Table talk
Posted on June 26, 2005
Filed Under: Books, Personal
Tagged: children, communication, dinner, family, talk
Matthew Homann’s [non]billablehour posted some information from Eide Neurolearning Blog about the benefits of family dinner:
According to a Harvard study, family dinners were more important than play, story time, or other family events for building vocabulary. And “families that engaged in extended discourse at the dinner table, like story telling and explanations, rather than one-phrase comments, like ‘eat your vegetables,’ had children with better language skills, said Dr. Catherine Snow, a professor of education at Harvard and the researcher of the study. Parents should be encouraged to use adult-level vocabulary and encourage back-and-forth conversation with their kids. It also helps social skills. Today, 65% of families with kids under the age of 6 have dinner together 5 or so nights per week, but that drops to 50% if a family has kids age 12 to 17.
How true. We routinely have discussions at our dinner table and include our daughter in them at all times. Recently she and I had watched both The Incredibles and the first 3 Star Wars movies together. Some people would argue that those films may be a little “old” for her - but they didn’t hear our dinner conversation either…
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