The Latest Argument for Having Consistent Family Dinners? Less Teen Drug Use

Regular family dinners have long been credited with a range of positive outcomes—including, just for starters, better parent-teen relationships, reduced stress, a healthier overall diet for adolescents, and positive mental and physical health for kids.

Now there’s a new piece of evidence to add to the pile, with a Tufts University study finding that Family dinners may help prevent substance use for most adolescents.

For the study, published in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, researchers analyzed online survey data from 2,090 U.S. adolescents ages 12 to 17 and their parents. Questions revolved around the quality of their family meals—including communication, enjoyment, digital distractions, and logistics—as well as the teen or tween’s alcohol, e-cigarette, and cannabis use in the previous six months. Then they asked about a range of adverse experiences, including parents being divorced or using drugs, a family member having substance-use or a mental-health disorder, or exposure to violence.

For those adolescents with no or low levels of adverse childhood experiences, higher family dinner quality was associated with a 22% to 34% lower prevalence of substance use. 

“These findings build on what we already knew about the value of family meals as a practical and widely accessible way to reduce the risk of adolescent substance use,” Margie Skeer, the study’s lead author and professor and chair of the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tuft’s School of Medicine, said in a press release.  

“Routinely connecting over meals — which can be as simple as a caregiver and child standing at a counter having a snack together — can help establish open and routine parent-child communication and parental monitoring to support more positive long-term outcomes for the majority of children,” added Skeer. “It’s not about the food, timing, or setting; it’s the parent-child relationship and interactions it helps cultivate that matter.”

Still, according to the study, family meals offered little protection for those youth who had high adversity scores — something affecting nearly one in five U.S. high school students under 18.

“While our research suggests that adolescents who have experienced more severe stressors may not see the same benefits from family meals, they may benefit from more targeted and trauma-informed approaches, such as mental health support and alternative forms of family engagement,” said Skeer.  

The Family Dinner Project, a national nonprofit made up of educators, therapists, and researchers, points to 20 years of previous research proving the importance of parents and children sitting down to share meals regularly.  

“When kids have a chance to bond with their parents, to feel close to their parents, to feel that their parents are listening to them, they have a chance to talk about their days or whatever is on their mind,” Family Dinner Project co-founder and clinical psychologist Anne K. Fishel told Time, “it’s like a seatbelt on the potholed road of childhood and adolescence.”

For parents who are intimidated by the time or cooking that they fear will be required for family dinners, advice on the nonprofit’s site includes the following: don’t worry if one parent isn’t home, it’s OK if you eat takeout (as long as you talk while eating and have healthier meals as often as possible), it’s OK if the TV is occasionally on, if you can’t swing dinner together it can be another meal, and to not give up if you can’t achieve it every night of the week.

“Often when families have one great meal or one ‘good enough’ meal, they find that they want to have more of them,” Fishel notes on the Family Dinner Project’s website. “Even one positive dinner a week can be very beneficial to a family.”