Since before I was married, I’ve always said that it would be a rule with my family that we have dinner together every night. I always imagined I would be fighting to get my children to join us at the table. I was wrong. My husband has worked many evenings missing dinner (and now misses all of them since he is working in a different state) and I find that I struggle giving my full attention when he is gone. I often clean up my mess from cooking as the kids are eating and they are done and off to play before I even sit down.

I came across an article by Marianne Jennings that Stephen Covey put in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families. It really hit me and I’m going to renew my vow to make dinner time – family time. I will sit down with my kids and really listen to what they have to say and when we are blessed to live with my husband again we will make it a priority that he joins us for dinner.

Here is the article by Marianne Jennings:

I cut my wedding dress at the same place where I memorized my spelling words. It was in that same place that I ate Archway cookies each day after school. And it was there that I prepared for my SAT. My husband-to-be was grilled mercilessly in that same spot. Much of what I have learned and hold dear is inextricably intertwined with the kitchen table. This 4-by-6 scratched and worn piece of furniture was a small physical part of my home. Yet as I look back on what we did there, I realize that it was a key to the life I now have.

Each night during my youth it was the kitchen table where I was held accountable for the day’s events. “When is the next report card?” “Did you clean up the mess in the basement?” “Did you practice your piano today?”

If you wanted dinner, you had to accept the accompanying interrogation that would have violated my Miranda rights if I had done something more than attempt to bathe the neighbor’s parakeet. There was no escaping the nightly confrontation with accountability.

But the kitchen table was not just a source of fear, it was my security blanket. No matter how rough the day’s tauntings had been and no matter how discouraged I was over long division, the kitchen table and its adult caretakers were there every night to comfort and support.

The fear generated by the Cuban missile crisis and my fourth air-raid drill in a week disappeared in the daily certainty of a family gathered around that table graced with Del Monte canned peas, cloverleaf rolls, and oleo (margarine). Regardless of the day’s schedule or demands, the kitchen table brought us back together for roll call at 6:00p.m. every night.

And following my dismal task of doing dishes at a time when automatic dishwashers were country club novelties, I returned to the kitchen table to sweat bullets over homework. I read “Dick, Jane and Spot” stories aloud to my father, who then did his “homework” while I wrote and rewrote the math tables I carry in my mind even today.

Each morning that table sent me off fed and duly inspected for clean fingernails and pressed Bobbie Brooks. No one left that table without a review of the day’s events and assigned chores. That kitchen table nurtured. It was my constancy amid the insecurities of crooked teeth, more freckles than skin, and geography bees on state capitals.

Years have gone by since my days of Black Watch plaid and white anklets. Life has given me more challenges, joy, and love than I could have fathomed as my legs shock beneath that kitchen table when faced with parental inquiries. When I return to my parents’ home to visit, I find myself lingerings after breakfast to enjoy their company around the kitchen table. After dinner, the dishes wait as my father and I discuss everything from Jackie Onassis estate auction to potty-training.

And then shortly after we restore the kitchen to its spotless pre-dinner state, my children return. We sit together, three generations, as Breyer’s ice cream and Hershey’s syrup melt, drip, and stick to new tiny faces at that old table.

They tell Grandpa of their spelling tests and which word they missed. And Grandpa explains, “Your mother missed the same word. We sat right here and reviewed it. She still got it wrong.”

Perhaps it’s in the genes. Or perhaps it is in that kitchen table. That magical simple place where I learned responsibility and felt love and security.

As I struggle each night to get dinner on my kitchen table and round up my children from the four corners of our neighborhood. I wonder why I just don’t send them to their rooms with a chicken pot pie and Wheel of Fortune. I don’t because I am giving them the gift of the kitchen table.

In all the treatises on parenting, in all the psychological studies on child development, and in all the data on self-esteem, this humble key to rearing children is overlooked.

A recent survey revealed that only half of our teenagers eat dinner on a regular basis with their parents. Ninety-eight percent of female high school students who live with their birth parents go on to college. Teenagers who don’t have dinner with their families are four times as likely to have premarital sex.

Last year my daughter said she could only find one other student in her homeroom who had dinner each night at the kitchen table with her family.

They are both honor students. The other kids, my daughter explained, “make something in the microwave and then head to their rooms to watch TV.” They have no company, no questions – just Wheel of Fortune, and the grades to show for it. How sad that not all children’s lives are touched by the miracle of childhood. There’s something about a kitchen table.

What memories do you have of sitting at the kitchen table?