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It’s a contemporary image of the American family: children eating dinner in front of the television set, Mom and Dad drifting through the kitchen at whatever odd hours they come home from work to fix individual meals, the nuclear family reduced to bouncing particles.
But the image may be all wrong. According to a New York Times / CBS News poll, the vast majority (80 percent) of Americans with children say that on a typical weeknight most of their family eats dinner together.
Interviews with 31 respondents after the poll revealed that despite the pressures on single parents and on families in which both parents work outside the home, families go to great lengths to eat dinner together. Nearly all of these people said eating dinner together provided a peaceful respite from the frenzy of their day. Without it, many said, they would no longer feel as though they were a family.
