Family Dinner ~ The Hour That Matters Most

As work at home moms we’re often focused on business, building business, getting traffic, growing our audience, and those things are very important. As a work at home mom, I know I started working from home because of my family… because I wanted to be here, be available. It can be tough once we get into work mode, to call it quits for the day, and remember why we started this in the first place!

One of the “rules” I mentioned for how to get your work done with kids around was to set a stop time… and when work time is over, put 100% of your attention on family.

The perfect time to do that is over dinner. Family dinner. Not sit in front of the TV with your plate on your lap dinner, but real, home cooked dinner at a table.

I’ve always been a big fan of family dinner. However, we generally had “family dinner” in the living room with the TV on, shushing the little one, and only talking during the commercials!

However, I was recently sent the book The Hour That Matters Most ~ The Surprising Power of the Family Meal by Stephanie Allen and Tina Kuna. (yes, I got the book for free :)) I sat down to read it, and while we had made a start, by eating real home cooked food, at the same time… there were definitely places we could improve our family meal.

This book outlines so many positive changes that can happen with just one little hour over dinner. While it outlines the changes, what I really liked about it was the concrete information, steps to manage dinner, and the problems that can arise by bringing your family together. 🙂 If you’ve got more than one kiddo, squabbles happen. Who are we kidding? This book provides great ways to engage your kids, connect with them, and circumvent the squabbles as well.

This book could have come on strong, and made me feel guilty for our lack of eating at the dining room table, and having a TV on during dinner, but it didn’t. It showed me easy ways I could better connect and concrete ways to make family dinners happen. It made me want to do better. It made me want to clean off the kitchen table and serve more meals than Thanksgiving and Christmas at it. It made me want to better connect with my kiddo, and my husband. It made me feel it was not only a great thing to do, but possible, and gave me the tools to do it as well.

Some of the tools were mental things ~ how to start creating conversations, how to listen so our kids will talk, how to instill gentle manners, and some were really concrete like family favorite recipes to eat around the table.

So, if you’re sitting around the TV for dinner, or haven’t even gotten your family in the same room to eat, I highly recommend The Hour that Matters Most… it will encourage you, give you energy, and tools to make dinner the best hour in your house.

Disclosure: I received a copy of the book from the publisher for review. I have not been compensated in any other way… although the links to the books in this post are my affiliate links and I will receive a small commission should you purchase after clicking the link. With that said… as an opinionated mom… the thoughts on the book are mine and mine alone. 🙂