My parents divorced when I was three-years-old. Mom really hadn’t ever worked a formal job. Dad was in the family small business. This being the 1970s, men were assumed, probably rightly, to be incompetent when it came to kids mom got custody of me and my brother without question. Mom got a low-end office job, and held those types of positions for the duration of her career. Though my grandmother supplemented mom’s income, we weren’t well off.
Cook out
While we ate breakfast at home and brought lunches made at home to school, mom seemed to consider the kitchen a no-go zone in the evening. So most of our dinners were eaten out. Mostly this meant fast food restaurants. Yay, burgers?
Dinner typically being the most expensive of the three traditional daily meals, the cost of eating out must have cost mom a fortune in the aggregate. She could have saved so much money. And we could have had way more healthy diners, and quality family time around the dining room table had we eaten dinners at home. Alas, finance was not mom’s strong suit.
Kitchen confidenceal
At age 10, my brother and I went to live with our dad and stepmother. There, we ate most meals in. Although what we ate often could not be described as cheap, it was not extravagant, and generally was healthy and tasty. We also had family time at dinner. Of course, a TV was always on and in view. But hey, “Wheel of Fortune” wasn’t just going to watch itself.
I often think of these experiences, which had an indelible effect on me. For one thing, although during college and law school and the remainder of my 20s I was no master chef, I didn’t fear the kitchen. And I knew enough to be able to eat most meals in. Going out for any meal was special and relatively rare. The Missus brought a similar mindset to our relationship. Not to brag, but together we make a preeetttty mediocre cooking team.
Our food costs were and have remained lowish. But never have we really sacrificed on quality meals. Ours is by no means a ramen, beans and rice-only household, tho each of those items have been a component of many an excellent meal. We eat healthy, diverse meals featuring flavors/recipes from the world over. Stir-fry one night, Italian the next, and Mexican after that. All heavy on vegetables and nonmeat protein. Recently we started making sushi (rolls) in-house, which generally satisfies my daughter’s family’s sushi tooth (Oh, it is too a thing! Look it up!).
We also eat dinner together as a family, and talk about school, upcoming and past events, politics/the news of the day, and money and careers, among many other subjects. I don’t know how much Thing One, The Elder and Thing Two, The Younger will resent me for all the money-saving/generating talk retain from these conversations, but it’s gotta be something. Right? And I may have deluded myself into believing that we’re a pretty close-knit family. So The Missus and I often are able to spot and troubleshoot issues during the course of the dinner conversation.
A few years ago, Thing One told me that one of her teachers polled the 20-or-so kids in the class to see how many ate dinner as a family. Including Thing One, two or three did so regularly. A handful did so occasionally. The vast majority almost never ate dinner together as a family.
I get that parents sometimes have unavoidable or “unavoidable” work and other obligations in the evening. Kids also may have after-school events (and if you have more than one kid, the permutations increase). But I still found the poll results sad. To me, family time isn’t just quality time but an important exercise. Done regularly instead of ad hoc or haphazardly, I think the sum of good is greater than the whole of its parts by virtue of being together and bonding daily. Then again, if you’re neurotic like me, maybe you’ll also be increasing the likelihood that the kids will be as neurotic as you.
I can only guess that a lot of these other families may not be as close-knit, and only spend quality time together on the weekends, if that. But it’s never too late to change!
If you don’t eat dinner together as a family, I’d suggest you make a greater effort to do so. You just might find that you benefit from it as much as we do. And you’ll save a buck or twenty.
