The legend of the family dinner
For many, this week was chockfull of family dinners, making it a perfect time to talk about why they’re great for bringing people together — but not a silver bullet for ensuring children’s academic success.
Family dinners are the stuff of legend. Throughout history, countless brilliant minds have credited their enhanced intellectual development to the act of sitting down for dinner with parents, siblings and extended family.
As these stories go, gathering for a communal meal allowed the successful person to learn about everything from household happenings and their parents’ work concerns to the political issues of the day. More importantly, it allowed them to eventually take part in lively backand-forth of discussions, during which positions needed to either be argued against or defended.
In 2017, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told CNBC that when he was a young entrepreneur, he felt confident having professional conversations with older business people because he’d grown up hearing his parents articulate their thoughts and ideas at the dinner table.
“I think family traditions that get you to come together and talk about what you’re up to — going on trips together, always sitting at dinner and sharing thoughts — really made a huge difference,” Gates said.
Basically, unless a family has some sort of serious dysfunction — alcoholism, drug dependence and mental illness can make for some horribly painful family meals — you can hardly go wrong with insisting that your crew gather to share some food and talk.
But, like so many other pieces of educational advice that seem like a slam-dunk to people with means, family dinners are neither a magical cure to what ails modern public education nor an adequate counter to families’ economic struggles.
To start, though the majority (almost 71%) of children under 18 live in two-parent households, nearly 30% live either with one parent or with no parents at all. It’s hard for kids to hear the interplay between two adults engaging in mature conversations about the world when there’s only one caregiver present who’s probably just doing the best they can to get dinner on the table.
And about those two-parent homes — they aren’t the be-all, endall of what makes for successful children, either.
New research from Christina Cross, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of sociology at Harvard, found that living apart from a biological parent doesn’t carry the same life-quality penalty for black kids as for their white peers. And, similarly, being raised in a two-parent family is not equally beneficial.
Cross contradicted previous analyses by using more than 30 years of national data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to demonstrate that family structure has a weaker relationship to the educational success of black adolescents than of white adolescents.
“I show that living in a singlemother family does not decrease the chances of on-time high school completion as significantly for black youths as for white youths,” Cross wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. “Conversely, living in a two-parent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers.”
The big factor at play in these instances was access to socioeconomic resources, such as a mother’s educational level and generational wealth or business connections. Cross noted that, “although in general, youths raised in two-parent families are less likely to live in poverty, black youths raised by both biological parents are still three times more likely to live in poverty than are their white peers.
“Additionally, black two-parent families have half the wealth of white two-parent families.”
So even though family dinners have been pushed as a surefire way to improve lifelong educational and earning outcomes, research going back to 2012 has bucked that notion by finding no causal relationship between family meal frequency and a child’s success.
This isn’t, of course, to say that two-parent and other families who are able to come together for a meal at least once a day aren’t an ideal worth striving for.
But even as some tsk-tsk about “today’s young people” or “unwed mothers,” it’s important to note that low-income children’s academic performance isn’t a matter of culture or character.
If we want families to have two parents, we must make it possible for them to thrive. And If we want families to eat together, we must first ensure that the most vulnerable among us actually have food to put on the table.