Family challenge: One meal a day together

The commitment should produce healthy, happy and confident children.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

DALLAS — Dawn McMullan juggles the family schedule around league sports for her 9-year-old, rock-climbing for her 12-year-old, her husband’s bank job, her work as a freelance writer, and church, school, social and volunteer activities.

When Noah’s rock-climbing coach suggested extending practices to 7:30 p.m., she reached her breaking point. She responded with a family challenge: Commit to eating at least one meal together every day over the next year.

McMullan, who lives in East Dallas, writes about her family’s commitment on a Web blog — www.bringingdinnerback.com — and hopes to inspire others to come back to the table.

Similar mission

At Mount Hebron Missionary Baptist Church in Garland, Texas, the Rev. Leonard O. Leach is on a similar mission. He wants families to eat together more frequently — and he stresses that the electronics be turned off. He thinks it will be tough, but says it’s imperative for parents who want to raise healthy, happy, confident children.

Studies by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse have consistently found that teens who have frequent family dinners (five to seven per week) are less likely to smoke, do drugs and drink, and are more likely to have better grades, go to religious services and have good relationships with their parents.

Eliminating the dinner distractions makes a difference, according to the center’s survey.

The survey found that teens who have fewer than three family dinners a week are twice as likely to use tobacco or marijuana, and more than 11‚Ñ2 times likelier to use alcohol. The results are worse among teens who have infrequent family dinners and when people at the table use cell phones, BlackBerries, laptops or Game Boys. Those teens are three times likelier to smoke pot and tobacco, and 21‚Ñ2 times likelier to use alcohol.

That’s just what Leach has been preaching to the 800 families in his congregation. At a recent family life conference, he called on participants to have dinner together at least three times a week, without distractions. Fifty families accepted the challenge.

Putting aside the distractions is key, said LaDawn Fletcher, a mother of three girls, ages 2, 4 and 6, who lives in Heath, near Lake Ray Hubbard. A member of Mount Hebron, she said her family was already eating together at least three times a week. Her husband, Cedric, commutes to their restaurant in Tyler, so they have breakfast together more than they have dinner.

“Our rule is if we’re all here and dinner is ready, we all sit down to eat together. I think the only conscious decision we made was no TV,” Fletcher said.

She points out that anything that interferes with direct discussions with your children is a distraction — scheduling too many kids’ activities, playing DVDs in the car or even cell phones.

“I got an iPhone in June. Oh, it is so addictive,” Fletcher said. “My 6-year-old walked up to me and said, ‘I don’t like that phone. I like your old one better.’ I asked her, ‘Why would you say that?’ ‘Because you’re always on that phone.’”

Leach said he witnessed the power of bonding over meals when he taught music in the late 1970s at Booker T. Washington School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

“You could tell the students that were really bonding [in the lunchroom]. They were the students who said, ‘Hey, this is my posse, this is my group, these are the ones I’m running with.’ And a significant part of that was that they were eating together.”

When students were in a production, they were at school all day for classes and rehearsals. “Their time at school is in someone else’s care,” Leach said. “And we wonder why our children seem to listen to their voices rather than the voices of their parents.”

He said parents need to use mealtime to talk to children about school and friends, to explain and reinterpret events, and to share family history and values.

Dinner together was a challenge when he was growing up in Tulsa and as an adult raising two daughters with his wife, Sharon.

“As a boy, our family meal was at dinnertime on Sunday and every once in a while we would have a meal during the week,” he said. “On Sunday, we would learn so much around the table. My mother and her friends and my aunts and uncles gave us an understanding about who we were, our family, our church, our community. It was a tremendous part in our being confident and having a sense of protection.”

But his mother raised four kids on her own and was very involved in the church, which interfered with family dinner time during the week. “The church can be just as much a culprit,” Leach acknowledged.

He and his wife faced similar challenges with dual work schedules and even apathy.

“I feel a real urgency about convincing families that this little thing that we have ignored is like a treasure in a field,” he said. “If we would take care of God’s first corporate entity, the family, we could really make a difference in what’s going on in our community.”

Sharing the experience

Dinner together every day for McMullan’s family started on Nov. 1, with McMullan blogging about the experience. Her blog combines several of her passions: family, food, writing and the desire to help the needy in Africa.

McMullan, who is on the board of Refugee Services of Texas, visited Rwanda over a year ago and felt changed by the experience but didn’t know what to do about it. At the same time, her freelance work started to dry up because of the bad economy. “I was lost for the first time in my life,” she said.

A creativity coach suggested she start a blog, but what would she write about? “An endless blog about our life didn’t sound all that interesting,” she said.

Then two things happened this fall. She saw the movie “Julie & Julia,” in which a woman blogs about her quest to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

And, Noah’s coach suggested a later practice time, sparking McMullan’s focus on mealtime. That’s when her dinner/Africa/soul mission came together.

The family dinner pledge is for 53 weeks — 53 because that’s the number of countries in Africa, and McMullan highlights a country a week on her blog. She also plans to incorporate some African foods into special meals.

McMullan doesn’t have a target audience, but she hopes to inspire others.

Easier said than done

McMullan’s husband, Clyde Thompson, thought the challenge would be easy. “I didn’t realize that we didn’t eat together every night,” he said. But on a few occasions, they’ve had to get up early for breakfast. One night, they ate at 9:30. They haven’t missed a day. There are new rules; Noah isn’t allowed to text at the table. And there are old rituals; younger brother Sawyer climbs onto his dad’s lap at the end of the meal, while the conversation continues.