Keeping our kids away from drugs by sharing dinner together.

Today is Family Day – a day to eat dinner with your children. Family Day was started a few years ago by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) to raise awareness around the positive impacts of coming around the table to enjoy a meal with your family.

Why? Well, Columbia University has over a decade of solid research indicating that the more often you have dinner with your children, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs.

Don’t we all want that for our children? I don’t know about you, but I’d do just about anything short of moving to a remote and desolate island to keep my kids away from drugs. This is way easier – have dinner together, stay off drugs. Yeah, we can do that.

The simple way we can encourage our kids to stay substance-free is to share a meal with them, talk to them about their day, friends and school, and listen to what they tell us. If we listen and observe carefully7, we can tell what’s going on in our children’s lives and be there to support them.

So, what keeps you from sharing dinners with your family more often? For us, it’s getting dinner on the table within minutes of getting home so that I have a little bit of time to enjoy my kids before their early bedtimes. We’re working on different solutions right now and I’ll share them with you soon.

I’d love to hear your challenges, how you solve them and new ideas – write a comment and share with us!

For those wondering why I didn’t write about this earlier so that you’d know about Family Day ahead of time, well, I really didn’t think we needed a special date to have dinner as a family. This shouldn’t be just one day a year.

And I was simply too busy having dinner with my own family. Enjoy!