We spend a fair bit of time at Plugged In keeping tabs on stories and studies correlating how entertainment and culture influence the choices we make. Much of the time, those behavioral associations aren’t positive. And the steady drip of stories about the damaging ways that entertainment influences our society can start to feel pretty depressing sometimes.
This is not one of those stories.
On the contrary, it’s about one of those relatively rare studies that indicate how something simple and concrete—in this case, having dinner together as a family—can pay dividends helping adolescents combat the emotionally destabilizing effects of cyberbullying.
Researchers at the Institute for Health and Social Policy at Montreal’s McGill University analyzed survey data from more than 18,000 teens in 49 schools in Wisconsin. Those surveys indicated that about one in five students had been bullied via the Internet or text message the previous year. And those students had higher incidences of mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation, as well as behavioral problems such as fighting, vandalism, self-harm and substance abuse.
But interestingly, McGill’s researchers found that as the number of family dinners weekly increased, the mental health issues reported by those who’d been cyberbullied went down. While the scientists can’t identify exactly how family dinners help, they theorize that having a place to talk through issues and struggles may help teens process and deal with bullying better. “The more contact and communication [parents] have with young people, the more opportunities they have to express problems they have and discuss coping strategies,” says the study’s lead author, Frank J. Elgar. “Essentially the relationships between victimization and all other mental health outcomes were lessened with more frequent family dinners.”
Elgar’s scientific findings echo down-to-earth parenting wisdom: Conversations with your kids help parents identify problems adolescents may need help dealing with. “The message that comes through for us is to talk to your kids,” Elgar said. “Unless you take time to check in, a lot goes undetected.”
Dinner can help with other problems, as well. Elgar’s research is reinforced by similar findings from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Over the last 20 years, CASAColumbia has regularly surveyed teens regarding their drug and alcohol choices as well as the number of times they eat dinner regularly with their family each week. Summarizing the findings of CASAColumbia’s last such inquiry back in September 2012, Joseph A. Califano Jr. writes,
Our past surveys have consistently found a relationship between children having frequent dinners with their parents and a decreased risk of their using drugs, drinking or smoking, and that parental engagement fostered around the dinner table is one of the most potent tools to help parents raise healthy, drug-free children. Simply put: frequent family dinners make a big difference.
In a world where it so many forces pull young people in potentially dangerous directions, studies like these remind us that something as simple as shared meals as family can offer a powerful relational counterbalance when it comes to combatting those pernicious influences.
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