Our family used to eat together most evenings. Now work shifts, homework and activities mean everyone is hungry at different times. Insisting on one dinner hour makes the household miserable, but I'd miss the conversations if we stopped trying. We're considering two shared dinners a week plus a relaxed weekend breakfast. How have you kept meaningful family mealtimes without forcing a schedule that no longer fits?
Making family dinners workable with conflicting schedules
- parenting
- family
- dinners
- workable
31
5 replies
We stopped pretending every meal had to be family dinner. Two set nights a week, plus leftovers and a weekend breakfast, worked much better...
We stopped pretending every meal had to be family dinner. Two set nights a week, plus leftovers and a weekend breakfast, worked much better for us. The key was making those meals feel protected, not forced.
That’s close to what we do too. We have one “everyone if possible” dinner and one very loose breakfast on Sunday. The conversation is better when nobody is grumpy from pretending a Tuesday at 6:30 is sacred.
We do a very relaxed brunch on weekends and call it enough. One thing I like is letting people build their own plates, so it doesn’t become...
We also started doing dessert or fruit after the separate dinners, all together if the timing worked. It sounds small, but it gave us a bit of the shared-table feeling without requiring a full synchronized meal. Sometimes that was the only calm part of the day.
That actually makes sense. I was wondering if the meal itself has to be the bonding part, or if the same people just need to be in the same...