Kids, Sports & Meals

50. Too busy to eat, pray or love?

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

When we become overwhelmed by the way life can steal our sense of peace, give some thought and prayer to ways you can reign in the overcommitment, and gather nightly as a family around a nutritious meal.  When we are just hanging on all the time, the REAL needs of our souls are ignored, which is the twin necessity for relationship and food.  It is all symptomatic of the SAME problem.

Relationships take time.  How are you doing in your daily relationship with God?  With your spouse?  Kids?  Neighbors?   What about food, both physical AND spiritual?  How’s it going getting healthy food in the lunch boxes and on the dinner table every day?   Are you feeding regularly on God’s Word?  Is your prayer life nutritious?

Don’t beat yourself up.  Instead, think.  Perhaps what are you doing now is just crazy.  Does your battle with the clock rob your family of together time?  Keep you away from church too often? Running through the fast food drive-through out of desperation?

DECIDE.  Begin to PLAN how this COULD all go BETTER if you made even a couple of small changes.  Enlist the family’s help.  Start small and work your way up.  And take pleasure in the results!

Discussion Questions

  1. Who is responsible for the food in your home?
  2. What are some of the food challenges you face on a daily basis?   (e.g., budget limitations, picky eaters, food allergies, wacky schedules).
  3. What are some ways your family meets the disparate food demands of the group?
  4. Who decides what to eat? Where to eat? When to eat?
  5. Where does the food in the house come from?
  6. Who prepares the table, the food, and the menus?
  7. What kind of lunch do family members eat on weekdays?
  8. How often do you eat out? Is eating out usually at a fast food place?
  9. What are your table rules?
  10. How is your lack of time related to your prayer life?  Your love life?  Your family life?  Are these issues really, at heart, just one problem?
  11. Let’s say that being organized is not your strength.  How DOES a family meal happen without good planning?  What could you do differently?
  12. Let’s say you are a hyper-organized agenda maker.  Does your attitude sometimes feel like tyranny to the rest of the family?  Is there a way to plan and be organized without acting like an Army drill sergeant?
  13. Make a table and put each family member’s name in a column across the top.  In the rows, list out meal planning and prep issues that need to occur, and place an X in each column if that issue is age-appropriate.  For example, you may place an X under Joe’s name for helping cut up veggies for lunches, because Joe is 14 and capable of safely using a knife.  You might place an X under Carlie’s name in the table setting row, because she is 6 years old, and this is an age-appropriate practice.  We KNOW you are BUSY, and that it often feels as if doing these things will go faster if you just do them yourself.  But, making a list, and posting it on the fridge can be a reminder that you are actually helping family member contribute to meals in wonderful ways.  Let them develop their talents as they help out!

 

A MEAL PRACTICE TO CONSIDER AND DISCUSS

  1. Set aside four days, on average, per week when every family member is expected to be present for an evening meal. Try to meet at the same time for each meal.

 

Shared Table Blessings posts will be on holiday hiatus until early 2017. Please use this time to enjoy your shared meals at home and with others!  Thanks for reading.

Blessings,

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

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46. Pitching In, Licking Clean: Meals Take a Team

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

For a regular shared dinner, teamwork is essential, because meal-making cannot simply all fall on one person’s shoulders. Our daughter was nine when I went back to work full time. She was already setting the table each night before dinner, and my husband was helping with kitchen clean-up after dinner, so it was only natural to build on that involvement. When I got home from work and readied dinner, our daughter set the table as before. As she got older, she often undertook age-appropriate preparation tasks with me in the kitchen. After the meal, I was formally excused from any further work. I like to think of it as the 5-D plan: dad, daughter, and dog doing dishes. Dad rinsed the dishes, our daughter put them in the dishwasher, and our black lab joyfully licked them each for good measure. Over the years, this time of shared father-daughter kitchen duty helped them build a vibrant, laughter-filled (most times at my expense), and wonderfully joy-filled relationship. They shared music, jokes, and news of the day. They teased. They snuck extra dessert. It provided this father-daughter duo the opportunity to work together and create a sense of collusion in “mom’s” kitchen that gave them glee. It also helped our daughter begin to learn the value of saving leftovers by having to sort them into containers, prep them for lunches the following day, and creatively think about other ways the food could be combined and prepared for additional meals. It was good practice, and today she is a marvelously creative young cook who entertains on a shoestring budget, having learned early that sharing food- its preparation, consumption, and clean-up- is a rich and happy exercise in what it means to be fully human.

This post is intentionally short.  At this point, I encourage you to really think and pray about ways to MAKE a nightly family meal happen…without stress.  This usually involves INTENTION.  PLANNING.  MENU-MAKING.  It is a WHOLE-FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY.  This week, write down some ways you and your family can come together around a nutritious and comforting meal most nights of the week.

Post 47 will begin to lay out some ground rules!

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

 

 

45. Disrupted Family Time, Or, Just How Many Subs Can You Eat in a Week?

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

Well, you have to start somewhere, and taking a long, honest look at the disruptive schedule is a good and necessary first step. I wrote earlier of my belief that our children today are overscheduled and their lives over-managed by parents. While it may sound harsh, the more we schedule our children into adult-led structured activities outside the home, the less time they have for creative free play, learning the joy and discipline of solitary studiousness,[1] and developing the ability to resolve their own differences. When they get home too late in the day, they are often over-tired and over-stimulated, and low blood glucose makes them cranky. What’s more, today’s children live in an increasingly unstable world, including unstable families, and family instability is unhealthy at any age.[2] A shared family meal on a near-daily basis can go a long way in providing children with what they most need from their family: safety, face-time, encouragement, down-time, comfort, discipline, mentoring, and yes, even the predictability of structure, including set times for meals, homework, prayer, and lights out. Research clearly shows that children of families who frequently share meals at home actually perform better academically.[3] [4]. This is because children thrive on the dependability a structured family time affords, and truly benefit from the regular chance for practicing conversation, story-telling, shared prayer, and listening skills. Furthermore, as communication technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, face time has become imperiled. Meals create opportunities for face-to-face exchange of ideas when the life of the family takes precedence, and the texting and phone calls are temporarily banned.

So, we probably can all agree that shared family time is critically important in a child’s development, and that because we all have to eat, a family meal is an ideal place to come together. But, our shared dinner hours are difficult to make happen. I believe that sports participation is the second most common cause of fractured family time at the dinner hour, the first being when all adults in the family work full time outside the home, or one or both parents’ work requires frequent travel or shift work.[5]   At some point, you may have to admit that it is not necessary or healthy, for your younger children especially, to participate in sports on a year-round basis. When we get caught up in travel teams, twice-weekly lessons with a pro, and hiring a special sports trainer for out-of-season conditioning for our 10 year-olds, we have stepped over a line in most cases, and we have done so at the real peril of regular, intentional family time. It is important for parent and child alike to learn that no one family member’s activities should consistently dictate the entire family’s schedule and routine.

Try to find several days each week when every family member is expected to be home for dinner at a reasonable predetermined time. Teenagers with work and school obligations will need to negotiate nights off from the family meal commitment, but should not be allowed to assume that their presence at the table isn’t important on a regular basis; while it is critical at this age for teens to begin to learn about the privilege of independence, they must not forsake their place in, and obligations to the family either.

In post #46 we will continue to look at ways to get a family meal on the table in these hectic times.  PLEASE!  If you like what you are reading, share this blog with friends at church.  Leave your suggestions and comments in the LEAVE a REPLY box below.

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

[1]a very under-developed characteristic in my college students

[2] Susan Fiske, “The Spiritual Costs of the Missing Family,” By Faith Magazine 34 (Winter 2011): p.29.

[3] Catherine E. Snow, Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

[4] Sharon M Fruh et al, “The Surprising Benefits of the Family Meal,” The Journal for Nurse Practitioners 7, no. 1 (2011): 18-22.

[5] As a child-athlete myself, and the spouse and parent of child-athletes, I do not pick on sports with random disdain. The ramped-up nature of the sporting world has made indelible marks on Christian families that we ignore to our peril, and we need to start and continue serious ongoing theological reflection and discussion in Christian circles of the true and rightful place of sports in a child’s and family’s life. The same can be said for any other extra-curricular activity.

Featured Image Credit: http://edacious1.blogspot.com/2008/06/good-eating-at-ball-park.html