6 Ways to Make Family Dinner Less Stressful (Without Fighting Over Broccoli)

If family dinner at your house has turned into a hostage negotiation over how many bites of broccoli someone needs to take before they can leave the table, it might be time to rethink the whole approach. 

On Raising Good Humans, developmental psychologist Dr. Aliza Pressman makes the case that the experience of eating together matters way more than what’s actually on the plate, how many colors are represented, or whether you nailed a Pinterest-worthy spread. 

Here are her six rules for making it less painful and more meaningful.

Pick any meal and aim for 5 a week

It doesn’t have to be dinner. “It can be three breakfasts and two dinners,” Dr. Pressman says. “It can be any combination.” She points out that with younger kids, breakfast is often easier to pull off anyway. The goal is five shared meals a week, but there’s no rule that says they all have to happen at 6 p.m. with a home-cooked entrée and matching napkins.

Don’t stress about where you eat

“Here’s the ideal,” Dr. Pressman says. “You’re sitting at a table. It’s a memory. It’s a ritual. But I also recognize that we are people who have busy lives.” Her point is that a snack shared at a baseball game still counts. “I would rather you find a way to share a meal anywhere than feel like, ‘Well, I missed it. Forget it because we didn’t get to sit down at the table.'” The togetherness is the thing. The table is just furniture.

Stop driving yourself crazy about the menu

This is the one every parent needs to hear. “You don’t need to make a fancy farm-to-table meal or take individual orders,” Dr. Pressman says. “You can make it cereal. It’s much more important that you have the meal together than the content of the meal.” She also calls out how much of our week gets eaten up by the domestic labor of planning, prepping, and delivering the meal. “So we don’t even enjoy the meal itself.” If that’s happening, the menu is too complicated.

Create a ritual that makes it feel like a tradition

Dr. Pressman loves rose, bud, thorn, and feather. Everyone goes around the table sharing something positive (rose), something they’re looking forward to (bud), something that was crummy (thorn), and something that made them laugh (feather). If that feels too structured, she says even something like doing dessert before dinner once a week counts. The point is to have something that makes the meal feel like more than just eating. And if you’ve got teenagers rolling their eyes through it, that’s fine. “They’ll still remember even through those eye rolls.”

Share stories about yourself and let your kids actually get to know you

“It’s actually really cool to get to know your kids and have them get to know you and your family history by sharing stories,” Dr. Pressman says. She also says this doubles as a sneaky way to stop yourself from monitoring their plate. “It takes your mind off of watching what they’re eating and watching their plates so carefully.” Ask them questions. Teach them how to have a real table conversation. Let them ask you stuff too.

Talk about what’s going on in the world

“If your children have big ideas about the world, the family meal is the perfect place to talk about it,” Dr. Pressman says. Ask them what they’re learning in school, what they’re seeing on social media, what questions they have. “You can even make it a space that is so safe that you can have lively debates and discussions, open flow of ideas.” Her one non-negotiable for all of this to work? Phones out of the room entirely. Not flipped over on the table. Not under someone’s leg. Gone. “It really only needs to be 15 minutes,” she says, “but it is a sacred 15 minutes.”

Listen to the full episode on Raising Good Humans with Dr. Aliza Pressman, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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