Making more time for your family can only be a positive thing as a parent, and a part of that is making time for meals together. It’s a good way to start the day and end the day too. It gives you the chance to catch up, share time together and bond. But if you feel like you’re not making time for family meals together or your family meal routines are a little dull, read on and find out how to change that.
Cook Together
Cooking together as a family is a good way to ensure you’re not leaving all the work to one person. Sharing responsibilities or even making it a communal effort between you and your partner or you and your older children can be a good way to get everyone involved. And after the cooking is done, you can share the food together, and it makes the whole experience more communal.
Turn Off the TV
It’s important that the shared meal experience is not overrun by external distractions. So turn the TV off, ensure everyone puts their phones away and instead focus on conversation and sharing time with one another away from all of those distractions. It might be an alien concept to some nowadays, but it’s certainly more than worth in terms of the chance it gives you to share valuable time together.
Make Mealtime Fun and Playful
Mealtimes should be fun for the whole family if you want to make it a time that every member of the family wants to get involved in. If you have young children, you could get them involved in the cooking and give them a task to take care of. This can be fun for them and an opportunity for them to learn at the same time.
Ensure Everyone Schedules Time for Meals
Ensuring you all schedule time for meals together is important. You want to make sure that you’re all prioritizing time for your family and for meals because it’s very easy to fail to do that when you have other commitments and responsibilities to take care of. So think about how you can do that more often because that’s the only way you’ll find time for meals together.
Don’t Overcomplicate Things
You don’t need to make things too complicated when it comes to family mealtimes. If you spend too much time cooking, you’ll be tired and frustrated and you might not want to cook the next day. And it’s also about spending time together, not spending hours over the stove. You should try these crock pot ribs if you want an example of a delicious recipe you can cook with minimal effort.
As you can see, there are lots of little changes you can make to ensure you and your family have time together for meals. Most importantly, you need to make it something that everyone enjoys and wants to be a part of. If things are dull and boring, your older children probably won’t want to be involved.
