Research reportMothers and meals. The effects of mothers’ meal planning and shopping motivations on children's participation in family meals☆
Introduction
Family meals have become a touchstone for not only children's well-being but also the fate of the family itself. Some have argued that such events are disappearing (Murcott, 1997) and others have identified barriers to successful family meals (Fulkerson, Neumark-Sztainer, & Story, 2006). However, Jackson, Oliver, and Smith (2009) assert that concern about the decline of family meals constitutes a “moral panic” and family time at meals has remained highly stable over the past 30 years. By looking at historical data, they claim stability over the past 100 years. Furthermore, the symbolic status of the family meal remains intact. What has changed appears to be the percentage of these meals consumed away from home.
At the same time, children's participation in family meals, particularly dinner, has received a great deal of attention by researchers, who have found that such meals promote healthier eating among children and adolescents in the form of (1) greater fruit and vegetable consumption and (2) less soft drink consumption. Woodruff and Hanning (2008) reviewed the research on adolescent participation in family meals and its effect on their dietary intake, finding family meals to be associated with greater intake of grains, vegetables and fruit and lower intake of fried foods and soft drinks. Neumark-Sztainer (2006) reports greater nutrient intake (Vitamins A, C, E, B6, folate; fiber; calcium and iron) as well as less disordered eating. Others have linked family meal participation and psychological well-being (less depression; higher self-esteem; less suicidal ideation) and lower proneness to engage in delinquent activities (lower likelihood of smoking, drinking alcohol, using marijuana) (Eisenberg, Olson, Neumark-Sztainer, Story, & Bearinger, 2004). It is perhaps predictable that this research has spawned books with titles such as “The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier” (Weinstein, 2005). This book in all likelihood greatly exaggerates the “power” of the family meal. More importantly, missing from the academic literature is how children are persuaded to participate in family meals.
We thus face various claims about the healthfulness of family meals and their value to participants, particularly children, but we know little about why children participate in them. Neumark-Sztainer, Story, Ackard, Moe, and Perry (2000:329) found from a focus group study that “parent and teen schedules, teen desire for autonomy, dissatisfaction with family relations and dislike of the food served at family meals” were things that led to lower participation. But this literature describes only half of the story; it tells us little about why children are motivated to participate in dinner in the first place.
Some recent work provides hints. To begin with, family meal participation by teenagers increased from 1996 to 2007 (National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, 2007). These researchers also found that 84% of their respondents preferred eating dinner with their families to eating alone. Teens in this study perceived that “the best time to talk to their parents about something important to them was during or after dinner…” Ironically, now discredited ‘functionalists’ in sociology used to describe communication and information-sharing as key functions of family meals (see McIntosh, 1996). Results of a study by Olsen and Ruiz (2008) suggest that children's participation in decisions about what foods are served during family meals may affect their participation in those meals. They suggest that children participate in meals more frequently when their choices are served, having received “reward power” from having their food choices considered. These accounts, however, do not consider other efforts by mothers to construct meals as family events that family members including children come to see as important.
In addition, the frequency with which children eat dinner with their families is influenced by age and socioeconomic status of the family. Research by Taveras et al. (2005) found that younger children ate dinner more frequently with their family than did older children; similarly, Neumark-Sztainer, Hannan, Story, Croll, and Perry (2003) found that high-school students ate fewer times a week with their families than did middle school students. Some report that children in families who are close to the poverty line eat dinner with family more frequently than do children from families well-above the poverty line (Child Trends 2006); similarly, Neumark-Sztainer et al. (2003) found that children from families of low socioeconomic status reported eating with family more times often than children from families of upper middle or high SES.
The literature above says little about how mothers’ efforts and constraints on those efforts affect family meals and children's participation in those meals.
The above research can be thought of as reflecting “demand-side factors” influencing children's participation in family dinners; absent from this account are factors that affect the “supply” of such meals. Here we turn to a second research program, which suggests that mothers take family meals seriously, because in DeVault's (1991:39) words “family meals construct family.” DeVault (1991) argues that women are socialized to take on what she refers to as the “gendered work of caring” having learned that the production of a “family” as a socially organized entity requires particular kinds of coordinative and maintenance activities. The DeVault research adds a third important leg to our research, namely, that developing meals that create the sense of family takes work on the part of mothers/wives. Recently, Moisio, Arnould, and Price (2004) argued that these efforts sometimes include homemade or made-from-scratch meals. Thus, mothers who perceive this important role of meals in constructing and maintaining ‘family’ are more likely to engage in those things that make family meals possible, including meal planning. Fiese (2006) observed that such planning is crucial to regularly scheduled meals in which family members believe it is important to participate. Missing from the DeVault and Fiese accounts is the degree of success that such work and planning has in getting children to participate in these family-defining events. However, two things are evident from DeVault's (1991: 228) discussion: (1) that those who attempt to produce family by cooking often felt “frustrated when their efforts fall short of their plans, and worried that they might not be doing enough” and (2) that producing family involves creating multiple food events based on individual family members’ (both spouses and children) schedules and competing activities.
Other literature illustrates these difficulties, finding that some women engage in “haphazard planning” (Schlundt, Hargreaves, & Bechowski 2003) while other studies found women using a “reactive timestyle”—feeling they had no control over their time and thus dealing with dinner when the time arose (Jabs et al., 2007). Some have suggested that such women's ‘poor’ planning is due to their employment outside the home. Time pressures and poor planning may result in the use of convenience foods; income constraints may constrain food purchase choices. The results of these various constraints may lessen the importance of the family meal and children's willingness to participate in meals. Tradeoffs are often made by low income mothers. Although convenience foods are more expensive, they greatly reduce preparation time (Rose, 2007).
Mothers’ work outside the home has received a great deal of scrutiny by researchers interested in the amount of time that mothers spend performing household chores, including cooking (Bianchi et al., 2006, Mancino and Newman, 2007) and how much time working mothers spend with their children compared with non-employed mothers. The research indicates that working mothers spend as much or more time with their children in so-called primary activities (activities that directly involve the child). At the same time, Neumark-Sztainer et al. (2003) found no relationship between mothers’ employment status and number of times children reported eating dinner with their families. However, some report that both income and employment outside the home reduce the amount of time women spend cooking (Mancino & Newman, 2007). For this reason we have included mothers’ work in the model. Other constraints/influences on shopping for food and preparing meals include time pressures, food budget constraints, and use of convenience foods, with time constraints often leading to the purchase of convenience foods (Bava, Jaeger, & Par, 2008).
Based on the above literature, we argue that mothers’ efforts to create family meals affect children's willingness to participate in them, and we hypothesize that:
- 1.
Working mothers will be less likely to plan family dinner and utilize different shopping and food preparation values than non-working mothers.
- 2.
Mothers who plan family dinner are more likely to report that the family eats dinner together regularly.
- 3.
Mothers who plan dinner are more likely to have children who believe that it is important to eat dinner with their families.
- 4.
Families that eat together regularly increase the children's perception that it is important to do so.
- 5.
Children who report that it is important to eat dinner with their families do so more frequently.
- 6.
The importance that mothers place on family dinner increases the likelihood that their children eat dinner with family; furthermore, we hypothesize that mothers’ perception of family dinner importance increases children's family dinner participation directly, but also indirectly by increasing the likelihood of mothers’ dinner planning and increasing the likelihood that children perceive that eating dinner with family is important.
- 7.
Mothers who experience time pressures on their ability to cook dinner, who prefer easy to prepare meals, or who have cost primarily in mind when shopping for food are less likely to have children who participate frequently in family dinners.
- 8.
Mothers who experience these time pressures or prefer easy to prepare meals are less likely to plan dinner, but those who shop for food with cost in mind are more likely to plan dinner.
Section snippets
Methods
Random digit dialing was employed to recruit 312 Houston families. Participants included both parents (if a father was present in the household) and one child aged either 9–11 or 13–15. The age groups were selected to provide data on both pre- and post-pubertal children; 12-year-olds were thought to be most likely on the cusp between these two groups of children. Mothers and fathers responded to a telephone survey which contained questions about work experiences (e.g., hours, standard vs.
Path modeling results
We began by creating a model that included controls for children's age, mothers’ age and education, and household income. The full model performed poorly, producing a chi-square value of 122.36 (df = 32; p = 0.001), CFI/TLI < 0.800, and a RMSEA >0.10. Neither mothers’ age, child's age, nor family income had a significant effect on either mother's efforts to plan meals or the frequency with which children ate dinner with their families. Income was dropped from the model because (1) it had no
Discussion
Data from the current study illustrate the powerful impact of mothers’ motives and actions on their children's behavior; we believe this extends DeVault's (1991) work on “feeding the family” in that it provides evidence that this “work of caring” pays off. As mothers’ perception of the importance of family dinners increased, so too did their children's perception that eating dinner with family was important and the likelihood that the child would eat dinner with the family. Similarly, the
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This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, May 29, 2009, State College, PA. Data presented in this paper were drawn from the project “Parental Time, Income, Role Strain, Coping, and Children's Diet and Nutrition” (43-3AEM-0-80075) funded through a grant from USDA-ERS-Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Program. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of USDA.