The Importance of Family Dinners

I recently had a youth worker friend lament what’s happening in the lives of her students as the result of some bad habits their families have adopted. She told me that after doing a quick survey of her students, she learned that only about ten percent eat dinner with their families every night. She went on to say that some of the families rarely ate dinner together. She told me that she had discovered that one of her students was using drugs. When she went to that student’s parents to share what she had learned, the parents were flabbergasted. When the parents wondered how they had missed this with their child, my youth worker friend was able to help them understand that their lack of time together as a family made it easy for them to miss what was happening with their teenager. A recent study of families in Britain found that families spend, on average, just six hours together a week. Parents, God has given you a relationship with your children. Nurture takes place when we spend time together.