Article A Positive Nutrition Approach to Family Meals
Dial down parenting pressure, connect with your kids, help them eat right, and learn healthy habits for life—reframe family meals with 5 positive nutrition strategies.
November 05, 2024
When your family’s average weeknight is a whirlwind rush from work to extracurriculars, fitting in a sit-down family meal can feel impossible. But you don’t need time-travel to give your kids the benefits of eating with everyone at the table—our Positive Nutrition Approach to Family Meals dials down the parenting pressure and empowers you to connect, help your kids eat right, and learn healthy habits for life.
What is a Family Meal,
and Why Do They Matter?
There’s a lot of research on the benefits of frequent family meals.
Studies claim children in families who regularly share meals have:
But there’s a catch.
For all the studies, there isn’t a universal definition of what a family meal actually is!
Family meals have
been defined as:
And many studies that have made a positive connection between family meals and healthy diet did not specify important features like:
When the only common thread defining the family meal is “sitting and eating together,”3 and details like the list above aren’t consistently tracked, it’s harder to prove what feature of family meals causes the benefits.
Modern Challenges and
the Family Meal
As much as there are benefits to sharing regular sit-down meals at home, the family meal ideal hasn’t caught up to the reality of 21st century life.
Getting a scratch-made dinner on the table in time to get to a 6 PM soccer practice simply isn’t possible for parents who work 9 to 5 outside the home and have even an average commute.
But the pressure to do it anyway is real.
And juggling a week filled with organized activities and scheduling conflicts leaves many parents feeling stressed out and guilty, like they’ve somehow failed their kids by not living up to a standard set generations ago.4
We’re going to share a secret—you haven’t failed, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
What to Do When Frequent
Family Meals Aren’t on the Table:
5 Positive Nutrition Strategies for Parents
The lack of definition and gaps in the research open the door for busy families to embrace the spirit of the family meal, while adapting it to fit their full lives.
And that means you and your family can connect over shared meals on your own terms, guilt-free!
Here’s how you can reframe the family meal with positive nutrition strategies that remove barriers, take the stress out of making time to eat together, and help you and your family get the goodness you need:
It’s not about where you eat, but what you eat.
This line from one of the studies we read stands out:
Sitting at a table, eating without TV, serving meals family style, or the presence of a parent cannot directly change the healthfulness of foods served at the meal.”2
It’s possible to check all the family meal boxes—even with food cooked at home—every night of the week and miss the health benefits if most of the meals are made from heavily processed ingredients high in saturated fat, sodium, and sugar, deep-fried, and rarely have veggies.
If the location and context don’t determine whether the food you eat together is good for you, then anywhere you share a healthy meal together counts—non-dinner-table spaces included!
So, if the best you can manage is a back-seat family picnic in the parking lot between after-school care and Scouts, stop worrying.
Because whenever nutrient-dense foods like whole grains, fruits, and vegetables play a starring role, you’re still modelling healthy eating better than an at-table dinner with less nutritional value.
It’s not about time-consuming traditional meals
but connecting over wholesome food shared simply.
Picture a family meal, and most North Americans imagine a scene like a 1950s TV show, complete with mashed potatoes and the whole nuclear family at the table.
But you don’t have to toil over a multi-dish dinner one step down from a Thanksgiving feast to call it a family meal. How long you spent making the meal matters far less than connecting over healthy food!5
Simple, wholesome dishes—like sandwiches—shared with just one other person in your family count.
If you can fit in a meaningful 15-minute mealtime chat with your wiggly preschooler or busy teen over sprouted bread grilled cheese and apple slices, you win!
It’s not about the time of day but making time to eat together.
We’ve got good news if your family’s after-school activities calendar laughs at the idea of weeknight family dinners:
Although most research has focused on the evening meal, breakfast or lunch can be family meals, too!
If dinner finds your family flung far and wide five days a week and weekends aren’t much better, focus on another time of day.
Talking with your kid about their recess plans over morning toast or your teen about their term project over a blueberry spinach smoothie can be just as rewarding—and a lot less stressful than cramming the idealized square dinner peg into the round hole of real life.
And even snack time is an opportunity to connect and model healthy eating.
Let your kids see you scarf an apple on the way out the door, or snack on snap peas instead of chips often enough, and someday you’ll have a young adult who includes fruits and veggies on their list of grab-and-go foods.
Cooking from scratch is smart, but connecting over food doesn’t always have to start with a recipe.
If you connect as a family while sharing food, it doesn’t matter as much who made it as that you found quality time together.
Part of the positive nutrition approach to healthy eating is finding balance in your relationship with food. And that applies to family meals, too.
As our friend and registered dietitian Desiree Nielsen says,
It’s important for kids to see that a healthy life looks like kale and sprouted grain bread. But it also looks like getting ice cream on the weekend.”
So, make the homemade meals with nutrient-dense plant-based whole foods in your own kitchen whenever that’s available to you.
And treat your family to pizza and game night sometimes, too.
Modelling healthy eating habits begins at the grocery store
(and on your kitchen counter).
Frequent family meals aren’t the only way to help kids learn to like fruits and vegetables as picky toddlers turn into teens. Healthful parenting makes all the difference (and you don’t even need to nag)!
You can promote healthy eating just by making sure ready-to-eat fruits and vegetables are readily available and accessible!6
In a 2017 study, 9 – 18-year-olds whose parents modelled healthy habits by regularly eating and offering wholesome foods in spite of infrequent family meals ate more fruits and vegetables than those who had family meals often but weren’t exposed to healthy eating practices by their parents.6
So, put a big bowl of apples, oranges, or bananas on the counter where they can’t be missed.
Place the snap peas strategically so they’re right there when your kids open the fridge to scrounge up an after-school snack.
Hide the wholegrain crackers in plain sight in your pantry.
And let go of family meal worries.
Because when you fill your grocery basket with healthy options, make sure your family can find them at home, and let your kids see you choosing better-for-you foods often, it more than makes up for the traditional family meals that don’t always fit your full life.6
