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By Kimella Walker  Dinner time is a social time, and ideal time for bonding as a family. It can be a teaching time, discussing issues that have come up during the day at home, or the office or at school. But it is also a tired time where energy is at a low ebb and tempers are short. Consequently dinner can be the opposite of what you want it to be. Dinner time can be a difficult and stressful time because of the many things happening there. Everyone is hungry and wants to eat. Parents are tired after a long day at work or at home with the kids. Mom wants to talk to her husband because he is another grownup to talk to. Dad doesn't want to talk, he just wants to relax and eat his food. He might have some essential information he needs to put across to the family or his wife and since they are all present he figures it is a good time to do it. The kids are face to face with their parents for perhaps the first time since breakfast. It is close quarters and the time is ripe for some attention-getting behavior. (Remember kids like attention even if it is negative attention). With Mom and Dad right there some children start to perform with silly speech, silly antics or teasing brothers and sisters. Talk time can disappear in a series of reprimands, time-outs for children, or having a cloud of sullen silence descend over the table. Our family had a real difficult time for a while because the dinner time became so unpleasant with children's antics and parental anger mixing together at every meal. After pondering the problem for a while I came up with a plan that my husband and I decided to try. It involved making a talk wheel with each person's name on it and an arrow that was fastened to wheel. The person whose name we pointed the arrow to, could talk for 5 minutes. If they acted silly or talked nonsense their turn was over. If someone else interrupted, that person's turn to talk was skipped. It was hard at first for the children not to interrupt each other. It was also hard for them to think of things to say for five minutes. It was hard for them to listen to the others. But they all wanted their turn to talk and for everyone else to listen to them. Sometimes the subject that a child wanted to talk about was not very interesting to anyone else. This required a little tact as a parent did a little conversational steering. There are seven children in our family and we found dinner was over before everyone had their turn. This was a disappointment to them, but we started where we left off the next day and they learned that their turn would come up. This experience was valuable as we tried it because it focused children's attention on conversational etiquette. It focused on skills such as listening to others talking, not interrupting others, and helped learn how to obtain parental attention in a positive way. Children do grow older, meals become less chaotic and habits of eating together as a family that are formed as little children continue with them as they mature. Habits of having dinner together formed as small children will carry over when they as older children make an effort to be home for dinner and to linger there. Everyone is tired and hungry but they want to be there with the family at the table instead of with friends or hanging out somewhere else. It is worth perservering through the challenging times at the dinner table with small children. Eventually there is a harvest of many enjoyable dinner conversations with teens and beyond. |
