For 18 years my family ate dinner together almost every night. We talked, we laughed, we fought, we told stories. Sometimes someone left in a huff. But still we gathered every night, most of the time at 6 o’clock, all of us in our same seats at the same table. In other words, family dinner was family life.
I made dinner for my family because I wanted to and because the world told me I had to, and then three years ago, I just stopped. I didn’t want to anymore, and I’m here to tell you that you can stop, too. Your family will remain connected and whole; your kids will still grow up to be well-adjusted humans. And you might even enjoy one another a little more.
I learned to cook the summer I was trying to become pregnant. My wife and I were on a vacation on Cape Cod, and the house we rented had an entire bookcase of Gourmet magazines. I was 29 years old and more of a Moosewood Cookbook kind of girl. But those cooking magazines spoke to my overwhelming desire to nurture and to grow and feed a baby, a family. I must have read 20 issues during that week, and by “read,” I mean “studied.” I learned how to truss a chicken, how to bake custard in a water bath and how to sear steak in a cast-iron pan.
When we returned home, I started cooking. Tagines and chili, pilafs, ratatouille, salmon in parchment. In a family, the person who learns to do a job well becomes the person who does that job. It’s a simple law of domestic life, one I didn’t know when I was copying those Gourmet recipes into my journal. By the time our first daughter was born, I was officially the family cook.
Over the years, I kept recipe books and files, a dinner diary, master shopping lists. I amassed an enviable collection of pans and bakeware, cloth napkins, candles. I loved all the objects. But did I love family dinner? Did it feed me?
These were the questions I asked myself a few years ago when my older daughter was heading off to college. Yes, I did love family dinner, sort of. Sometimes. But I didn’t love the work. I didn’t love the daily obligation, the repetition. I didn’t like waking up in the morning when I should have felt the whole day ahead of me, full of promise, but instead thought about dinner.
I didn’t want to do it anymore, but I felt terrible about giving it up. The messaging on family dinner is intense! I would like to get the P.R. machine behind family dinner working for the end of gun violence in America. Family dinner will make your children smart! It will keep your children off drugs! Your children will learn languages, turn away from vaping and join Model U.N. if you just sit together at the table for 15 minutes every evening, a plate of food in front of you.
It seems like such a light lift for such enormous payoff, and the alternative — well, the alternative is so terrifying, so dire that you don’t even want to consider what might happen.
But family dinner is an extraordinary amount of work, ill timed to coincide with the one period of the day when no one wants to do any work. Which is why we have the family dinner industrial complex, which began with the Crock-Pot and now includes all manner of fryers, sheet pans, foodstagrammers, viral TikTok recipes and cookbooks with names like “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking” and “I Dream of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To).”
But none of these contraptions actually put the food on the table. And the endless recipes just add to the burden, giving home cooks too many possibilities, too much to live up to.
I wish I could say what it was exactly that released me from the weight of family dinner, what inner voice or higher power calmed my fear of letting my kids down nutritionally and spiritually. I’m not even sure I was released so much as I simply surrendered to the truth that it was over. I just couldn’t bring myself to make dinner anymore.
“I can’t make another dinner,” I told my mother, my sister, my best friend. “I’m quiet quitting dinner,” I told people I barely knew. “You’re on your own for dinner tonight,” I told my wife and kids. “Great!” they said. We were all tired of family dinner.
Now I make simple meals a few times a week, and on other nights we rely on takeout and cereal. Often we don’t eat the same things or at the same time. I go out to dinner with friends more often or to an evening weight lifting class. Sometimes my wife and I eat cheese and crackers while we play mahjong on the porch and our daughter eats a burrito in her room after tennis practice. I love the ease and relaxation of those nights. I wish we’d done this sooner.
The best part of giving up family dinner is finding new traditions. For some families this might be a walk around the block, an evening bike ride. For our family — for so many families, I’m sure — it’s TV. Every evening, we gather in the living room and decide, together, on a show to watch. We eat toast or ice cream or potato chips, and occasionally I make pancakes. Sometimes I roll out my yoga mat and do a little stretching, although mostly I just lie on it with the dog.
And we talk. Oh, how we talk! “Guess what,” my daughter will say, walking into the room as I queue up an episode of “Gilmore Girls” or “Parks and Recreation” or anything we’ve already seen dozens of times, the show’s familiarity allowing it to fade into the background of our conversation. “What?” I’ll ask in anticipation of her news, sure to be more delicious than any Gourmet dinner.
Now our time together is about everyone’s pleasure, everyone’s sense of well-being and connection and relaxation, including mine. There is no work, there is no planning, and there’s no cleanup. There is just a family being together, sharing our lives.
Erin O. White is the author of the forthcoming novel “Like Family.”
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