Cooking up connections
PARENTS are put off by the idea of family meals because of the mess, stress and chaos, a new study has found.
But this doesn’t stop them viewing eating together as a worthwhile goal, researchers have found.
Georgia Middleton and her team from Flinders University’s Caring Futures Institute assessed 32 international studies going back 10 years and found most people accept family dinners were a good thing.
Yet many studies found significant barriers made it hard for families to eat together.
“Parents felt the family meal provided an opportunity for communication and connection, which they appeared to value highly,” lead researcher Ms Middleton said.
“At the moment, there are many people trying to chase the ideal of the family meal model that might be introducing, yet more pressures to family life.”
These included “scheduling conflicts, exhaustion or tiredness, cost or limited resources, lack of time, lack of help, lack of skills or confidence and the amount of work and effort involved in the meal”.
Positive steps parents could take to ensure mealtimes were less stressful included turning the TV off during meals, parental modelling of healthy eating behaviour, higher food quality, positive mealtime atmosphere, involving children in meal preparation and longer meals, the research overview found.
“Future interventions would benefit from utilising a range of strategies targeting the family meal, such as the environment, use of technology, quality of food served and parental role-modelling,” Ms Middleton said.
“More work is needed in this area to better understand the relationship between family members and meals, especially if we are to continue promoting the family meal as a health and wellbeing strategy for families.”
Mother of two and owner of Aromababy skincare Catherine Cervasio enjoys cooking for her sons Beau, 25, and Jacob, 19, every night.
“The boys really it love, and I work on the atmosphere and the food, so it’s peaceful and joyful,” she said.
“It’s a special time to connect and debrief.”
Although Ms Cervasio works full-time, she enjoys creating handmade pasta and making the sauces.
“There’s always lots of leftovers and it’s good to show them good etiquette and how to eat when they go out on dates!” she said