16 Elinor Ochs, an applied-linguistics lecturer at the University of California, who has studied dinner customs and conversations, says the most successful dinner times involve story-telling. Too often, however, parents get the children to tell stories but contribute few of their own. “Typically,” she says, “the mother encourages the child to tell a story, and then the father acts as the critic, judging the child’s actions. Parents need to guard against this.”
17 Perhaps the biggest value of story-telling is that it provides an easy path into any complex issue. “Everyone enjoys a good story,” Elinor Ochs says, “especially the younger members of the family who might otherwise have trouble wrestling with complex ideas.”
18 Story-telling is also valuable for problem-solving. Five years ago, my son Ben mentioned a child at day camp who kept bullying him. Sitting round the dinner table, Ben’s two older brothers and I started wondering why. It turned out that it was the boy’s first time there he didn’t know anybody. Someone recommended Ben use reverse psychology and ask the boy to join in some activity with him and his friends.
19 The next night, Ben told us the new boy wasn’t so bad. In fact, Ben had invited him over to play the following Saturday.
· Broaden the discussion to include everyone.
20 After one child’s report of the day’s events, steer the talk towards broader issues. John Ronan lives with his wife and two stepsons near the coast. One evening at dinner, 17-year-old Ben was complaining about his summer job on a fishing boat. Each day they pulled up lots of worthless fish instead of the cod they sought. Detaching the unwanted ones, throwing them back and resetting the lines was time-consuming work that cut into Ben’s pay-packet.
21 “It must be frustrating to work hard and not get much for it,” John commented. Then he steered the conversation towards a wider topic, and soon the family was discussing everything from the work ethic to regulations governing commercial fishing. Ben began to see the relationship between his own situation and problems that beset the industry as a whole.
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· Play games
22 Paul Iaffaldano, an advertising salesman, recalls how his daughters Paige, eight, and Blair, six, used to clam up at dinner when asked about school. That changed when they invented a game called Truth or Lie. Now everyone takes turns relating what happened that day. Once in a while, someone throws in a tall tale to see if the others can detect it.
23 “When we were growing up,” reminisces American broadcaster Katie Couric, “my dad asked each of us four kids to bring a new word to the dinner table every night. The other kids would have to guess the meaning. My favorites were ‘incongruous’ and ‘perspicacity.”
· Invite a guest to dinner.
24New faces at the table mean new ideas and a fresh point of view. Playwright Israel Horovitz remembers his parents always had lively Sunday dinners with family and friends. “My mother’s side of the family told jokes, and we all doubled up laughing,” says Horovitz. “My father’s side sat quietly and told impressive success stories.” Now, with wife Gillian and their nine-year-old twins, Horovitz keeps up the tradition of inviting friends or colleagues to dinner. Their dinner hour, he says, is filled with both “lots of jokes and lots of success stories.”
25Times change and families change. But one of the constants in life is the importance of the family dinner. As Erma Bombeck notes of her own childhood dinner times: “We argued. We sulked. We laughed. We asked for favours. We shouted. We listened. It is still our family’s finest hour. ”
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