Life is busy.  During the school year, evenings are quickly filled with work and sports schedules, games, homework, friends and ever-present chores.  While it can be hard to get the family together at the same time for dinner, the importance of a family meal is consistently demonstrated in research studies.  As summarized by Nancy Gibbs from Time Magazine, “studies show that the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use.”  Sounds pretty good.

If you are not already in the habit of sitting down together for at least one meal every day, start now.  Be flexible about mealtime – perhaps breakfast works best for your family’s schedule.  Pick a quick and easy meal.  It helps to plan a week’s menu in advance when grocery shopping to prevent last minute scrambles to get something together and to ensure that all necessary ingredients are on hand.  Encourage everyone in the family to help get the meal together so the labor does not fall on just one person.  Even young children can help with age-appropriate tasks such as putting silverware on the table.  Create conversation at meal time by having everyone share the best and worst part of their day.  And most importantly, turn off the television.

    Change is hard for the majority of people.  This is why obesity, diabetes, eating disorders, and other health problems are on the rise despite continued education and prevention efforts.  Why do people continue to make unhealthy choices?
    Part of the problem is that the solution is not as easy as simply taking a pill, avoiding a food, or following a diet for two weeks.  A person making unhealthy choices often has a relationship with food that is like a length of yarn that has grown tangled and snarled with each unhealthy choice, assumption, action, or observation that person has made over their lifetime. Trying to untangle the ball all at once is near to impossible and many people don’t have the confidence or motivation to slowly untangle the knots one by one.
    Children start their lives with a clear length of yarn and they deserve the right to reach adulthood with the same untangled piece of yarn. However, each time they experience unhealthy behaviors such as hearing cheers when they cleaned their plate or being scolded when they did not, watching someone mindlessly eating in front of the television, hearing someone complaining about their body, or being rewarded with food or given food for some reason other than hunger, a twist, a kink, a knot appears in their yarn.  The more often this happens, the more snarled and dysfunctional their own ball of yarn becomes.    Ultimately, they will find themselves an adult with a huge knotted ball of yarn that they can painstakingly work to unravel or can ignore and become buried under.
    Think about your own relationship with your diet, your weight, and your health.  Is it what you want for your child?  Or, are you willing to slowly untangle one knot at a time and send your child into the world without their own snarl of yarn to trip them up?