Family meals
* There is a positive relationship between elementary school students' academic success and at-home meals with the family. Further, children who eat breakfast do better in school.
* Family mealtimes are an important part of the socialization process, during which children and adolescents learn to define the ways in which they are going to live.
* Children develop important social skills during family meals, such as table manners, taking turns speaking, and listening to the person talking.
* Eating together promotes good communication, strengthens family bonds and relationships, teaches family values, improves nutrition, helps families solve problems and learn about each other, saves money, brings order and structure to families, and allows for discussion of family needs and plans for activities.
* Family rituals, such a mealtimes, give children a sense of security and a sense of how their family works together. Quality mealtime conversation between parents and children has been shown to increase children's mental and verbal abilities.
* College students with meaningful family rituals, such as family meals, cope better with freshman-year stresses.
* Families who regularly gather around the table have more cohesion and more unity. For kids, that translates into the all-critical "group to belong to." Researchers have found that families who converse over dinner have greater affection for one another. Siblings sharing a table in childhood are more likely to remain close after growing up and leaving home. Further, children of families who eat together are more likely to respect adults and to get along with them.
* The single factor common to the best readers from elementary through high school is that their families eat dinner together at home. Children whose families gather at the dinner table and converse develop more extensive vocabularies at earlier ages, are superior at conceptualizing "real subjects" (as opposed to, say, a cartoon plot), are better able to articulate at an earlier age, and score two to three grade levels higher on standardized reading and language tests. Social, economic, ethnic, and parents' educational backgrounds had little influence on the youngsters' reading achievement. The only differentiating element was whether or not families had meals together. Meals are one of the best times for tots to pick up new words. Kids whose families chat most during mealtimes have larger word inventories.
* The important factor is to sit down together, not to eat a gourmet meal.
* Eating with children teaches them healthy attitudes about food. For example, if you eat vegetables, your children will be more likely to do the same.