The Empathic Family Meal

In the last post, I’ve pointed out that a family meal is a good idea.  At least by current research, there seems to be solid evidence that family meals are good things for your kids.  When read critically, the research leaves many questions unanswered.  Research shows that kids who eat regular family meals have lower rates of obesity.  And lower rates of other problems.  It could be that kids are less likely to have eating issues if they come from these cartoonishly-structured families. You know, the families where mom is in an apron most of the day at home and dad comes home from work about 5:30.  It could also be that families that make an effort to get together and keep in touch with the lives of each family member are more supportive, and this is a key factor in prevention of obesity.  Maybe just the fact of having a dependable dinner every night prevents that fast-food or pizza stop on the way home from school. 

Since I’m writing this to encourage you to make a family meal part of your daily routine, or part of your weekly routine if you can’t do it daily, you should have an idea what an Empathic Family Meal might look like.

Those that follow my general take on parenting see that I encourage an empathic approach.  The authoritarian, Top-Down Management model of parenting—as would be practiced by the family I described above with mom at home wearing an apron and so looking forward to the time her husband will give her permission to leave the bunker and freshen up their survivalist hoard—is not going to get a lot of support here.  But because these families don’t move much (it’s just so inconvenient to pack up all the firearms), have stable family structures and menus that are easy to keep track of, they are heavily followed by researchers.  That alone might skew some of the conclusions.

It’s both funny and foolish to look back on those family meals from our own childhoods or those we have witnessed.  Sometimes they were opportunities for bitter parents to enforce conformity, where having an elbow on the table was an offense deserving of discipline.  Children were there to be interrogated about their school or personal lives, and their attempts to keep certain parts of their lives private were never respected.  Occasionally, parents who were either sadistic or indifferent would bring up the most humiliating issues at the dinner table.  You know this is possible.  It has happened to you or your friends.  (These parents are the ones who in 30 years will have adult children that don’t talk to them.)  So there’s a danger in the power structure of the family meal that I think has been ignored.  Absolute power, corrupting as it does, has a nasty tendency to make the people sitting at the head of the table really believe that they are in charge.  Like a president-for-life in a small ex-colonial country, they really believe that if they are happy, the family is happy.

Family meals do more than somehow help reduce the chances of obesity and eating disorders.  They are a great way of reducing picky eating in younger kids, and getting children to try new--occasionally even green--things.  This can be accomplished with an empathic family meal. 

Here is the best way I know to get a preschooler to eat vegetables.  Give them some guidelines, take them to the market, and leave them in charge.  Start with a plan.  Maybe your plan is that on Wednesday night, Eric is making dinner.  Why would he?  Is this just another unrewarded chore that Eric, 5, is supposed to do while you catch up on your emails?  Of course not.  Eric’s true reward is the one-on-one time he will spend with you.  First, you and he will plan a menu.  Make the menu suitable for a weeknight family dinner.  There are many fine cookbooks with short recipes, if you don’t know some off the top of your head.  This dinner, however, does not consist of a phone number and stained paper menu of the ethnic restaurant that delivers.  From the menu, make a shopping list.  From the shopping list, make a trip to the market.  With Eric.  This last part is crucial for success.  When you call your partner to pick up some broccoli on the way home, you have rescinded Eric’s ownership of the event.  He needs to pick it out.  However ridiculous it may appear, he makes an important step when he’s at the market with you and picks out one bunch of broccoli over another.  In his mind, he has been given authority over what his family will eat.  You have trusted him with your sustenance and he has taken up that challenge. 

I often encourage new parents to put aside one bottle a day for dad to feed the baby.  A baby bottle, I mean.  Whatever bottle dad was hoping for is his own business.  However sleep-deprived he might be, that intimate time with the baby, giving her what she needs, is profoundly meaningful to new dads.  Even though newborns may not smile or laugh, the dads have no problem sensing their baby’s gratitude.  It’s a moving and wonderful thing that every mother knows.

I think this wonderful generosity of supporting another’s life through food stars with feeding a baby.  It continues through life.  There’s a reason humans of all cultures socialize over food.

So picture the parent I saw today with an 18-month old.  She complained that he’s “starting to get picky about eating.”  She said that she fed him in the kitchen before she and his dad sat down to eat.  I asked why they didn’t have him at the table with them.  She said that it was just too much trouble because he would keep grabbing their food if they held him, and if he was in his high chair, he would complain about not getting stuff off their plates.  Do you see the empathic parenting lesson here?  When they give him baby food he’s not interested in, he won’t eat it unless he’s very hungry or it’s one of his favorite foods.  We’ve all had this experience.  We look in the full refrigerator, the bursting pantry and complain that there’s nothing to eat.  That’s us.  We’re picky, too. 

But we usually will eat if the company is good, and even if the food isn’t just to our taste, we’ll be polite about it because we see how happy it makes others.  Babies know this and they feel it.  This 18-month-old was telling his mother this in the clearest way he could.  Isolating the child isn’t what he wants.  If he had a place at the table, it would indeed be a lot messier.  But he would love to taste the broccoli off mom’s plate and maybe some of the clam chowder dad was eating.  They don’t want to try healthy foods, and they don’t want to try new foods.  They want to try your foods.  Let them.

The Family Meal

One of the things that research consistently supports is the value of a family meal. The more often your children sit at the table with you and have a meal together, the better off they are.

When I read some of the early research on this topic, it seemed obvious and biased. When we examine households in which there are two parents, one full-time breadwinner who shows up every night by 6 PM, one full-time homemaker who shops and does child-care and prepares meals, we find certain unsurprising and uninformative things. Relatively low rates of juvenile delinquency, teenage drug use, legal entanglements, and similar social problems. The kids seem to eat healthier, snack less and have a lower rate of obesity.
I was and remain dismissive of this as medically relevant. In so many ways, it’s like surveying people who identify themselves as happy and then announcing that these people have a lower rate of depression than the population in general and a much lower rate of depression than those who have been hospitalized for depression. These mythical households, in which parents live unrealistic lives in unrealistic places with unrealistic children, provide little in the way of helpful insight for those who don’t fit into the constraints of these fantasy family structures. In most places, financial realities have made two incomes essential. Even when it’s not, and perhaps especially when it’s not, the idea that one partner is at home cooking dinner for several hours a day is obsolete. equally unstudied are school and work schedules. Our children, even from the happy and intact families, are busy with their own schedules that include after school sports, tutoring, or jobs. Perhaps because of where I practice, here in Berkeley (but I think this is true most places) it’s tough to make a living from a job you never take home. It’s been hard not to notice, making as many house calls as I do, how often one of the parents isn’t at home. Mostly it’s dad who is still working at 7 or 8 o’clock. But I have often seen kids who are fed and watched and put to bed by dad or grandma since mom won’t get home from work until after the child is asleep.

So I admit that this might seem like a distant dream for many families. But there are a lot of lessons in The Family Meal that go beyond nutrition. Those families from the television-reality of the 1950’s may not have much in common with yours. And it’s no surprise that in these families, teenagers are expected to be home from school before dinner and don’t go out at night. With this level of tight supervision, it is understandably difficult to imagine them getting into trouble. There’s also little opportunity for stopping for a cheeseburger on the way home instead of dinner with the family. No chance for snacking, drinking, or other unhealthy activities.
I have intentionally painted this lifestyle as repressive and restrictive. That’s the way your teenager is likely to see it. After all, their friends get to do these things. And that feeling of imprisonment is a universal one at this developmental stage. They know what they are able to do, and this doesn’t match what their parents are able to allow them to do. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I advised ignoring some of this research.
I don’t think the research adequately explains why kids with more family meals are less likely to be obese. Maybe the reduced time outside of the house, eating fast food less often is an explanation. Maybe the increased parental supervision contributes something. Maybe it’s something deeper.

Think about the last binge you had—whatever constitutes a binge for you. Did you do it sitting down at a table of people? Maybe kids who would eat particularly badly feel this same social restraint. So if they get a family dinner every night, even if it’s hot dogs and mashed potatoes, and even if they have two helpings, they won’t be having 7 or 8 portions. Even if they could sneak out, the sense of fullness probably will short-circuit the impulse to binge, which happens more often when we miss meals.

Think about the last good dinner you had with someone else, or a group of people. What made it good? The most fabulous chef can’t make food good enough to provide satisfaction and enjoyment from time spent with bickering unfriendly people. Normal family and sibling interactions are not, realistically, going to lead to peaceful supportive conversations at every meal. But the dependability of the meal, day after day—or even week after week—will provide its own important support. Think of it this way. You are on a team. Sometimes it’s competitive, and sometimes you need to work together. Sometimes you will win and sometimes you’ll lose—and some of those times, you feel that you’ve lost very unfairly. But you keep showing up for practice, keep showing up for games. And your coach is always available, whether encouraging you or pointing out your mistakes. I think the family dinner is like this. Sometimes a child will be sulking and quiet, or quick to anger. And nobody should be forced, somehow, to do this. But the dependability of that dinner is crucial. They can invite a friend to join. That may seem easy, but it’s an impossible social step if everyone in the family eats at different times, in different places. So it’s easy for a child to ask a classmate to come over for dinner if your child knows in advance when and where that dinner will take place. If they don’t do this, when will you meet and get to know your child’s friends? This is an easy, natural way to do this important task.

Most important of all, the family meal is the place to show your children that you’re interested in them and their lives, their schoolwork, friends, and news. Please, no interrogations. Don’t go around the table as I have sometimes seen and make each child complete some checklist you have created for them. Tell me one thing that happened in school today or something like that. If the child is always saying that nothing happened and that they have no homework and nothing is new, you need to reach out in a better way. Maybe over the dinner table isn’t the ideal venue for many types of conversation. But when parents repeatedly express interest in their children and the lives of their children, it’s probably a good thing. Maybe it will convince some of those kids that their parents really care about them. Maybe it will help them care about themselves. Maybe it will help a few of them eat healthier.

An Aunt Who Shares

When a baby is born at the local hospital, the clerk in Labor and Delivery calls the pediatrician identified by the parents. The call I received one night about 3:00 AM was a little hard to understand. Granted, I had been awakened. But I asked the clerk for the patient’s name. ‘Oran…,‘ she said, then ‘Oranolantu…,‘ then ‘…bat…. “Do you mean Oranolantubaataar?“ I asked. Relieved, she told me I had a healthy big baby girl to come in and take a look at. I knew the family, and took care of the 4-year old son. I told her I’d be in later that morning. She politely told me that everyone in Labor and Delivery would really like me to come in now. I got dressed and went to the hospital, fearing the worst.

The Charge Nurse for L&D, who is the supervisor of all the nurses and operations of the department except for the obstetricians, and always one of the most experienced veteran professionals there, met me at the elevator, before I entered the ward. She said she’d never seen anything like it and didn’t know if it was OK and wanted me to evaluate this and write a note about it in the chart. She was afraid the hospital might get sued, and maybe a little afraid of losing her job. When I walked into the room, I was not prepared for what I saw.

The mother I knew was smiling happily in bed. Her labor had been relatively short with this second child, born about 2 hours earlier. She greeted me warmly in her broken English. I looked around. “Where’s the baby?” I asked her. She pointed to the chair next to her bed on which was a young woman. ‘Sister’ was her one word introduction. This woman was bare-breasted and nursing the newborn child.

I had never seen anything like it. I met with a group of the nurses, the charge nurse, and others.

The transition from unencumbered adult to parent is always unforeseeably and indescribably enormous. It seems that in recent years, the pressure on new parents has continued to build. The parenting shelf in the bookstore has become a whole section with many aisles. Perhaps it’s a good thing that you now can choose to learn what one author thinks you should have been expecting while you were expecting and another author claims to help you raise a child who is an over-achieving, healthy, gifted, socially adept, high IQ athlete who knows both how to control her temper and who goes to sleep without problems. (My approach to advising parents is almost always to ask the child to provide the right guidance. They usually know.)

Why has this proliferation of parenting advice taken place? The simple answer is that there’s a market for it. Publishers are aware of the demand and are in the business of meeting it. What’s behind this demand?

The desire to produce a text on childrearing isn’t new. Especially with the industrial revolution, the idea gradually took hold that maybe there was a ‘right’ way to raise kids.

Especially for the new parent, and the new mother in particular, these books can seem like an essential reference. There is a tendency for new parents and new mothers in particular to feel that the ‘success’ of nursing the baby, soothing the baby, even bathing the baby is a great burden that falls on them and them alone. If things aren’t going exactly right in the first days and weeks, it’s hard for new mothers not to see that as a personal failure. This is a major contributor to postpartum depression. But what has caused this crushing pressure? Is this part of Eve’s curse (Genesis 3:16)?

I don’t think so. According to archeological evidence, and according to countless cave-people movies, humans most likely never went through a phase of living in completely isolated family units. The idea, maybe born out of the settling of the American West, that there would be settlers who lived a hardscrabble life by themselves on a ranch the size of some European countries, is not one that has typically existed elsewhere in the world. Sure there are subsistence farms and always have been, but they are small and the families live close to other families.

And, finally I’m getting to the point, all the households are multigenerational. With marriage as teenagers, there would usually be grandmothers and even great-grandmothers living with the new mother. There would be sisters and aunts with their babies, too. And despite the considerable work all the women were required to do, some of the work of childcare and an enormous amount of cumulative experience and wisdom would be easily available and given.

Though it’s a good guess that midwives, people with special expertise in childbirth, have been around for a long time, Lactation Consultants are likely a newer breed. Within a multigenerational household, there would be lots of sources of advice about sore nipples and babies who don’t latch well. I suspect that postpartum depression has always been with us, but some of its pervasive contributors--isolation, the feeling that every need of the baby must be met by the mother, the sense of failure if the mother’s milk hasn’t come in by day 3 or 4--would be so very much relieved by having a crew of experienced and trusted peers who know what the heck they are doing.

The baby’s mother was from one of the Mongolian families I take care of. Some speak no English at all. But they all live very near each other in one neighborhood of Oakland. Many bring their kids to me. Her sister had given birth a few months earlier, and was still nursing her own infant. In their culture, this wasn’t unusual--it was simply what was done.

About a hundred years ago, and for millennia before that, wet nurses were common. Women who couldn’t nurse or those who could but had the resources to avoid this task of the masses, would employ a woman whose lactation was maintained by her continued employment. There were few alternatives. (The picture above is from a booklet produced about 1900 by Nestle, for a product called Nestlé's Food, which was among the very first commercial baby formulas. It’s from my collection.) But before there were professional wet nurses, there were women who would share their supply with the less fortunate, or the babies who had survived childbirth when their mothers did not.

One of the nurses asked if it was hygienic. Honestly, I didn’t know. I suppose, in these days of Universal Precautions and doctors afraid to touch you without gloves on, I could see what the concerns might be. There are some diseases which can be transmitted through breast milk, along with many medications. As politely as I could, I tried to get a little medical history from this other woman. She spoke almost no English, and the postpartum mother was translating my questions—I think. She’s the one who told me ‘she OK’ and left it at that.

I told the L&D crew it was OK with me and I would write an order in the chart explicitly allowing it.

The woodcut from 1550 is by Hans Brosamer and is from my collection. It shows the creation of Eve, her temptation, and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The poster from the 1958 movie Teenage Caveman was part of the collection I sold in 1992. Produced by—who else?—Roger Corman, I think it was Robert Vaughn’s first starring role.