More Sit Down Meals = Better Behaved Kids?
Here’s one of those “no duh, but wait a minute” reports (from scotsman.com(!)) about the results of a major study on kids who do and do not get into trouble as older teens. Conducted over a decade by researchers at the University of Alabama, the study of nearly 10,000 kids found a statistically significant decrease of getting into trouble (“drinking or smoking, taking drugs, getting into fights, running away from home and other ‘problem behaviour’ “) among those who had more sit-down meals with the family. And it doesn’t have to happen every night of the week:
Even increasing the number of family mealtimes by one day a week can lead to a 5 per cent improvement.
The study doesn’t say whether kids who have to be strapped down to a dining room chair to eat with the family show the same improvement. We’d guess not.
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