Growing up, my family had very structured eating habits.
Breakfast was eaten together. After we finished, we’d read the Bible and a little devotional, pray together (we had a list of different people and situations to pray for on a rotating basis each day of the week), and then sing—usually a Sunday School song with actions.
It was quite the morning routine!
If we were home mid-day, lunch was what my family called the “main meal.” Translation: meat, potatoes, and vegetables. (Basically without fail.).
Supper—or what lots of you would call dinner—was also eaten together and was usually “light”: sandwiches, soup, or things of that ilk.
It was rare for us not to be sitting around the table as a family at every single mealtime. And if everyone was home, we were always at the table together (in other words, the only way we weren’t eating together was if someone was away).
When our kids were little, I think we defaulted to eating together most of the time too. But lately, I’ve been noticing a very real shift.
Our family meals are much less predictable.
We usually eat lunch together every Sunday after church, and we still eat most suppers together. Beyond that, it’s a bit of a toss-up.
We do host a lot of kids, and in those cases, we tend to be managing the food rather than actively sitting down and eating with everyone.
Sometimes one of our kids is away. Sometimes a subset of the family is rushing out the door for an extracurricular activity. Sometimes we just aren’t hungry at the same time!
I’m not usually ready to eat breakfast first thing in the morning, so I tend to drink coffee at the table while Indy eats. During the summer, Belle usually gets up and eats breakfast hours later.
Whenever John’s free, he usually shows up at the table with a cup of coffee. Other mornings, he’s already downstairs in the office on a work call. (His days start at wildly different times depending on his meeting schedule, which varies from day to day and week to week.)
He’s also away a significant portion of the time, which automatically changes the family dynamic around meals.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the shift. It’s just… different, and as the kids get older and their schedules fluctuate, I notice more and more how much our habits have departed from those of my family growing up.
There are still plenty of meals eaten together, but we’re no longer in the stage of parenting where everyone is home, awake, hungry, and available at the same time. Getting four people around the table seems to require a surprising amount of coordination!!
Your turn:
- How did your family of origin handle mealtimes?
- How does your household handle meals now?
- And for those of you with older children (or an empty nest) how has that changed your mealtime habits?
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Welcome to the teen years- when dinner falls to extracurriculars and jobs.
Growing up, mostly breakfast about the same time but not sit down. Lunch the same if we were home. Dinner – sit down together, though sometimes my dad would be home later and have a plate waiting.
Now, it’s a mess. In our early married years, sit down together dinners. But once we renovated our kitchen and no longer had a big table in it, over time dinner became more fractured. It seems like a big effort to eat in the dining room. We tend to eat in the kitchen around a small table, with some people standing or in shifts. We’re failing dinner.
Breakfast and lunch eaten about same time, but no big sit down together.
We don’t have any place to eat in our kitchen which I sometimes bemoan… but now I’m realizing that likely HELPS us eat together more. But we definitely do sometimes eat in shifts, even in such a small family.
we are at a similar stage than you. the only sure meal time together are lunches on weekend. breakfast is staggered by time of getting up. lunch is at school or at work or home, and dinner I eat alone most of the time as girls don’t get home until 6 or 7pm. I don’t find it a problem, it’s just a shift. I also make weekend lunches extra special so we really get to meal together.
I completely agree that it can be a matter of quality over quantity. A few special weekend meals can accomplish the same family bonding as eating together every single day.
Same! Growing up, our mealtimes were very structured too. Breakfast was at 7am, and we ate together while reading the “Daily Text”, a Bible verse accompanied by a thought for the day. Lunch was just us kids and Mum, and at dinner we were all together again for bread and cheese. We also prayed before every meal.
Now that it’s just the two of us, things are much more flexible, but we still make a point of having at least one meal together each day, and we still pray before it. I think it’s such a lovely habit, and a simple way to pause and practise gratitude
I love that you and Kai eat at least one meal together. There is something special about sharing that time together!
Growing up, we’d always have dinner/ supper together, but breakfasts were sort of come-as-you-are. I don’t ever remember eating lunch with my mom, but my brother was probably around if we were both at home. I would bring friends home for lunch all the time during my elementary years, when we weren’t eating at the school.
Now, it’s basically the same. We have dinner together every night. When the boys were in karate, there were a couple of nights a week that were on the fly, and when Jake was in wrestling and Mark had a shift job, same. But I would say that when both boys were home we had dinner together at least 4 nights a week. Now it’s just the three of us, but Mark will come home for dinner a couple nights a week. It’s always been important to me to have that dinner together. We are at the point where Jake is going to leave us, so it will be just me and Rob I guess! Breakfasts – well, we all have different schedules so that’s all over the place. Lunch, who knows what anyone is doing, it’s just Rob and I at home for lunches so we kind of eat whenever and never together.
Coming home to eat during the school day was SUCH an era. Very common for a long time and now pretty much nonexistent!
I love that you still have those wonderful family dinners together; I imagine it is not a hard sell with such a great cook in the house! And conversations over meals can be priceless. You must have all the feelings about Jake leaving. Pride and joy and delight… and sadness.
Growing up we ate breakfast and dinner as a family, and lunch was on our own since everyone was in a different place. As an adult, mornings were scattered but there was almost always a “bus” meetup for Hubs to chase the boys out the door to their bus and we would go out with them with the dog. We were separated for lunch, and then we were always together for dinner. Dinner was often very rushed on weeknights because of nighttime activities, but we had more quality time on weekends. As the kids got older they were away at dinner time more often, but there was always a shared meal for the folks who were at home.
I’m with you in that I usually don’t want food right away in the mornings, so unless it’s a special occasion or I’m with someone on my exact hunger schedule, breakfast is probably going to be a solo meal.
I like eating on my own time in the morning (and, most of the time, at lunch, too). But I do generally try to eat at the same time as the kids at lunch if they’re home just to streamline cleanup.
Dinner/supper is definitely the main meal we aim to eat together, but I would say the most consistent meal is Sunday lunch. We just always go to church together and then come home and eat, but the evenings are so much more fractured than they used to be now that the kids are getting more and more independent.
Oh, and whenever we have company. That is a big point of connection over meals. So every single evening my brother was here, for example, we ate dinner together and then lingered at the table talking for hours.
Growing up, we always ate dinner together. Breakfast was kind of haphazard- my sister and I would usually be at the table eating cereal, but I don’t remember my parents- especially my mom- sitting down with us. It seems like she was always there in the background though. Now I’m wondering what exactly she was doing, if she wasn’t eating with us? I’ll have to ask my sister. I think it was pretty rare that our family ever all sat down and ate lunch together.
Soooo… nowadays. Well I’m going to honest. Once Paul left for college, our family dynamics kind of fell apart. Nowadays it’s especially scattered, because we don’t even eat the same thing most of the time. Lately my husband and I have been getting our dinners ready, more or less at the same time, and eating while we watch a baseball game. My daughter is kind of wandering in and out- sometimes she’s at the gym, out with friends, sometimes she’s home and just fends for herself or I’ll heat something up for her. It is what it is! I guess you could say it’s working for us right now.
i have to laugh- can you imagine if you were trying to get your entire family now to sit down and eat breakfast together, read the bible, pray and sing every morning??? Ah, different times.
When my parents come to visit I have to remind them it’s a fend-for-yourself affair in the mornings. They are so used to waiting and eating once everyone’s ready and it’s just not feasible. Plus, I PREFER to not be eating and I can just sit and talk with whatever kid is around when I’m at the table with my coffee.
I cannot imagine trying to coordinate things in the way my parents did. It really was a different era on so many levels. When the kids were young, I would say mealtimes were much more structured because of things like naps and scheduling. For the most part, I don’t really miss it. I feel like we still connect over meals enough for it to be a central part of our family identity, while also relaxing things A LOT more than my family of origin. Neither is right/wrong, but it feels good to arrive at a place that feels more natural for our stage of life/priorities.
Dinner is the consistent sit-down meal – as a child, a parent and an empty-nester. Breakfast and lunch everyone was on a different schedule and ate whenever they got up. There were exceptions to everyone sitting down at dinner – activities, jobs etc. but for the most part that’s the meal where we connected all together. Since we’ve retired, my husband has been cooking a few nights a week, we do the dishes together, then over the summer we’ve been going out for a walk, coming back to sit on the deck until it gets dark. I’m really enjoying this “ritual” together and we both want to find a way to keep it happening through the dark, rainy days. I’m thinking a walk before dinner and enjoying time in front of the fireplace after dinner. We both find it very calming at the end of the day.
I just love your evening ritual, Jacquie. (And post-meal exercise has been long-proven to be beneficial healthwise, mentally and physically.)
And following it up with time in front of the fire on cooler fall/winter days sounds like perfection!
I love hearing about the way families handle meals! Your mealtimes growing up sound like such a wonderful blend of family time and faith practice.
When I was growing up, I remember *lots* of dinners as a family, but they certainly weren’t every night. My brother and I had evening extracurriculars, so there was fast food a couple of times a week eating in one of our parents’ offices. At some point, we started having a tradition of pizza every Friday, which we would eat as a family but in front of the TV. I feel like I’m supposed to feel some sort of way about that, but I try not to; I LOVE TV and it still felt like a time of family togetherness and bonding. My dad was big on family breakfasts — bacon and homemade pancakes or waffles — but there’s no way that could have been daily or even weekly. I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t remember the frequency but I do remember the togetherness.
As an adult, I have a lot of guilt about meal times that I am trying to work through. (Rereading that last line in the paragraph I wrote above should help more than it does.) Meals as a family just don’t work. My kid is too picky to eat the same foods that my husband and I eat. My husband typically gets home too late for the three of us to eat together. We try to have a dinner as a family as often as possible, but sometimes THAT is around the TV. There is so much research on and media about the benefits of eating dinner together; I *know* it’s a wonderful way to build a family bond and it has all sorts of protective qualities for kids. And yet more often than not, it just doesn’t work for us. And/or we don’t prioritize it.
Holidays and vacations are really the only times when we are guaranteed to eat together at the table. We often do family breakfasts AND dinners, then. When we visit my parents, my dad still makes us big bacon-and-pancakes breakfasts, too!
I LOVE eating in front of the TV. It happened so rarely for me as a kid and it was an epic treat, and to this day I love it. Almost without fail John and I eat in front of the TV 2 nights per week (at home date nights; the kids eat together and watch something on a laptop). I ADORE this. I understand why it’s important to connect directly with people but I feel like our family does that in a lot of different ways (we had a 4-hour road trip today and literally talked about such a broad range of topics, including existential ones every second of the trip…).
What I’m saying is, there is no one-size-fits-all and I definitely think eating in front of the TV can be a really bonding experience, at least it has been for our family.
Growing up, my family always ate dinner together. At 6 PM sharp! Years later I tried to continue that with my own family and it usually worked. Then came football and wrestling seasons, lol 🙂
Haha! My parents are definitely of the “sharp” era. It was 5:30 for me growing up.
We definitely do not have a set time for any meal and it can vary quite dramatically, actually. Especially depending on kid extracurriculars.
Growing up we mostly had dinner together. Breakfast was a little less structured because my dad worked in the early morning. Usually it was cereal or toast or boiled eggs, so we were able to get it ourselves. Gosh now that I’m writing this, I don’t know what my mother ate for breakfast. She owned a bakery so she was often making bread in the morning.
Wow – thinking of food habits and rituals, I clearly see that I didn’t give my mom enough credit for feeding all of us.
We try really hard to have dinner as a family. I work a lot of evenings, though, so it doesn’t always happen. Breakfast and lunch tend to be every person for themselves, though. I have to be honest, sometimes on weekends, I forget to feed the kids. Not really, but almost. It’ll be 1:30pm and I’ll realize, “Oh wait, no one has had lunch yet….”
Wait, how did I not know/remember your mom owned a bakery?
It takes… a lot to feed people every day. I didn’t appreciate it when my own mother was doing it and my own kids don’t fully appreciate it now. But they will some day when it becomes their responsibility as adults.
You seem very intentional about great meals and it also has to happen around life! You have unusual working hours and connect with your kids in so many ways, including enjoying interesting meals together.
I also forget about lunch sometimes!
Our household is largely based on how my family of origin functioned. We never eat breakfast together and I would say generally we aren’t breakfast people. I usually just have coffee, #3 has tea. My youngest son eats breakfast most days which he prepares himself. Everyone is out the door at different times and when I see patients (Tues/Thurs) I am out the door before anyone else is up. Lunch is a free for all on weekends.
But dinner we eat together 5-6 nights a week seated at the table. And there is almost always a green salad first then the main course — even if the main course is past with sauce from a jar. The nights we don’t eat together are typically because my daughter is at youth group (they eat together) or I am going to choir practice (starts before my kids get home from activities.
We also don’t have a space to eat in our kitchen. Every meal is eating sitting at the dining room table…we just aren’t all there at the same time.
Love your dinner routine, right down to the standard salad!
Wow! You just said al.oat exactly what my family did at breakfast! Minus the song and we just read straight from the Bible, no devotionals. Then each of us kids would say something we heard in the text…I think to make sure we were listening? We all ate together all meals, even all sat in the same seats!
Now as an adult with a 17 and 18 year old, they’re in charge of their own breakfasts. I put lunches out (usually leftovers or sandwich maakings) and every gets their food when ready.Whoever is home at lunch sually ends up eating together, but not always.
Suppers is the big meal I cook and I really strive to have us all eat together, bit with different evening activities it doesn’t always happen.I have such fond memories of eating together as a family from my growing up years and it’s important to me.
Sorry for all the bad typing…I’m doing it on my phone instead of my laptop
We were the only family I knew that sang at the end of each breakfast time! Often a song with actions when we were little so we got to move our bodies and be silly.
Your current setup sounds very similar to what we have by way of structure in our household! I feel like eating one meal together a day is nice, and even though I don’t typically eat with my kids in the morning, someone is usually at the table drinking coffee when at least one (or both) kids are eating breakfast. So we fit in lots of conversation time.
Growing up, we did breakfast on our own, lunch was usually around the same time (often fixing our own things like soup or sandwiches) but dinner was always together. Because togetherness was more important than time, we would often wait for someone to get home or eat early before someone left (within reason of course). My husband grew up eating most meals whenever, on the couch in front of the TV (when we had kids, I got my in-laws lap trays so my toddlers could more easily eat in front of their tv without making a huge mess). When we got married, one of my priorities was eating dinner together! Even if it is leftovers or someone has soccer practice until 7, we do! The kids and I always sit at the table, together, if they are home. My husband has regressed to his childhood the last couple years and will usually eat the same time as us but he usually sits in the living room scrolling on his phone with the TV on. This makes me sad to think what our future will look like when the kids are gone.
We remodeled our kitchen a couple years into living in our house (it’s not a large house but had both a breakfast area and a dining room, mere steps from each other. Totally unnecessary!) We incorporated the breakfast area into the kitchen and created a lovely 6ft island with chairs along the far side. I always envisioned my kids sitting there for breakfasts and lunches or to work on homework etc but they always sit at the table! I guess I did too good a job of enforcing “eat at the table!”, ha!
Your breakfast area sounds lovely! I have always wanted an island, but our dining room table is so close to the kitchen that it almost functions like one? We do all sorts of things there, from work and homework to eating.
I can understand why it makes you sad that your husband tends to eat separately, especially when eating dinner together was something you intentionally prioritized when you had kids. Family-of-origin habits really do run deep, but I know I’d find it hard too if everyone else was gathered around the table and my spouse was nearby but not really part of it.
I wonder if there might be some middle ground? Maybe one or two dinners a week that are specifically designated as “everyone at the table” nights? Not because you can necessarily change his everyday preference, but because it would preserve some of that togetherness that clearly matters, especially as you think ahead to when the kids are grown. Just a thought. And great work at making this such a priority with your kiddos. I’m sure they will recognize and appreciate all the effort this takes, especially as they get older <3
Breakfast was pretty much fend for yourself, apart from when we were very little – my parents would put the cereal boxes on the table and my sister and I took it from there lol! Lunch and dinner were more structured and we usually always ate that together at the table, apart from the years where my mother took a part-time job and sometimes worked at the weekend, or if my dad was away on a work trip. When we got older we were occasionally allowed to eat in front on the television if there was a specific programme we wanted to see, and sometimes my sister would eat dinner without us if she was going out.
We didn’t say grace or have any kind of religious or structured conversation – we would talk, but it would be a general conversation about our day – and I remember feeling very out of place when I went to someone’s house for dinner and they said grace! The same with Brownie camp lol!
These days I live alone so dinner is whatever I feel like cooking and I usually watch a show. At lunchtime I usually listen to a podcast (unless I’m at work, and then I like to eat with a friend).
I love to read while I eat; it doesn’t happen very often since I tend to be eating with someone or (dare I admit this) eating while working at lunchtime, but it’s such a treat. I also love to eat while watching something, too!
Growing up, my mum was very much in survival mode, so dinner was whatever she had the energy to make at the time. I recall a few times eating dinner around the table, but I think the norm was either at the bench or in front of the telly. There were no rules, and I think that compounded my issues with never developing a love relationship with food. I was also notorious for reading a book at the table while eating (so is my sister).
As a family now, my husband would love for us to all eat around the table together. Breakfast is eat as you go – he starts work early, I eat about half an hour after I get up, my son it randomly depends. And even though we both work from home, hubs and I rarely have lunch together. Dinner is the most structured, but he likes to eat dinner early, so normally it’s him and our son at the table, and mine at my desk if I’m still working. I’ve tried asking him to wait half an hour or so until I’m done (I finish at 5.30, so it’s not an obnoxious amount of time), but he prefers to eat early so… *shrug. We make it work.
Growing up, we always had dinner together. (And moving to a Midwest small town at age 6, the meals were breakfast, dinner, and supper. Lunch being “dinner” was an adjustment I never really made!) Now, we eat breakfast and lunch together-ish (one parent is usually out, and lunch only on the weekends.) My kids always read a book so it is quiet. Dinner together almost every night; books go away and we share a rose/thorn/bud from our day and occasionally something we’re grateful for. I expect this will change when we hit the teen years but for now it is really wonderful.
My family of origin had a 17-year span from youngest to oldest so must of my memories are from before my sister joined the family as the caboose. Whoever was home at 6pm on weeknights sat down and ate together; if you were at an extracurricular/working, my mom made up a plate for that person and they ate when they got home. We did eat a big meal together on Sundays after church – that was pretty non-negotiable, but there also weren’t Sunday activities. We were all limited to one sport at a time and there was no such thing as traveling/club sports in my tiny hometown so people’s absence was fairly seasonal/driven by sports schedules. I think my mom held our meal plans with a loose grasp and understood we couldn’t all sit down together.
These days, the kids eat around 5:15 on week days and the adults almost always eat after they are done. But we have some selective eaters, one in particular, and I can’t eat the common denominator kind of meal that everyone would eat! Similarly, on the weekends the kids eat their lunch and dinner and the adults eat after. But some of that is the reality of our schedules. Like on week nights, I cannot get food on the table for all 4 of us by 5:15-5:30 since we get home around 5pm. So it makes sense that we are not all eating the same thing at the same time. But I’m ok with this. Meal time is not this more sacred tradition that it was for my parents but it’s just the reality of having selective eaters tbh…
It is hard to get dinner on the table and everyone ready at the same time and interested in eating the same thing. I think eating in shifts makes a lot of sense!!
Our Sunday lunch is the one time I would say we are together eating basically every single week (unless one of the kids has gone to visit a friend or something). It’s not a formal meal (we usually have something simple like wraps), but it is nice to have a specific time we’re all eating a meal together week after week.
We used to always eat breakfast and dinner – sitting at the table! – together as a family growing up, and as often as possible for lunch as well (both my parents were teachers, so we were often able to all be home together for lunch).
I think it was a really good routine and I am glad you grew up like this as well. I think eating a meal together is such an important part of family life.
Things have definitely changed when I moved away. Jon usually doesn’t eat breakfast with me (I get up earlier and have often left the house by the time he gets up) and obviously, I have to eat lunch at work, but we always make a point to have dinner together (unless there are unforeseen circumstances).
I think it’s normal that things shift as kids grow up and eating habits change, but I think it’s still wonderful that you sit and eat as a family whenever possible… even if you just have your coffee in the morning and sit with Indy while he eats.
I think it has taken me a while to realize we do things differently than my family of origin, but with the same goal. So when I sit down with coffee while the kids eat breakfast, we still talk and bond.
It definitely is so much less structured than my household growing up but… that’s okay! And my kids certainly know and appreciate family meal times, so I feel like they have that foundation for moving through life.
There was no regularity to mealtimes as a child; our day-to-day life was always unpredictable and unstructured. I honestly don’t recall any meals with my Mom as a kid. I’m sure they happened, but I just don’t remember.
I love the idea of Lunch being the larger meal–what a concept.
Like you, we always had meals together when my girls were young; once they were both in different activities, we generally ate two by two, because of dance and softball. (Linds and I, Coach and Lolo)
I agree, though; shifting to a different plan isn’t necessarily a bad idea, especially when you’re feeding a crowd, as you often do.
We almost never eat a “big” meal at lunch at home, but still when I visit my parents, that’s how it’s done!
Activities really make it almost impossible to eat on a predictable structure. Indy has had practices at 4 pm, 5 pm, and 6 pm (not on the same day)… so there is constant pivoting.