The Mannerly Guide to Family Dinner

When I think about the family dinners of my childhood, I feel like I need to make a confession. Almost zero of our family dinners were ‘homemade’ by my mom. My mother loved takeout from her favorite restaurants, and she also loved making reservations. She would bring the takeout home, plate it beautifully on china, and seat us as though she had been cooking all afternoon. I carried that exact skill into my own marriage in 2012. But that’s another story for another day…

My mother worked (as an etiquette educator) during the day which made it hard to prepare a big family meal, but she still made it a priority to get our family around the table.

The research agrees with her, and the findings are really, really compelling. Good things take root slowly.

Below, for paid subscribers, I’m sharing the vocabulary research that has outperformed the bedtime story, what years of data say family dinner does for teenagers, and my grandmother’s one rule for correcting table manners without ruining the table.