Family Dinner Night is Tonight!

Last week I shared some of the details from the recent survey conducted for M&M Meat Shops focused on family dinner habits.  The results of the survey weren’t exactly glowing.

Here are some stand out points from the survey:

• Quebec is the provincial leader in eating dinner with the family, with 43% of those surveyed saying they eat dinner as a family every night

• In Alberta, an astonishing 11% of respondents say that they never sit down to a family dinner

• 12% of parents don’t know if their kids know how to set a table because they’ve never asked them to

• 40% of those over 55 years of age eat with their family or spouse every night

• Not surprisingly, only 20% of households with kids 18 and older eat dinner together every night; 7% of these households never eat dinner as a family

• Almost three-quarters of kids in Manitoba know how to set the table, as compared to only one-third of kids in Saskatchewan

• 2% of respondents say they don’t sit down to a family dinner because the dinners are too boring; another 2% say it’s because they already spend too much time as a
family; and 4% say it’s because their kids don’t want to.

“The decline of the family dinner is a disturbing trend,” says Andy O’Brien, M&M Meat Shops’ CEO. To mark the 10th  Anniversary of National Family Dinner Night, M&M Meat Shops is leading a back-to-basics approach to bringing back the lost art of dinner.  “While nourishment is important, dinner is so much more than the food you eat. Dinner is time spent together to talk to your loved ones and to acknowledge the value of every friend and family member at the table,” says Andy.

Our lives are so busy now that we’ve moved to a larger city and have access to more activities (and more fun!) but we still try to have a sit-down dinner every night.  With activities that start at 6pm, sometimes that dinner means 4:45 but we’re still together.  It’s the perfect time to catch up, find out what’s going on at school and have a few laughs too.  I think if families make it a priority, family dinners can happen more than the stats above explain.

National Family Night is tonight, September 18th –  but as Canadians let’s do better and make family dinner night an everyday thing and not something needing a special night.