A family tradition that unites us

Hello everyone, trust we are all having a pleasant week. I want to share my own experience and thoughts on this week's prompt about families eating together.

In a world that is fast paced with a lot of distractions, eating together as a family is a culture that is quickly getting lost on us. Back then, I remember that we always had many opportunities to eat together as a family no matter how little we had to eat. This happened mostly in the evenings when we were all back together from our daily activities and weekends when everyone was home. My mum would serve the meals after we all did our part in cooking and we all sat together to enjoy it with many fun discussions, teasings and sharing of how we spent the day. Then we would watch the evening news before retiring to bed. While on weekends we spend longer times together during and after meals having a family discussion even about spiritual matters. This was a tradition that kept the family close knit and got us wanting to come home to the ones we loved.

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But today, families find themselves pulled into different activities like work even at night, school, social activities and there is even digital distractions where even when all are present physically, they are not completely attentive because they are emersed in one electrinic device or the other. So sitting together as a family for a meal is rare.

Growing up we also found ourselves in this mix as some of us started having more individual time away from the family with activities like higher education, more demanding jobs for my parents, and some of my siblings even had to leave home and then the digital era came where we started having phones and other devices that sort of blurred this tradition of spending evenings together. As young adults, we even want to eat on our own in the room rather than sitting with our parents.

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However this tradition does now necessarily have to stop because of such reasons because when a family is intentional about building bonds that unites, they will find a way. Families can make it an agreement that everyone sits together for a meal in the dinning or family sitting area at least once a day or few times a week and have discussions that strengthens the family bonds. This will enable younger children have an informal setting where they learn values, language skills and social etiquette. Parents might share a story about what transpired at work, teenagers will share the stress they are going through like any peer pressure in school and others give their own experiences which in turn builds communication skills, problem solving together as a family and the likes

I plan to intentionally continue this tradition as I make it a practice to eat daily with my spouse even in the the same plate to create bond and opportunities to discuss about the days activities. This tradition should be encouraged and all devices put away in families while eating and we will more ways to connect, unity, growth and understanding in the family because family dinner table is more than just a place to eat.