The Family Dinner Deconstructed
February 7, 2008
About a decade ago, research started appearing on the family dinner, and the news was uniformly good.
Children who ate with their families were less likely to do drugs, smoke, have eating disorders or become depressed. They were better at reading, less likely to end up in the hospital for asthma and had better grades. And perhaps most shocking of all, in rare instances they could apparently demonstrate exemplary table manners. (Scientists have been unable to replicate this last finding on a consistent basis, however.)
Dads and moms across the country took note and began rearranging schedules. Meeting were canceled, work dinners declined, tuna casseroles purchased. It worked. By 2005, a study conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse — one of the country’s foremost advocates of the dinner hour — indicated that the number of teenagers who ate with their families had increased by a whopping 23 percent since the late ’90s.
Now, there is no doubt that dinner is a noble pursuit. But research on its benefits does raise a question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
In other words, does dinner itself offer some magical protection, or is something else going on?
David Dickinson, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University, says this remains an open question.
“It’s possible that some of these findings are occurring because the ability to organize a mealtime and come together may be just one indicator of a family that is intact and functional,” Dickinson says.
Basically, strong families are able to sit down together each night and eat, and strong families — rather than regular meals — produce healthy kids.
A Closer Look
Dickinson has done his own research on the family meal. Several years ago, he and a group of researchers from Harvard wanted to figure out why some kids learned to read early while others lagged behind.
They did this by looking at family routines, such as how often families read to their children, ate with their children and played with their children. When they started the study, Dickinson says the group fully expected that reading would be the most important contributor to early literacy.
Instead, Dickinson says, they found that mealtimes “were a much stronger predictor of how later development would go for children’s language and literacy development.”
And so that was the headline: Family dinner equals early reading.
But as Dickinson will tell you, if you looked more deeply at the research you might come to a different conclusion. It turns out that the verbal content of dinner was really important. The kids who did well didn’t just eat dinner with families, they ate dinner with families that maintained complex conversations rich with explanation and storytelling.
“When a new word was used — like ‘reptile’ — the parent that would stop and say, ‘You know, like a snake’ — or say something that would give the child a definition of what that meant, and those interactions were very powerful,” Dickinson explains.
Dinner provided an opportunity for children to be exposed to these language behaviors on a regular basis. But dinner in a more-limited verbal environment apparently didn’t have the same effect.
And this kind of thing is true in a variety of studies on dinner. While the headlines tout the power of sitting together over a plate of meatloaf, often when you look beneath the surface, the clarity of that picture muddies.
Barbara Fiese, a professor at Syracuse University, produced a study which indicated that children with asthma who ate dinner with their families were less likely to end up in the emergency room. But as with the Dickinson study, it turned out that the specific behaviors that the families engaged in were critical to producing this result.
In order for the family dinner to have a benefit, parents had to demonstrate interest in a child’s day, regularly express empathy, and organize the dinner in a fairly specific way, such as assigning roles like table setting and making sure that family members began and finished dinner at the same time.
So is it possible for a dysfunctional family to sit down together each night and benefit?
“They can if the meal is conducted in a way to support healthy development,” Fiese says.
Don’t Dismiss Dinner
While it may be that the good news on dinner is premature, it’s also too early to dismiss the possibility that the meal itself substantively contributes to family well-being.
To answer this question, researchers need to do an experimental intervention where similar families are randomized into regular family meal groups and non-regular family meal groups. Thus far, no study of this kind has been undertaken.
In the meantime, as David Dickinson says, it’s probably a good idea to keep the dinner hour going. As he points out, dinner is one of the few times in modern life when families can sit down together, speak face to face, and build relationships. All things, he says, which simply can’t hurt.
Judges plead with county for bigger jail
February 5, 2008
Clarke County needs both a larger jail and more programs to rehabilitate criminals and ease them back into society, local judges told a new criminal justice task force Monday.
“The conditions (at the jail) are, in my opinion, horrific,” Athens-Clarke State Court Judge Kent Lawrence said. “The jail is just not, in my opinion, a suitable environment for the deputies who have to work there (and) the inmates being housed there. It’s a public safety issue.”
The population of the aging jail has exceeded the 338-inmate capacity for years, creating a dangerous environment for both deputies and inmates and costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars to house inmates out of county, according to officials. Change is overdue, three judges and other county officials said.
Lawrence recommended larger holding cells at the Clarke County Courthouse, larger courtrooms at the jail and new technology to allow judges to hold hearings and lawyers to meet with clients via video, cutting down on transportation costs.
Poverty, illiteracy and unemployment are the root causes of the rising jail population, Clarke County Superior Court Judge David Sweat said. Most Superior Court defendents are indigent and “quasi-homeless,” so they’re hard to keep track of if they’re released and they can’t afford ankle monitors, Sweat and Judge Lawton Stephens said.
Many people are caught in a cycle - they are sentenced to probation, then steal or use drugs and wind up right back in jail, Sweat said.
“It’s the same folks,” he said. “We see them all the time.”
At any given time, 30 or 35 people are in jail because they didn’t pay child support, but they can’t pay it when they’re in custody and can’t work, Lawrence said. Such people need a work-release program where law enforcement can keep an eye on them but they can earn a living, he said.
The judges touted a diversion center scheduled for construction next year, drug, DUI and mental health courts and day centers where probationers report on a daily or weekly basis for counseling and treatment. Such programs reduce the chance of recidivism, and more are needed for offenders who aren’t considered dangerous, they said.
“We’re always looking for alternatives to incarceration,” Stephens said.
The task force will be responsible for overseeing planning for a new or expanded Clarke County jail, evaluating punishments and rehabilitation programs that don’t involve jail time and streamlining the overall criminal justice system to reduce overcrowding at the jail.
“I don’t think we’ve always had enough cooperation and collaboration, although I will tell you that is changing, and I’m very pleased,” Mayor Heidi Davison said.
The task force, chaired by Athens-Clarke commissioners Elton Dodson and Harry Sims, met for the first time Monday, but Davison won’t officially appoint its members until tonight’s commission meeting. They will include two lawyers, two University of Georgia law professors and three other Athens residents.
The task force is supposed to report to the commission by May, but Dodson already has said it’s likely to miss that deadline.
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 020508
February 5, 2008
http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/020508/news_20080205032.shtml
DUI/Drug Court Receives Grant
February 5, 2008
The Georgia Power Foundation presented Friends of the Court with a $2,500 check Friday, Jan. 25, to help fund Burke County’s DUI/Drug Court. In a letter to the organization, Susan Carter, executive director of the Georgia Power Foundation, said they were glad to give support to a court that offers alcohol and drug recovery programs to its participants. Pictured are, from left, Georgia Power employee Louia Sapp; Betty White, public relations chairperson of Friends of the Court; Laura Riska, CSRA probation officer; State Court Judge Jerry Daniel; and John Hamilton, newly appointed DUI/ Drug Court coordinator.
January 29, 2008
The True Citizen
