The Dinner Table and Your Hoola Hoop

One Family’s Experience

I was with a family recently who felt that their every day life was unmanageable.

After establishing their family mission, values and rules, we went to work on establishing their routines.

Dinnertime felt most disconcerting so we started there.

The parents explained that though their children were now in elementary school they had never been able to get the kids to sit down for dinner. Dinner-time felt chaotic. The kids complained about what the mother cooked, they got up from the table several times and then ran off to their rooms after dinner.

This family needed to get the parents back in charge of dinner. The parents are to indicate when dinner begins and ends. The parents identify who has to help with after-dinner clean-up and who can go outside to play or to their rooms to finish their homework.

1. In order to clarify the routine, first we wrote down what the dinner routine looked like and we hung it in the kitchen.

1. Set the table.
2. Place the food on the table.
3. Sit down to dinner
4. Ring the dinner bell to mark the start of the meal.
5. Say an observance of gratitude.
6. Eat.
7. Talk about our day.
8. Ring the bell to signal the end of the meal.

2. We marked each child’s eating space and told them once they sat down they would not leave that space without parental consent.

We all sat down to eat, we placed hoola-hoops under the chairs of the children to mark their “eating space.” They were told that once the family sat down to eat, the children were not to leave their eating spaces until they had asked permission and it had been granted by their parents.

3. We required the children to ask for consent to leave the table.

Dinner was done, they asked for permission, “Mom or dad, may I leave the table?” The mom and dad said, “Yes you may,” the children took their plates to the sink, and to the parents’ surprise they went into the living room for family activities.

The parents just looked to me like, “What, our kids have never sat through a family meal!”

For the next hour, we played activities, we built some towers, we did a family drawing, and then it was time for a bath, reading, and sleep.

Now, this was a family who understood what a dinner-routine looks like. There were clear expectations about what dinner would be like. There was an order to the dinner routine, there was a clear beginning and an end. Then, there were family activities after dinner.

Your children hunger for their routine, they need to know their routine, they need to know what’s next because it helps them with mastery. They also hunger for you, even a recalcitrant teen will do activities with a parent if the activities appeal to the teen.