Time USA - 16.09.2019

33

TheView Food

Breakfast, it is oft alleged, is the

most important meal of the day. Also

a thing of champions. Plus a meal you

really can have at Tiffany’s (as long

as you book a month ahead and don’t

mind paying $35 for avocado toast).

And for many families, breakfast is now

becoming something else: their primary

family meal.

As parents deal with unpredictable

workdays and kids’ after-school

activities stretch into the evenings,

gathering the clan around the table at

dinner has become a more complicated

operation to pull off. Yet the studies

that suggest family mealtimes are great

for everybody’s health and sanity are

not ambiguous. Rather than struggle to

hold it all together, some parents are just

opting to front-load their family time.

“It kind of evolved organically,” says

Meghan MacKinnon, of Wilmette, Ill.,

who has daughters in third, fifth and

eighth grades. Their middle daughter is

a picky eater, and much of their precious

dinnertime was spent coaxing her to fin-

ish her meal. “We realized that in order

to make sure she got enough calories, we

had to give her a good breakfast,” says

MacKinnon. “It was one of the meals she

didn’t fight over.” So they began to make

the first meal of the day a little more sub-

stantial. Then their daughters started to

have multiple extracurricular pursuits,

which made evenings a bit of a hustle for

both parents. “It clicked with me a cou-

ple of years ago, when a friend of mine

whose kids play a lot of hockey said,

‘We’ve become a breakfast family.’ And I

realized, Ohhhh. We are too.”

The MacKinnons’ meal shift was the

result of changes in the way their lives

were ordered that are echoed throughout

the U.S., if not much of the world. Her

husband decided to work from home,

rather than spend time commuting to

an office he didn’t need. That meant

he could come to breakfast, even if

he didn’t always eat. With the rise of

the gig economy and results-oriented

As it gets harder to

gather the family

for dinner, parents

turn to breakfast

By Belinda Luscombe

StudieS have long Shown that

eating as a family brings with it a

cornucopia of benefits, ranging from

decreasing a child’s risk for obesity,

eating disorders, drug and alcohol

use, depression and teen pregnancy,

to improving their academic

performance, eating habits, self-esteem

and resilience. Mostly, however, this

research has been based on families who

have dinner together, which researchers

find is still the preferred option.

But Anne Fishel, a family therapist

and director and co-founder of the Fam-

ily Dinner Project, a nonprofit orga-

nization that endeavors to encourage

families to eat together, is a breakfast

believer. “It’s our go-to recommenda-

tion,” she says. “When families say

they’re too busy for dinner, we say,

‘Well, what about family breakfast?’” In

fact, the organization recently launched

an offshoot, the Family Breakfast Proj-

ect. It’s a seven-day guide with recipes,

conversation starters and morning ef-

ficiency tips. Fishel is not the only one

who’s into this idea. “Having breakfast

family meals has become more com-

mon,” says Jerica Berge, director of the

Healthy Eating and Activity Across the

Lifespan Center at the University of

Minnesota. She has done several studies

specifically on breakfast and has found

work environments, more and more
employees can set their own hours or
work locations. But that doesn’t mean
they put in fewer hours—they just
contend with end-of-day spillovers.
Eating together before work, rather than
after, can be easier to plan for.
Like a majority of college-educated
mothers, MacKinnon went back into
the labor force and now works as a
preschool administrator and teacher,
meaning neither she nor her spouse has
much bandwidth to prepare meals. For
many parents, that time crunch leads to
an increased reliance on eating out or
grabbing takeout, but the MacKinnons
took a different approach: “I’m not a
good cook and I really don’t like cooking,”
she says. “But I can make breakfast.”
And of course, the looming specter
of college means many kids’ days are full
of enriching activities, from sports to
sessions with a math tutor. “I would say
dinner when we have all five of us is once
or twice a week, whereas breakfast we
can manage four or five times a week,”
says MacKinnon. “It’s the meal we most
GETTY IMAGES consistently eat together.”

△

“Breakfast is a reminder that any

good family meal is not about the food

anyway,” says therapist Anne Fishel