3 Ways to Make Family Dinners Fun

Family dinners are one of the most important factors to a kid’s success in school and in life. However, if you arent used to sitting down to the dinner table each night, that can be a daunting prospect. Here are a few tips to ease the stress and increase the fun.

1. Tell me three.

To encourage productive conversation around the table, have everyone at the table share three things about their day. This prevents the “How was your day?” “Fine.” conversation. Even toddlers can tell what they did over the day with a little prompting. If you have older kids (read: teens), remember not to judge what they say. If they say something that needs to be discussed further, do it later. If you question it at the table, they may see it as a challenge or harassment and then shut down.

2. Tell a joke.

Another way to encourage conversation is to tell a joke. It doesn’t have to be great (my seven year old insists on telling made up knock knock jokes), but if it even gets a groan, that’s OK. If you have younger kids, help them out by looking up and then teaching them a joke that they can tell at the table. Here is a site with kid appropriate jokes.

3. Everyone’s stuck with cleanup duty.

I hate cleaning up after dinner. It’s one of those tasks that ranks up there with hand washing dishes. To make this task less painful, we assign everyone a job to make it go quicker and you can do the same. Toddlers can clear silverware and throw napkins away. Older kids can load the dishwasher and clean counters. In fact, dads can even do this!

Family dinners are an important way for families to slow down and reconnect in a crazy, too fast, technologically overloaded world. Be willing to find ways to make the family dinner work for you.

What challenges do you face when trying to get everyone to the table? What tricks work for you?

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