The Holiday Dinner: Rare Time Family Ever Eats Together

Few care to admit it. But for many Orange County families, today’s Thanksgiving feast will mark one of the rare meals they actually share, sitting down, at a table, all together.

For working parents, the daily sit-down dinner they knew as children has vanished into history, giving way to what experts call “grab and eat”--a slap-dash affair of tuna sandwiches on the run or microwaved frozen food in front of the TV.

Some families manage dinners together when the children are babies, said Nancy Claxton, president of the local branch of the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children.

“But you begin to see this fall apart in the mid-elementary school years where there is soccer practice, Scouts, two working parents with different schedules. And from there on, it just falls apart,” she said.

s ForgottenMeg Flavin, a single mother of two teen-agers in Irvine, is well acquainted with nontraditional approaches to dinner.

“My kids go crazy if I cook, it’s that rare,” she said, describing their happy excitement on those occasions.

Besides working as a sales representative, Flavin runs her own business--grocery shopping for others. Her clients increasingly include two-income families, she said. In one, the wife comes home around 8 or 9 p.m. and the maid feeds the 18-month-old boy, Flavin said.

Many, like Kathy and Jeff Svoboda of Costa Mesa who run their own business, strive for the sit-down balanced meal but don’t always achieve the goal.

“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” Kathy said. “It’s very hard.”

Usually she leaves work early to pick up fast food at El Pollo Loco, or something from the grocery store, for the family. She and the three children, ages 5, 11 and 12, wait until Jeff comes home at 6:30 p.m. and they eat together for 20 or 30 minutes before rushing off to do errands or housecleaning.

She also runs up against resistance from the older children. “They want to be with their friends, who get to grab a microwave burger which is the norm these days. I’m fighting it tooth and nail.”

These families typify the stresses and strains of modern life, especially in an area such as Orange County, which is filled with two-income families, experts say.

In a third of American households in which both the husband and wife work, the two don’t even get off work at the same time, said Kenneth Chew, a family demographer at UC Irvine.

Chew, an assistant professor in social ecology, said he and his wife, a psychiatrist, read newspapers at the dinner table. Their daughter, who is 4, now also insists on having a book of her own to read at dinner.

Some families feel guilty about their eating habits, to the point where they were willing to talk about dinner scenes at their homes, but were unwilling to be named:

- A father in Costa Mesa eats a microwaved dinner in the bedroom watching football while his wife and two children eat scrambled eggs and O-Boy frozen food on lap trays in the living room watching “Charles in Charge.”

- A single mother in Irvine jogs while her 13-year-old and her 16-year-old make themselves potato casserole and turkey sandwiches.

- A Dana Point couple dine by candlelight in the dining room while their boys, ages 6 and 8, eat and throw toys at each other in the kitchen.

Some interviewed, however, have held tightly to the idealized daily family gathering, including a ban on television during dinner.

At the Laguna Beach home of Superior Court Judge David and Mari Ellen Carter, a full-time public relations specialist, all six children, ages 7 to 18, are expected to sit down for dinner at 6 p.m. Mari Ellen makes chicken, spaghetti or tacos, or they may order in pizza once a week, she said. The television is nowhere in sight.

“Dinner is our real communication time,” she said. “Sometimes Dave presents his cases at the table. He generally tells what happened and the kids give their opinions on how they would call it. It gets them thinking.”

After dinner, she said, she bakes cakes or brownies with her 7-year-old daughter.

But this is far from typical, according to Chew.

“I don’t see many calm family dinners,” he said. “I see potatoes thrown around, shouting, arguments and fights. I don’t know many families who go around calm all the time. With teen-agers you get a fair amount of wising off, everybody’s tired. You do this every day, and there’s nothing special about it.”

Gregory Bodenhamer, director of Back in Control, a parent training center in Orange, supported the commonly believed notion that families that eat together regularly have fewer problems with their children.

“By the time they come to us, most of the kids are no longer eating dinner with the family. They’re either grabbing something and running off or not bothering to come home and eat at all.

“It’s not the eating that is the key factor,” he said, rather the fact that “that’s where they take the time to talk about being together as a family.”

He suggests eating at least one meal together as a help for troubled families.

Viewing the family meal as a romanticized ideal from a bygone era may be a mistake, however, Chew said.

People now in their late 20s to early 40s were reared by an unusual group of American parents who married at extremely early ages, had low rates of divorce and relatively high birth rates.

“That 1950s generation was a deviant generation from the point of view of demographic behavior,” Chew said.

In many eras before the ‘80s, work took precedence over mealtime, he said. In movies and literature, women are often portrayed as taking food out to the field workers who grab something and get back on the plow.

“What’s different is that it’s the wife or the daughters doing it rather than McDonald’s.