What's For Dinner?

As I’ve been reflecting on how cool being a dad is on this Father’s Day, I thought I’d share this post from the Eide Neurolearning Blog about the benefits of family dinner:

According to a Harvard study, family dinners were more important than play, storytime, or other family events for building vocabulary. And "families that engaged in extended discourse at the dinner table, like story telling and explanations, rather than one-phrase comments, like 'eat your vegetables,' had children with better language skills, said Dr. Catherine Snow, a professor of education at Harvard and the researcher of the study. Parents should be encouraged to use adult-level vocabulary and encourage back-and-forth conversation with their kids. It also helps social skills. Today, 65% of families with kids under the age of 6 have dinner together 5 or so nights per week, but that drops to 50% if a family has kids age 12 to 17.

When I was growing up, we almost always had dinner as a family.  My wife and I are lucky enough to share dinner together with my daughter nearly every night as well.  I know my father better because of it.  I hope my daughter will be able to say the same about me once she’s grown.