Making the most of family meal times

Spending quality time together as a family without distractions can seem ever more difficult in modern times. No longer just competing with the television for our children’s attentions, so many of us are forever glued to other screens too - our Blackberries, iPhones and laptops.

Switching off can seem impossible but what is this constant remote communication doing to our more immediate family relationships?

According to a survey by Bisto, only a quarter of families now eat together every day and more than half admit they regularly eat their dinner sat in front of the telly. In the survey of 2,000 families across the UK, nearly a third confessed to eating dinner in front of a computer screen and almost a quarter said that they used social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter whilst eating with their family.

The research was commissioned to launch Bisto’s ‘Power Down for Dinner’ campaign set to encourage families to re-embrace the quality family meal without the disruption of emails, calls and virtual pokes.

So how can we make the most of our time together as a family? Do we remove ourselves from technology distractions entirely? Lead by example? Or is it possible to find a happy medium? In the following video, Professor Geoff Beattie, who has studied the importance of the family meal, talks about the harm we could be doing by failing to sit down together at night. He also offers his tips for making the family dinner a regular occurrence and how to make the most of that time spent together.