Turning Off the Television

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as television during dinner time. In fact, something such as eating dinner with my family while having a television on would have been an absurd suggestion. Instead, we would always eat dinner as a family while sitting at our dining room table between the hours of 5:30 p.m. And 6:30 p.m. While my family was one of many that did this back in the 1980s and 1990s, there are many families today who barely even know what a dining room table is!

It is a sad fact that now, as soon as the food is prepared, family members or even spouses take their plates and run as if they are magnetically drawn towards the televisions in their household. And with this comes the realization that perhaps there is a breakdown in the family structure that has occurred and is only getting worse as time goes on. You see, years ago, it was common to have only one member or parent of a household who would go to work full time while the other stayed home with the children. In many households, the parent that often stayed home happened to be the mother. However, as time went on, we began to see a radical shift in this way of living. I remember that by the time my younger brother and I were in high school, my mother had switched from staying at home with us to working full time in an effort to bring a little more income into the household. Still, all the way through high school, up until I went away to college, dinner was a family event.

Dinner was a time where my dad would get home from a long day at the office, my brother and I would get home from school and we could all sit down as a family and talk about how our days went. Often, the conversation would focus on my brother and I and how school was as well as what exciting things were going on with any extracurricular activities that we were involved in at the time. My mother and father would also chat about whatever it was that adults talked about back then. Then, afterward, either my brother or I would have dish washing duty or other miscellaneous chores to do before we could relax and do whatever it was we wanted. In essence, there was a certain kind of structure that was in place.

Now, with many households that have both parents working full time while the children are still young, there is no one to really be there for their son or daughter when they get home from school. Dinner has been elasticized to include any form of eating that takes place within your home sometime in the evening either with or without your parent(s) being present. I can remember that some of my friends would actually ask to come over to my house because they liked having a home-made meal at a dinner table versus eating fast food or going out to eat all the time. Today, it really makes me wonder what this lack of structure will do to children who are growing up in terms of the eating habits that they will develop. I guess that only time will tell.