Families don't sit down to eat together anymore. Something has been lost. Editorial from today's WSJ. Some notable quotes/comments:

"These days, fewer than one-third of all children sit down to eat dinner with both parents on any given night. The statistics are worse if both parents are working and the family is Caucasian (Latino families have the highest rate of sharing a meal). The decline in the family dinner has been blamed for the rise in obesity, drug abuse, behavioral problems, promiscuity, poor school performance, illegal file sharing and a host of other ills."

"And that's a shame [that the family dinner is disappearing]. Because dinner is like a formal poem, with a fixed meter and time. It can't be hastened by new technology or emailed as an attachment to our kitchens. Instead, it's one of the few opportunities for conversation in a noisy world, a place to take a slower measure of our frenzied days. By missing mealtime, we are missing a substantial part of our children's lives. Sooner than we realize, they will not be at our table. Sooner than that, they will not want to have anything to do with us."

Family dinners won't solve all of our social ills, but this article highlights the mis-prioritization of society's basic social unit, the family.

I'm curious to hear stories of K&K reader's own family dinners. Did you have them? Generally, were they a time of connection for your family or merely perfunctory?