Family Mealtimes Prioritize Harmony

Veg Power, the not-for-profit alliance increasing the U.K.’s vegetable, fruit and beans consumption, announced the findings of its “Families and Food” initiative with the publication of Making more of family mealtimes — How do the dynamics of family mealtimes influence children’s diets? The report includes new research that found families are sharing five-plus main meals per week, and 80% of parents were very positive about eating together as a family.

However, while these results are encouraging due to the numerous benefits that eating together as a family brings, interestingly, there was no correlation between the frequency of family mealtimes and the number of vegetables a child eats on an average day. This finding suggests that families may be prioritizing the harmony of mealtime over health.

Key findings from the research include:

• While 80% of parents say family mealtimes were “important” or a “top priority,” those with highly fussy/picky or neurodiverse children were the least favorable toward family mealtimes, closely followed by those with lower household income (HHI).

• Five out of seven meals eaten by children are (in their parents’ language) “home-cooked.”

• The primary barrier to family mealtimes was cited as “facts of life,” e.g., scheduling conflicts.

• 13% of all the families surveyed do not own a table, but while this had a material impact on behaviors and attitudes, owning a table did not correlate with increased vegetable consumption.

• Screens are often present at mealtimes; only 24% of parents ban them at every mealtime and these children eat slightly more veg (2.5 handfuls) than those with screens during mealtimes every day (2.3 handfuls).

• While the frequency of family mealtimes did not appear to influence the amount of veg consumed, “fussiness” had a large impact, with 54% of children who are “highly fussy” eating just 0-1 handfuls of veg per day.

• The importance of positive role modeling was confirmed — the more veg a parent claims to eat, the more likely their child ate a healthy 3+ handfuls of veg per day.

Overall, these findings suggest that to help improve families’ dietary health, all public health campaigns and interventions should follow a fully inclusive design that encourages joint participation between parents and children and adds to the family mealtime experience rather than jeopardizing it.

By encouraging parents to maintain their focus on the harmony of mealtimes, the food and nutrition elements will happen much more easily and with less conflict. Veg Power believes supporting family harmony at mealtimes is essential to unlocking increased vegetable consumption and urges all future public health campaigns and interventions to enhance the fun and harmony of these occasions.

Veg Power is known for its creative initiatives that engage, inspire and motivate people to improve their diets and establish life-long good food habits. To assist them with the Families and Food initiative, the not-for-profit once again utilized its supporter network to convene a collaborative multi-disciplinary and cross-sector taskforce. The taskforce supported the development of the research questions, provided their expert opinion on the results, and helped Veg Power to fully understand the topic of family mealtimes to enable the most effective solutions to be proposed.

The research component consisted of an exploration of habits and barriers of family mealtimes in Veg Power’s annual survey of 3,000 parents and primary school-aged children.

HARMONY OVER HEALTH

While we were initially surprised at the findings of this research — that the frequency of family meals did not correspond to increased veg consumption — when we dug a little deeper, it suggests that parents are prioritizing harmony over health. Therefore, any future interventions in this space need to take this into consideration, and rather than disrupting or diminishing the occasion, they must have high potential to strengthen family bonds during meals.

This insight illustrates the importance of our collaborative approach to tackling dietary health issues.

Louise Burke, editorial director, Netmums, says, “This report echoes what we hear from parents every day — families want calm, happy mealtimes, but that can be tough when fussiness, neurodiversity, devices or busy schedules get in the way.”

Lucy Porter, lecturer, UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, says, “The findings from this survey will be really helpful for informing future efforts to support families. We know from past research that helping families to increase harmony at mealtimes and take the stress out of food can often go hand-in-hand with helping children to eat more vegetables — after all, a stressful environment makes it harder for parents to try different feeding approaches and harder for children to relax and try new foods.”

Porter says she was surprised to learn that eating meals together doesn’t necessarily translate into increased vegetable intake, but the “important thing for us to do now is to understand more about what family mealtimes currently look like, what families want them to look like, and what challenges they are facing in achieving this.“

Dan Parker is the chief executive of Veg Power.