In an era of maternal employment and marital disintegration, fewer and fewer teenagers share their meals with their families. Indeed, when a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota recently surveyed 4,746 adolescents from ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, they found only about "one fourth (26.8%) reported eating 7 or more meals with their family in the past week, and almost one third (33.1%) reported eating family meals only 1 to 2 times per week or never." What is more, as the Minnesota scholars examined their survey results closely, they discerned a number of bad adolescent outcomes linked to infrequent eating of family meals-especially among teenage girls. The pathological teen tangle associated with the disappearance of family meals has now been reported in a study appearing in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
By systematically parsing their data, the Minnesota scholars establish that compared to peers who regularly eat their meals with their families, adolescents of both sexes who seldom or never eat with their families are more likely to use tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana, more likely to receive low grades in school, more likely to suffer from depression, and more likely to think about suicide. In addition to these negative outcomes, distinctively weak self-esteem and distinctively high likelihood to actually attempt suicide was observed among adolescent girls who rarely or never ate meals with their families. Because of the gravity of the finding on likelihood of a suicide attempt, the researchers underscore the point: "girls reporting more than 7 family meals per week were almost half as likely to report a suicide attempt compared with girls eating no family meals."
Of course, some of the protective effect of eating meals with the family might be interpreted as the natural consequence of overall family closeness. And, in fact, the Minnesota researchers limn a statistical link between family meal frequency and "family connectedness" (p < 0.001). However, when the researchers deployed a sophisticated statistical model that made separate allowance for reported "family connectedness," teenagers of both sexes who seldom or never ate meals with their families were still especially likely to use tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana and more likely to suffer from depression (p < 0.05 for all four outcomes). In the same statistical model that controlled for "family connectedness," teenage girls who seldom or never ate meals with their families were also particularly likely to earn low grades, and to both think about and attempt suicide (p < 0.05 for all three additional outcomes). The persistence in this statistical model of family mealtime as a predictor of behavioral and psychological outcomes indicates to the researchers that "eating meals as a family has benefits for young people above and beyond their general sense of connection to family members."
So durable is the link between teenagers' not eating meals with their families and their experiencing adverse consequences that even when the researchers took separate statistical account of family connectedness, parents' marital status, school level, race, and socioeconomic status, their statistical models still showed that teenage boys who seldom or never ate meals with their families were distinctively at risk to smoke and use alcohol (p < 0.05 for both outcomes) and that teenage girls who seldom or never ate meals with their families were particularly likely to use alcohol and marijuana and to suffer from depression (p < 0.05 for all three outcomes).
In trying to explain why teens who do not eat with their families are so vulnerable to psychological problems, so likely to engage in risky or even self-destructive behaviors, the Minnesota researchers reason that "family meals may ... provide a formal or informal 'check-in' time during which parents can tune in to the emotional well-being of their teens, particularly girls. Likewise family mealtimes may serve as a marker for young people spending more time at home and away from negative peer influences or youth culture more generally."
In underscoring the potential importance of family mealtime for "a broad range of health domains," the authors of the new study highlight the statistical evidence that family meals serve as "a potentially protective factor in the lives of adolescents for nearly all of [the] variables [investigated], particularly among adolescent girls." Given that it is adolescent girls who are most at risk when family meals stop, readers of this new study may detect some unpleasant irony in the fact that such meals have become infrequent in modern America largely because of the effects of the feminist movement.
