- Study also found that fathers were likely to miss family meals if unhappy at work
Eating together as a family isn’t just good for bonding – it could also help with discipline.
A study suggests that fathers who do not make it home for dinner with their families could end up with more badly behaved children.
Researchers spent time with over 1,400 married couples with two-year-old children, calculating how many dinners a week the child ate with their mother and father.
They revisited the families when each child was four or five years old and asked the parents questions about their behavior.
The study found that children who had eaten dinner with their father less often as toddlers grew up to be more poorly behaved.
A study has found that children behaved worse if they had eaten dinner with their father less often as toddlers, even if they ate with their mother every day
That was the case even if the children ate dinner with their mother every day. Regardless of how often women ate evening meals with their child, their behavior was worse if their father ate dinner with them less often.
Sehyun Ju from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who led the study, said: ‘During family meals, children learn from watching adults share food, interact with each other, hold conversations, and make eye contact.
‘This is a unique daily experience which may help them learn how to communicate and behave.
‘These results suggest that having the whole family around the table is important because fathers bring important and unique qualities, as well as mothers.’
The study, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, found that just one meal a week where a father or mother was missing from the dinner table was linked to worsened childhood behavior.
According to the research, mothers who were unhappy at work were less likely to avoid eating with the family, while the opposite was true for fathers dissatisfied with their job
However, mothers who were unhappy at work were less likely to avoid family dinner times.Follow Google News
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