Mealtimes Matter
Elevate Your Family Mealtimes through Curious Conversation Starters and Connections to your Faith
In my book, Child in Bloom: Practical Advice for Parenting Through the Growing Years, there is an excerpt titled Mealtimes Matter. It’s a short but mighty little excerpt, and honestly, one of the most important messages for parents to read. Whether it’s a regular lunch or dinner around the table or a midnight pizza run, communing together as a family at some point each day can seriously change your family’s outcomes. Mealtimes don’t have to be fancy or formal, but they DO have to be regular. They can be more beneficial if you ensure that you omit screen time and include mini connective conversations, where you pause and be present, even if it's for just a few minutes.
If you feel like your family’s mealtimes have been a little wobbly lately, it might be time to start over, introduce some new environmental structures that provide a framework for mealtime expectations, and add supports that could make mealtimes more meaningful. Think of the following environmental structures as the legs that support your mealtimes, enabling you to have more enriching mealtime experiences.
1. Curious Conversation Starters that can Lean into Faith:
If you feel like your kid-conversations are stifled by your child’s lack of interest in talking to you, maybe you could think of some curious questions that could spur an insightful discussion. Here are some regular questions that I have found myself asking kids as a teacher or parent to help me get to know them better and hear how things are going. They are open-ended and serve to keep the conversation flowing. I have rewritten them based on the various ages of the children at your table. Choose one here and there to plug into your connection time at dinner time or anytime you get a chance to dig a little deeper with your kids.
Early Childhood (Ages 4–8)
Who is someone you really like and want to be like when you grow up?
What things should we stay away from to help us be safe and happy?
Sometimes things are hard. What can we do to feel better or get through it?
What is one thing you learned today from something you did or saw?
How can we be really good at being kind and loving so our family and friends stay close to us?
Elementary (Ages 9–12)
When you think about your future, is there someone you look up to or want to be like?
What kinds of things do you think we should avoid in life to make good choices? Why?
Life isn’t always easy. What helps you deal with hard things or solve problems?
What’s something you discovered or understood better today from what happened?
What can we do to build strong friendships and family relationships that last a long time?
Adolescence (Ages 13–18)
Is there a person—real or fictional—whose values or path in life you admire and want to follow?
What habits, people, or choices do you think are unhealthy or unhelpful for a good life? Why?
When life gets tough, what are some ways you’ve learned to cope or move forward?
What’s something meaningful you learned today—about yourself, others, or the world?
What actions or values help create deep, lasting bonds in relationships with family and friends?
To see how parents implement these ideas, become a paid subscriber and read the Parent Response: Meal Times Matter.
Many of these questions can be used to begin drawing your child into conversations about faith, as faith can be something that helps your child fill in the gaps of their life when they feel out of control or in a difficult situation at school or at home. Curious Conversation Starters can also serve as an excellent starting point for parents when establishing their family's boundaries, routines, and priorities. If you leave the conversation open enough, you might even begin to hear your child establishing their own boundaries based on what they have seen or experienced in their life. Then, you can reinforce their boundary shaping by recognizing what a big deal it is for them to show grown-up thinking around the things that pop up in their life. Curious Conversation Starters, especially those that tie back to faith connections, can be a rock to stand on or provide a shoulder to cry on when parents or their kids are feeling alone, confused, or overwhelmed.
2. Start your mealtime by adding a common prayer,
Stand up, gather around your kitchen island, or pause while you sit at your table and hold hands while reciting your family’s favorite blessing before meals. You can add in a moment of special intentions for happenings from your kids’ week, friends, and family in need of extra prayers or gratitude for something that happened that day. These patterns of faith connections and curious questions can be a place for kids to open up about what is on their minds. Parents can model this by showing how they lean on a higher power when they are overwhelmed by their day. Here is the prayer that our family has said over the last 20+ years, whether it’s at breakfast, lunch, dinner, or midnight pizza time!
Our Family Prayer Before Meals:
Bless us, O Lord! and these Thy gifts for which we are about to receive, from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
I also recommend to parents, especially if they have let faith experiences go by the wayside, that preparing for faith connections and curious conversations for your dinner times could allow you a space to share your own life learnings and faith experiences. Pick up a new book or journal and use it to help guide the questions you might want to ask your kids. Take time during your child’s growing years to add to your own knowledge of your faith by reading and learning about it, and then begin weaving it into the fabric of your family life, especially when you have a captive audience at the dinner table.
3. Playtime:
Coming together to be silly, joyful, and playful gives us a chance to break down the walls that too many boundaries can create and allows us a chance to think or act like a child. Relax into your dinner time by adding a little fun. By playing with our children (I mean really playing, not just going to their sporting events), we get a moment to see things from their perspective. You will see that many skills can be taught to them through these tiniest moments of fun. I’d like you to weave playfulness across your parenting, and mealtime is a great place to start.
Playtime offers us a chance to foster sportsmanship (how to win and lose with grace). It also gives us an opportunity to help our children learn how to wait, take turns, problem solve, and plan. Self-esteem and taking risks are integral to playtime, and creative juices always flow when we step into the realm of play. So get silly and joyful with your kids: dress up for dinner (everyone wears a silly hat one night, change it up, and laugh a little while you spend quality time together over dinner). You’ll see your family bloom when you incorporate well-planned or even spontaneous positive playtime experiences.
4. Book and Learning Time:
Coming together to share stories and information gives us teachable moments and conversations that help children understand their world. I don’t mean doing flashcards at the pool in the middle of the summer (all work and no play makes Johnny and Mommy very dull). I recently saw this while a family was at a pool. They were in the middle of eating their pool picnic meal, but as dad passed the watermelon, mom was drilling the kids with their flashcards… This seemed a bit much. Relax and enjoy the outside time without being a drill sergeant, if possible. I do mean, while you are at dinner, bring up the characters from the story you’ve been reading aloud as a family. Use the characters as models or examples of how to navigate their world. Let their worries from the day release as they share how the story reminds them of their own experiences, and maybe you can make food that reflects the context and culture of the story to help your kids see a fresh perspective when they read or learn about people who are different from them. Sharing books provides a golden opportunity for parents to connect with their kids on many levels. In your busy day, don’t let sharing a good book or a teachable moment at the dinner table go to waste.
5. Rest or Down Time:
Coming together to sit and do nothing, or taking time apart to veg out without a plan, can be a rare occasion in this hustle and bustle world of GO…GO…GO… It’s so easy to flip the calendar and find it suddenly filled from Sunday to Saturday with extra activities and scheduled places to be. In fact, it seems we do these calendar catastrophes to ourselves so we don’t have to hear the dreaded, “I’m bored!!” We think, “I have to fill up their days with activities so they don’t have a minute to get themselves in trouble.” However, being bored can enrich your child’s imagination, help them maintain a healthy state of mind, and provide time for them to express creative ideas and develop problem-solving strategies. Plug downtime into your schedule.
But if you find that you've had a busy night and mealtime has been put on the back burner because you only had time for a quick power bar on the way to events, weave in a fun breakfast or late-night snack, and come together at a table to seal it up. If you give these add-in connections a specific name, such as Last Minute Lunches, Midnight Mayhem, or We Break for Breakfast, they will become more likely to replicate.
Meals are important, but rest and downtime are too. Help your child get healthy amounts of sleep, and don’t forget to include enough rest and downtime in your own schedule so you can consistently be at your best.
To see how parents implement these ideas, read the Parent Response: Meal Times Matter.
For more small parenting shifts that create big changes in kids, order my book: Child in Bloom: Practical Advice for Parenting Through the Growing Years
Who wrote this?
I am Dr. Renee Mattson, a licensed intervention specialist with 30+ years of experience presenting and coaching in schools, homes, & university settings. All my knowledge and wisdom is in my book: Child in Bloom: Practical Advice for Parenting Through the Growing Years. I know 1st hand that small shifts in adult behavior can lead to big, lasting changes in kids, which is what this newsletter is about—sharing small parenting shifts that create big changes in kids. Read more.
I love "the wisdom of mealtime"!