oh am I supposed to say something you just okay they they like you whatever welcome back we are so happy to have you today so today we're going to talk about one thing that a parent can do to help the life of the child and help family life now sometimes when you're well all the time as a parent when your child is worried or hurting or struggling what happens to the parent you're struggling you're worried about your child so maybe you're not a parent uh with a young child but maybe you're a grandparent and your
children have young children well this information will be very helpful here's one thing that a family can do to help improve the family and the life of the children they're raising eat dinner with your kids and no cell phones allowed no TV in the background during dinner every meal counts in a recent survey of 26,000 78 Canadian adolescents from a wide range of backgrounds urban and rural affluent and lowincome researchers asked each kid in the last 7 days how many days have you had a meal with your parents kids who had more meals with parents
were less likely to have internalizing problems such as feeling sad anxious or lonely they were less likely to have externalizing problems such as fighting skipping school stealing Etc they were more likely to help others and to report feeling satis ified with their own lives here we're highlighting the importance of Just Simply Having a meal with your family having a meal with your children now the statistical difference wasn't just between those children who had one meal with their parents versus those who had seven what the research shows later on in the book is that there's a
statistical um difference in positive outcome with every more meal so in other words those who had two meals with their parents in the week versus those who had one had a a greater statistical positive outcome and every step up after that so the point is eat as a family be together as a family at meal time without devices without distractions and just be together now I would like to share with you how we do our evening meal together and we have an intentional conversation almost at every single meal what do we do well we go
around the table and we share each person shares what they are thankful for from that day simple and we go all the way around now we try and say you have to say three things sometimes they have a whole list sometimes they really got to think they're in a bad mood like anyone who's in a bad mood has really got to think but that's a really good discipline to think about what you're thankful for when you're in a bad mood it's a great habit it's difficult to be down and grateful at the same time M
so that's what we do you can do something else you could just say what was the high of your day what was the low of your day you know do a high low but have an intentional conversation not just eat together but be it have it being meaningful M uh and as often as you can because every meal counts and maybe if you feel like you just sometimes don't know how to have a conversation with your children because I think if you're not in the habit of doing that it might be a little awkward or
if you're used to always having a device in your hand I know like something that I recently got was this like game it was a family question game where it's just bunch of questions and you just ask go around and each person has to answer these different questions like if you could go here or there where would you go or if you could so it was actually something you pulled out during the meal time yeah Janelle would pull out the card and ask a question of a child and they would have to answer it yeah
and sometimes it's it's interesting like one of our quietest CH children she like went and found this box of cards and she brought it to me one time cuz she's like I she wanted to do this activity at separate time and I thought that was really cute mhm MH do you remember what that was called uh I can go find it you know you could just get a book on also conversation starters with kids I'm sure there's somebody that's published something like that but just have predetermined questions that you're going to ask and and then
go for it and and you share too by the way parents have to share as well um I think that's it huh yeah okay share with us below uh your thoughts and we'll see you soon [Music]
