[Leading The Way] The Family Meal Table is "Pure Nostalgia?"

The kids won't behave. We work late. We sold our dining room table. Who wants to cook these days?

And the kids don't want to eat with mom and dad anyway.

Those are just a few of the reasons parents are showing a declining interest in dining with their children.

--John A. Blankenship, Point Blank, The Register-Herald

Blankenship goes on to lament that the afternoon family meal went out "with black-and-white television." One poor misguided mom admits, "It's too much bother to cook a meal nowadays. It's much easier to hit the drive-thru on the way home than it is to plan an entire meal and cook it. There just isn't enough time."

Praise God that He is restoring the family, turning the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, so that Mr. Blankenship's assessment that "the happy family meal is pure nostalgia" happily misses the mark.

There are many flaws to the arguments for "why" Blankenship believes it to be nostalgia... and even larger gaps in his interviewee selection skills. (Sorry, John, but a couple of colleagues and teenagers hanging out at the mall do not a random sample make.)

For example, he's got it all figured out why families don't eat dinner together anymore. "Reason: Too many parents work. It takes two incomes just to keep up with the mortgage payments." Question: Which came first: the mortgage, or a family economy with both parents working?

And he's a bit quick to sign the family meal table's death certificate. "The American family meal—by which most people mean the evening meal—has been dead for so long that chances for reviving it seem remote at best." Ken and Devon Carpenter, Colin and Nancy Campbell and Doug and Beall Phillips would beg to differ. In fact, their family meal tables are not only continuing to thrive, but are breathing life into dining rooms across the country with their godly example and heritage.

I pray Mr. Blankenship's colleague (at the Register-Herald?) will pick up a copy of "The Family Meal Table" and that she and her husband will reclaim their family; redeeming the evening meal, shaking off past defeat, and raise up a godly generation that will be "the family of [her] dreams."

--
Posted by Jim Bob Howard to Leading The Way at 8/11/2006 02:51:00 PM