Even when the kids complain, you're doing right by them when
you cook dinner and eat together.
Any kid can easily
rattle off a list of their parents’ biggest sins. When I was younger, my gripes
included my mom and dad stealing my Halloween candy and not letting me watch
R-rated movies. Later on, I was ticked that my parents made me go to school on
Senior Ditch Day.
But many of the most
important parental successes go unnoticed by children. In fact, what children
appreciate most — trips to theme parks or expensive toys, perhaps — hardly even
rank on the Parental Bests list. I don’t think I really appreciated that until
I was an adult with kids to care for myself.
One of the best things
my parents did for our family was something that, as a child, I probably would
have dismissed by saying, “That doesn’t count.” Several nights a week, my
parents made a home-cooked meal. We ate together as a family every night.
If my parents let me
take my plate to eat alone in front of the TV, it would have been easier to
smuggle those veggies off to my pet rabbit. And if dinner was take-out fare
(particularly if the menu items began with “Mc” and came with fries and a
drink), I would have loved it.
But no. We had
well-balanced homemade meals and we kids were expected to eat them. It didn’t
occur to me to thank my parents for going to the trouble of cooking after they
had already put in full days at work. I was too busy making gagging motions
every time mom served asparagus.
My first hint that my
mom had done anything special was my first “official” day as an adult, when I
moved into an apartment and began a full-time job. After work, I decided to
make dinner. Because that’s normal. That’s what you do.
I pulled out a cookbook
and began preparing a chickpea curry. My roommates reacted with surprise, and
one of them said, “Wow! You really cook!” I later found out that
one of them lived on breakfast cereal, and the other one, who “cooked,” just
heated up prepared meals from the freezer.
Nowadays, Americans
spend less time than ever cooking their meals. But as bestselling author Michael Pollan points out in
his new book Cooked, making dinner and eating together as a family
is one of the most important things you can do for your kids.
Looking at it from the
parents’ side of the equation, it’s not as easy as my mom made it look.
Building up a repertoire of recipes, ensuring you’ve got all of the ingredients
on hand, finding the time to cook and then sit down together somewhere between
homework, swim practice, and piano lessons… it’s all work. And then you’re
often thanked by choruses of “I don’t like it” and “do I have to eat it?”
But, even when the
kids complain, you’re doing right by them when you cook dinner and eat
together. They are learning conversation skills and manners. They not only eat
healthier food (compared to store-bought or restaurant fare), but they are also
developing their taste buds so that they will eat well throughout their lives.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. You
can read an interview she conducted with Michael Pollan about his new book at
AlterNet.org. OtherWords.org
