as, “Oh my gosh, this is a carnival. I love this.” Like, that would be unrealistic. But that in the balance, you know, 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road, some of the dinners that you had are gonna be things that you talk about and remember, and you’re gonna make those connections and make those memories together at the table.

Dr. Anne Fishel: I, yeah, and we always hope that once it gets going, it will have some momentum on its own. Once families start to put some of these routines into place, that what was initially a heavy lift becomes much easier over time. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s really important. And, and it’s also important because, you know, one thing that we often say, but I think probably gets lost in the shuffle for people, is it – family dinner –  is gonna change.

And you’ve brought up a point many times to me that I think is really important, which is about ritual, and the fact that rituals are not supposed to always stay the same. They are supposed to be flexible so that as your circumstances change, as your family gets older, as your schedules change, you know, as palates expand, or as somebody has a new dietary restriction, all of these things that can impact your dinner.

The ritual of family dinner is not going to stay carved in stone.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Static. 

Bri DeRosa:  Exactly. Yeah. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, right. They’re gonna bring partners back to the table. Right. The table’s gonna expand, it’s gonna contract. 

Bri DeRosa: Yep. Right. Sometimes it’s gonna be two of you, and sometimes it’s gonna be 10 of you, right? And that’s all gonna happen over the course of a family’s lifespan.

And so feeling like you know how to approach family meals no matter what life throws at you, I think is kind of the underpinning here. That, you know, it’s a set of skills and tools and things that you do that you hopefully can change and expand on the more comfortable you feel. We’re not saying you’re gonna do this program and you’re going to have perfect family meals seven nights a week.

Everybody loves everything you make, everybody’s smiling all the time, and it looks like Leave It to Beaver. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I- right, that ship sailed. 

Bri DeRosa: Absolutely. A long time ago. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I just, this is a little bit an aside, but going back to the Make It Work week, which is, you know, the one that maybe is the most different.

In addition to all the ideas about food, there’s also a lot of emphasis on getting help. If you have a partner, having conversations with your partner about sharing the workload, about the different things that kids can do to help at different ages. And so I just wanna add that. That’s part of the Make It Work, that this should not, family dinner should not fall on the shoulders of one person.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s such a good point. And, and, you know, if it does fall on the shoulders of one person, let that be after a good set of conversations, you know? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: That you’ve decided that that’s how it’s gonna be for whatever reasons work for your family, but then hopefully that person is getting a lot of support in other areas too.

It goes hand in hand. You can’t plan to feed people without planning how everybody’s gonna be a part of that endeavor. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. And that’s the departure from Leave It to Beaver. 

Bri DeRosa: It’s one of the major departures, yeah. One of. And I think we have a lot more, you know? Yeah. Because Leave It to Beaver wouldn’t have said, “You know what? Here’s a way that you can include phones at the table without it destroying your family meal.” 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: You know? So we’re, it’s sort of family dinner for the modern era, I hope. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah So I think let’s turn our attention to, we always end our episodes with food, fun, and conversation, and we wanna take a little extra time on that today, I think, because that’s what the four-week program is about.

So we wanna showcase a little bit the food, fun, and conversation that you and I are most looking forward to families discovering from this program, right? So I’m gonna start with food, and I think the two resources that I’m the most excited about from the food portion of this are one, the pantry sheets.

One of the things that I really like about the pantry builder sheets that we have is that if you don’t know where to start, or you are trying to build a pantry that can help you make dinner easier when things fall apart, these are pretty complete, but they also work at different levels. So we have, like, the practical pantry, which is here’s how you build a pantry that you can rely on when you don’t have time and you don’t have a plan, but also that it’s pretty budget-friendly.

It’s the basics. But then we also have a polished version, which is for people who want to build a pantry, but they also know that they get bored easily, or they’re a more creative cook, or they have lots of different flavor preferences in their house, and they like to have options. If you’re somebody who’s like, “Yeah, but I need basics that are gonna cover my whim for, you know, Middle Eastern cuisine tonight,” we’ve got that, too.

And you can, to your point, pick and choose, right? It’s a smorgasbord. You can decide which things on these lists actually make it into your pantry, but, uh, you have some choices, and you can always pull from different lists and different ideas and make something your own. And then the other thing is the sheet pan builder.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Love this. Love this. 

Bri DeRosa:  So this, this is… I love this, right? It’s something that you and I talked about a lot because you’ve, you’ve heard me talk about, like, sheet pans and that, you know, “Oh, tonight, I… We’re just… I don’t know. I’m gonna throw together a sheet pan of something for the family.” And I think that’s a really great plan for families is to grab a tray, turn on your oven, throw some food on it, and stick it in, but it’s not actually just as easy as that.

And so what we’ve done is we’ve created this visual sheet pan builder where you can look at a chart, and it’s gonna tell you, “Okay, here’s the temperature. Here’s the rough timing.” And across these different categories of timing, 10 minutes to 15 minutes, 20 to 25, whatever it is, right? You can look down the list and see on the chart, I could put in these ingredients for this amount of time, and It will come out with something that is edible and interesting and tasty.

I can use what I have on hand. Here are the seasoning choices that I might, you know, choose from. It’s fun to look at and I think engaging and hopefully helpful. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. And you can look at the visual and try to guess what the little symbols are. Yeah. And then if you’re puzzled by it, there’s a cheat sheet.

Bri DeRosa: There is a cheat sheet, yeah. Because it’s really hard to have little drawings of, like, a bunch of different foods and have everybody know instantly, oh, that’s a steak or that’s tofu. Yeah. Um, so we do have a cheat sheet. But yeah, there’s, you know, there’s- the idea is, you know, people will always say to me, “You can’t just throw everything on a pan and throw it in the oven and have it all come out cooked at the right time,” right?

Which is true. You can, if you look down the, the chart and see, okay, I have 30 minutes and here are all the things that I could put on there in 30 minutes. You could pick something from every category and have a perfectly fine meal and everything. But if you wanted to add tomatoes and you don’t want them in the oven for 30 minutes then here’s, you know that they only take 10, so you can pull the pan out and add them 10 minutes before the end, right?

So you can kind of look at it and understand, here’s how mathematically I build something that works with the things I have on hand without incinerating something or having something come out raw. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: These are, these are good goals to have. Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: These are good goals to have, right? And you can play around with it.

That’s the great thing about the sheet pan builder is you’re gonna play with it and you’re gonna build out a bunch of ideas that are just for your family. The things that your family really enjoys are gonna find their way into your sheet pan meals, and suddenly you’re gonna have all these new recipes that aren’t even recipes. They’re just methods, and they work for you. And that’s, that makes dinner easier. So.

Dr. Anne Fishel: And that’s… that’s kind of a metaphor for this program, right? It’s pick and choose and make your own recipe. Make your own pathway to better family dinners. 

Bri DeRosa: Yes. Yeah, because if you’re not, in the long run, if you’re not having to look at a resource every time…

You know, I find the nights when dinner feels the easiest are the nights when I’m cooking something that I’ve made enough times that I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to look at the recipe. I just, I’m on autopilot. I know it’s gonna work, and when I look at the kitchen at the end, it’s not a disaster and I don’t feel terrible leaving my husband with all of these dishes.

And I think that that’s what we’re hoping. People are gonna use this to build their muscles so that eventually they’re not looking at it at all because they’ve got the food down. They’ve got the conversation that they know they enjoy. They know how to, how to get from one thing to the next. They know how to have fun together, and it just becomes automatic and creative.

It starts to give you your own ideas. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. So, um, let me talk about the fun week. 

Bri DeRosa: Love this .

Dr. Anne Fishel: So this, as I was saying, is really pulls out our greatest hits and organizes them in a way that makes it very accessible and easy for kids and parents to look at it and say, “Yes, I’d like to try that.” So they’re presented by age, so you can just look at the games that if you have toddlers, you can just look at the games that are suggested for toddlers or for teenagers or whatever. But then there are also some other games that are bucketed in a different way, so you can look at games or activities that are food-themed or cooking-themed or that are more creative or that involve playing with your food.

And you can look at suggestions in that way, too. It’s like a very well-stocked pantry, and you can just go in and take something off the shelf that seems like it’s gonna work for your family. So I love that. And then I wanna give a special shout-out to 110 Alternatives to Would You Rather? 

Bri DeRosa: Hmm. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Because that is such a fun game for any age, but sometimes when I used to play it, and I play it now with my granddaughter, I will kind of run out of ideas after a few, and, you know, kids will often jump in, and they’ll come up with their own ridiculous would-you-rathers.

But these are, you know, an abundance of would-you-rathers. You know, would you rather have 10 friends that change every day or one friend you have forever? Would you rather be shipwrecked on a desert island or stranded on a space station? And what I’ve come to love about would-you-rathers is that the more ridiculous they are or outlandish or unrealistic, the more that family members are sort of free to be curious about another person’s point of view.

There’s not really anything at stake. Like, there’s nothing that’s better or worse or right, righter, or wronger about any answer. So would you rather can be the starting point of, “Really? You’d rather be stranded on a desert? How come? That’s so– I don’t feel that way at all.” And it can become sort of the beginning of taking somebody else’s perspective.

But the stakes are so low with would you rather ’cause it’s so, they’re so whimsical and playful, so. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. I mean, that’s probably why it’s been our most popular game on our site since the beginning. You’re not, you’re not gonna be wrong if you choose one or the other, and it’s also a game that serves as a conversation starter.

So like you were saying, once somebody has answered, it’s really fun to answer these, but now you can have a deeper conversation, and you can actually get to know each other better and kinda understand how your family members tick a little bit more if you ask the right follow-up questions and get a little bit curious.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. Yeah, there’s more there than meets the eye in would you rathers, and when you have so many, you can pick and choose the ones that might lead to either more hilarity or more getting to know each other, or both. Right?

Bri DeRosa: Right. And there’s 110 of them here, so as you said, like, there’s a lot to choose from, and I think that is, that is a strength of the, the fun week.

There’s a lot of options across all of the different games, categories, ages, stages, everything, and this is one example of, of a way to take a classic game and just bring you as much of it as possible. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: So, conversation. One of the things that I really like about the conversation week, we, you know, we’ve got a ton here.

Again, like you said, we’ve got all of the alternatives to how was your day and lots of things about how to not have a tense conversation. But one of the things that I think is so useful is the conversation-deepening resources. So I’m finding, I don’t know about you, Annie, but I’m finding across different areas of my life, people seem to be having a harder and harder time having the deeper conversation.

Things are staying a little bit more surface, a little bit more superficial, and I wonder if it’s because we’re getting so out of practice just sitting with each other and speaking face to face for any length of time in a relaxed environment that we’re losing that skill of, like, how do you keep a conversation going, and how do you keep it going, you know, slowly more interesting, introspective, really getting to know each other, really getting to a more productive place and not just staying at that kind of top level.

You know, kind of the excavation of a conversation, I guess. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a lot of forces bigger than one family at a time. I mean, with so much more time spent video conferencing, working remotely, scrolling, you know, kids on their phone so much. I think all of those skills are kind of either not getting built or atrophying.

And family dinner is one place that, that it can show up, and it’s one place that it can be remedied because it’s a place, it’s a time of the day when we sit and look at each other eye to eye, and we can have those deeper conversations, or at least we can have conversations that have follow-up questions and that can deepen, even if it’s about something that’s silly.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, and I think, you know, we haven’t said this yet, but I think it’s important for families to hear and understand that we never intend for family dinner to do all of the hard work of your connection and conversation, right? So, if you’re hearing us talk about this and you’re like, “Yeah, but we have 20 minutes max to sit together, some nights maybe not even that,” right?

“And we don’t have time to, like, spiral down this big philosophical conversation,” understood. But if you’re practicing some skills at family dinner that build that foundation of learning how to sit with each other, learning how to talk to each other, building that muscle where, okay, now we’ve established that we are safe for each other, we are here for each other, and we can talk to each other, even for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, then later on when you do have time, when you’re maybe in the car and the kid doesn’t have to make eye contact and they really do wanna talk to you, they know that that’s an okay thing to do because you’ve, you’ve established that safety and that bond at the table.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. Right, and I think there are a lot of ideas about what kinds of questions parents can ask kids, and maybe kids eventually can ask each other, that either are window openers or door slammers. So that, that’s another thing that I think, again, might be once a month, it might be once a week, but it can be kind of built into the repertoire of family dinners.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I love that metaphor, the window openers and the door slammers, and I think it’s really good for, you know, parents to look at the door slammers in particular, and you might recognize yourself. Like, I sometimes do a check and go, “Yeah, no, you just… Why did you do that?” 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: You know? “The, the first impulse that came out of your mouth was a door slammer, and you didn’t, you didn’t think about that.”

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: Okay. Well, that’s the four-week program, or at least some, some teasers, some glimpses into the four-week program. There’s so much more here that we haven’t talked about, because I know I’m hoping that people are gonna walk away and click through to the show notes, where they’re gonna find this four-week program, Four Weeks to Better Family Dinners, and be able to just look through it online, take what’s good, leave the rest.

But do give it a try, because you might find that there are some things here that, even if you’re having family dinner frequently, might bring your family dinners to life in a new way, and that’s, I think, always worth pursuing. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. And please let us know. We’d love feedback. We’re gonna do some surveys of families on our own, but if you wanna send a comment, please, please do that.

We’d love to hear from you. 

Bri DeRosa: Yes, absolutely. I hope that this makes back to school season fun, exciting, and maybe over time, a little bit easier. We will see you next time on the Family Dinner Project podcast. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Thanks so much, Bri. 

Bri DeRosa: Thanks, Annie.