The whole concept of family dinner, if you think about it, is pretty elemental: you gather around a table in the waning hours, you and yours, and eat some grub, converse about your day and, if you’re lucky, life its ownself. But sometimes — or, most of the time — our dinners can resemble not so much a family of four eating in the kitchen of our Dutch colonial but a pre-verbal gathering of primitive hominids on the veldt, hunched over a large rock, devouring the day’s kill with frightening, brutal efficiency – quick, before somebody steals it! – and doing it all through a silence punctured only by occasional lip smacks and grunts of pleasure. In other words, getting dinner on the table often feels like the easy part; it’s the conversing and communicating — the family part of family dinner — that often prove more elusive. And, okay, if you insist on greater specificity, it’s our ability to get our children to SPEAK TO US that is often very much in doubt. (more…)
