Exploring the role of the family meal in healthy development and how it can be a game-changer for adolescents in eating disorder recovery.
Family meals can look different depending on your cultural background, but they typically involve sitting down as a household to share a meal. Due to busy schedules, it’s probably impossible to get together for every meal, but carving out space to enjoy dinner can be enough to see lasting benefits. Building a routine where your family shares a meal has been proven to help children develop strong social and problem-solving skills and be a protective factor against worsening mental health.
If you’re a parent of a child with an eating disorder, sharing meals as a family can be a game-changer for their recovery. Family meals allow you to support your child’s recovery by promoting normal eating patterns and offering emotional support when your child is struggling. In addition, it helps demonstrate to your child the importance of prioritizing a structured eating schedule and deepens your connection as a family unit.
In the sections below, we will explore the general benefits of family meals as well as the specific significance mealtimes play in a child’s eating disorder recovery.
The General Importance of Family Meals
Family meals are a simple way to promote healthy child development. By carving out time to be together as a family, you are teaching your children essential life skills and demonstrating the importance of consistency and togetherness.
Let’s dive deeper into these benefits.
Develop Family Connectedness
Setting aside time to sit down as a family and have a meal together allows you to check in with your children in an otherwise busy world. We are quick to run from one thing to the next without ever taking a moment to be with one another, making it challenging to check in with your children about how they’re doing and what happened during their day.
It is common for families to report feeling burnt out from their busy schedules. Modern society’s go-go-go nature may feel like one more barrier to getting your family to the table together. However, research has shown that prioritizing meal times fosters a sense of familial connectedness in an otherwise disconnected society.
A sense of connectedness goes a long way in children’s development, from protecting them against low self-esteem to lowering their chance of substance abuse or disordered eating. It even is a factor in effective problem-solving.
An Opportunity to Practice Undivided Attention
As a society, we’ve become accustomed to our attention being split between technology and each other. Even when we spend time together, only a fraction of our attention is given to each other because we share our focus with things like smartwatch notifications, a buzzing phone, and email updates.
Attention span is connected to the part of your mind used to sincerely engage in person-to-person interactions. Things are moving so quickly in modern society that many adolescents don’t want to miss out on anything. Consequently, attention spans are shortening to accommodate this constant rapid influx of data, and relationships suffer.
Meal times can be an opportunity to strengthen your family’s attention spans. By taking off smartwatches, putting away tablets and phones, and turning off televisions, you are taking the first step toward practicing intentional connection with one another without the distraction of a notification or blaring TV show. Not only can this have a positive impact on your family relationships, but it will also set up your children with a more substantial mental capacity for managing stress, assignments, and peer relationships—all of which require an undo amount of focus.
Demonstrate Consistency
Family meals can become a routine that children can not only count on but learn from. Meal times allow parents to demonstrate normal food behaviors and explore effective communication methods with their children. In addition, the meals build consistency as they become a part of your child’s routine. Consistency is foundational for children’s sense of safety and stability, which are all protective factors against future mental health struggles.
Protective Factors Against Mental Health Struggles
Research has proven that time spent together as a family is associated with better mental health outcomes, higher self-esteem in children, and fewer incidents of substance abuse, disordered eating, and depression. It is theorized that this is due to the protective factors developed through regular, consistent time together, including increased connectedness, better problem-solving skills, improved attention, and increased social skills.
The Role of Family Meals in Eating Disorder Recovery
Having a child who is struggling with an eating disorder is disruptive for the entire family unit, as the illness can cause stress, anxiety, and conflict between you and your child. Sometimes, it can feel challenging to know how to support your child while tending to the rest of life’s obligations. One simple but effective way to support your child is by sharing a meal as a family where everyone eats the same thing.
Below, we’ll look at four reasons why mealtimes are so beneficial.
An Opportunity to Practice Normal Eating
Sitting down at a table together as a family allows you to demonstrate normal eating practices. An eating disorder is sneaky and wants to try and bargain with your child. This could look like your child asking to prepare their food, choose what they’re having, or serve their plate.
However, mealtimes in recovery are a great chance for parents to reestablish normal patterns. This means parents prepare and plate the food, and everyone shares the same meal without exceptions. Parents may be afraid of setting these firm boundaries for fear of upsetting their children, but having your child become upset or frustrated isn’t always a bad thing in recovery. It could mean that you’re pushing back against the eating disorder, and helping your child work through those difficult emotions would be a key next step.
Parents Get a Chance to Support Their Children.
As it was discussed above, meal times can bring up difficult emotions for your child in eating disorder recovery, which offers a perfect opprotunity for you to practice supporting them through these hard spots. As a parent, it may be scary to imagine doing so, but you’re not alone. Hilltop’s team can teach you tools for how to show up for your child’s recovery.
A great initial resource is this article: Empowering Parents: Strategies for Supporting a Child’s Eating Disorder Recovery. Feel free to click the link and read through the step-by-step guide to supporting your child in hard moments.
Connecting Conversations
When you are sharing a meal as a family with a child with an eating disorder, it is recommended that you steer clear of topics about food, exercise, or appearance. This allows you to think about conversation starters that revolve around other aspects of life. You could even think of games to play at the table, such as twenty questions or would you rather. Expanding conversations beyond topics related to your child’s illness deepens the emotional impact of the meal by reminding you and your child that your relationship is built on more than their disorder.
Redefine a Family’s Relationship to Mealtimes and Food
Lastly, meal times lay the foundation for your family’s relationship with food moving forward. Whatever associations with eating, exercise, meals, or body image were in place before your child’s eating disorder can be flipped around to make way for a more balanced approach to these topics, and it starts by showing your child that you will prioritize meals with them.
In addition, if you and your children share the same meal, it shows that you are willing to take the hard steps alongside them and that you are also willing to redefine and heal your relationship with food and your body.
Reach Out for Support Today
If you are a parent of an adolescent curious about this topic and want to discuss it further, please reach out today. Hilltop Behavioral Health has an entire team of expert professionals who would happily discuss how family meals may serve your family.
Find an Eating Disorder Therapist in Summit, NJ.
Hilltop Behavioral Health has a team of therapists who treat children with eating disorders who would be able to work with your family on how to prioritize meal times. On their website, you can request a free consultation call with a team member to see if they’d be a good fit for your needs.
References
Elran-Barak, R., Sztainer, M., Goldschmidt, A. B., & Le Grange, D. (2014). Family meal frequency among children and adolescents with eating disorders. The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, 55(1), 53–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2013.12.018
Harrison, M. E., Norris, M. L., Obeid, N., Fu, M., Weinstangel, H., & Sampson, M. (2015). Systematic review of the effects of family meal frequency on psychosocial outcomes in youth. Canadian family physician Medecin de famille canadien, 61(2), e96–e106.
Subramanian, K. (2018, June). Myth and Mystery of Shrinking Attention Span. International Journal of Trend in Research and Development, 5(3), 1-6.
White, H. J., Haycraft, E., Madden, S., Rhodes, P., Miskovic-Wheatley, J., Wallis, A., Kohn, M., & Meyer, C. (2017). Parental strategies used in the family meal session of family-based treatment for adolescent anorexia nervosa: Links with treatment outcomes. The International journal of eating disorders, 50(4), 433–436. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.22647
