Much Depends on Dinner

Families don't sit down to eat together anymore. Something has been lost.

BY CAMERON STRACHER
Friday, July 29, 2005

(The above article was printed in the Wall Street Journal today, and is available online via the link above. Here is my response, which I posted on the author's website Dinner With Dad as well as below.)

Enjoyed your commentary in Opinion Journal online. (Seriously, has someone really linked the decline in families dining together with the rise in illegal file sharing?)

I am fortunate in that my wife stays home with our two boys (10 and 3) and I work 45 minutes from home. Work days are rarely longer than 10 hours, so almost every night I am home for dinner.

Most nights my wife cooks our meals - some good, some not so much - and I cook, too, though not as well as her. There is a hole-in-the-wall mexican restaurant five minutes from our house with good, cheap fajitas and live music "Wednesdays with Juan" which is so awful it's fantastic. $5 pizza Mondays and a weekend stop at our favorite deli round out the majority of our evening meals together. Key word - together.

The mother who told you "it's just not fun to eat with them," referring to dinner with her kids, is right. She should also be ashamed for being so shallow and self-centered. My 3 year old spends most of the time at our dinner table crawling in and out of his chair and complaining that his food has "germs". My 10 year old, though better mannered, is a piddler, meaning his mother and I will be done with our meals just as he is getting going. Dinner with the boys is not (usually) fun, but it is too important to quit for the sake of something more amusing or satisfying.

I'm convinced dinner together is a comforting landmark in the terrain of our boys' busy, sometimes chaotic, lives. If sacrifices are required to provide them that sense of safety, or to impress upon them their place in a family, then so be it.

In a few years, peaceful dinners for my wife and me will common, and no doubt filled with conversations about when the boys will be home next, preferably with our grandchildren...

Best wishes.