The Transformative Power of Dinner

By Rebeldad Brian Reid

About a year and a half ago, a Wall Street Journal piece by a lawyer named Cameron Stracher caught my eye. It would have been a standard-issue op-ed decrying the loss of family dinners if not for the brief author's bio at the end of the piece, which noted that Stracher had a blog, dinnerwithdad.com, all about his efforts to make it home to eat dinner with his family most nights. He'd even sold a book proposal on the topic.

At the time, I had my doubts that a high-powered lawyer and law professor who commuted 55 miles each way into New York City could actually pull off regular dinners. And, quite frankly, I couldn't see what the big deal was. I had to wonder: Had family dinners become so novel, so incredibly rare, that the topic deserved a book-length treatment?

The book is out now, and it looks like I was wrong. There is room in the literary canon for a book about eating with your family, not because eating is important, but because the eating unlocks something even more critical. Sometime between writing that Wall Street Journal piece and publishing his book -- some time during all those dinnertimes -- Stracher quits his cushy job, shelves the commute and begins working closer to home (and sometimes in the home).

It's remarkable how achieving one little goal can shift the rest of your life -- resetting one priority makes other things more possible. Making it home in time to cook every other night or so should not be an outlandish goal for most professionals. For the particularly Type A, for those who have particularly deadline-driven jobs, it may take some planning, but such an effort ought not be out of reach for most people.

And the whole dinner thing is really a MacGuffin -- it's not the dinner that's really important, it's the way it serves to advance work-life balance (and -- as Sally Squires pointed out this week -- health). That's prompted me to think about similar small strategies that actually lead to much bigger behavioral changes. Obviously, dinner is a great one -- everyone has to eat, after all. And, more modestly, I've found that putting my BlackBerry away during family time (no vibrating, no sound, no flashing) has done wonders to keep my focus where it ought to be during the evening family time. I'd like to know if any of you have found other little life hacks that have changed the way you look at family life.

Brian Reid writes about parenting and work-family balance. You can read his blog at rebeldad.com.

By Brian Reid |  May 31, 2007; 7:15 AM ET
Previous: Small-Town Child-Care Woes | Next: Does Sanity Trump Balance?

Name:

Comments: