Nanny to Mommy

Regular family dinners are an excellent way to spend quality time with your kids and help grow a stronger bond as a unit. Your kids may moan and groan sometimes but stick with it because the long-term rewards of sharing in these moments will be worth it.

Maybe your mealtime isn’t going as well as you hoped or you’re trying it out for the first time. In either case, it’ll be helpful to learn some tips for having and planning successful and enjoyable family dinners. While they can’t and won’t all be perfect, you can do what’s in your power to help ensure that they occur and are managed in the best way possible.

One tip for successful and enjoyable family dinners is to have a set time you sit down each evening. If you’re always changing it then you risk people forgetting or not being able to show up. Try your best to set a time and then go forward with having the dinner even if someone is busy that night and can’t attend. Setting a time will set the expectation that it’s always happening and you should be there if you can.

Keep your family dinners interesting and exciting by serving a variety of foods. Mix it up without putting yourself through a lot of stress and strain trying to prepare the foods. For instance, you can check out the best way to steam broccoli in the microwave, which will make your job quick and easy and will be a healthy food to serve. Remind yourself that you don’t always have to plan elaborate meals that take a lot of time to make to have a successful and enjoyable family dinner.

You can get the most out of your family dinners by getting the conversation started right away. Dive in by having a few conversation starters ready to go each evening. Some nights you may discuss lighthearted topics that are fun and funny and other nights you may get into more serious conversation. Open up the lines of communication from the start but then hold back with directing the conversation and instead be open to seeing where it goes. You never know who will open up and help you all build more trust and allow you to establish healthy family relationships.

Another way to have a successful and enjoyable family dinner is to involve everyone in the entire process from start to finish. Instead of always doing all the work yourself, you can assign different and various tasks to each family member. Put some of the responsibility of preparing, cooking, and cleaning up dinner on your loved ones and work as a team to create each family dinner. It’ll be more fun this way and a chance for you to spend some quality time together and teach your kids about responsibility and the important life skill of cooking for themselves.