Surviving family dinners
By Lauren Schick
Nov. 10, 2009 9:00 p.m.
Going home for the holidays is a time for reconnecting with high school friends, and sometimes breaking it off with that high school sweetheart ““ a time for showing off your mounds of school paraphernalia, and rationalizing the money you spent on it (of course the dog needs a UCLA leash!). Some things you can’t prepare for, such as finding out your bachelor-pad bedroom has been converted into your mother’s sewing center. But you can always count on a holiday family dinner, oftentimes with extended family and friends, whose questions about your college-life and the inevitable, fast-approaching future will make you want to hide behind the stack of quilting patterns replacing your soccer trophy. Don’t stress. Here’s a guide to show you that the dinner table is just like a game board, and once you’ve mastered the players and the moves, you’re sure to win the game, or at least survive until the final round, which usually includes dessert.
Food for thought:
Nick Scull, a postdoctoral fellow with UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services, gave some tips to help students cope with the stress of feeling put-on-the-spot at family holiday dinners:
“¢bull; Anticipate questions: Decide which questions will be easy to answer, and for the more difficult questions, formulate some thoughts ahead of time. For example, family will probably want to know if you’ve settled on a major and how classes are going. They will also likely want to know about students’ personal lives, such as if they are dating anyone.
“¢bull; Talk to people individually: Maybe you don’t want grandma to hear about who you are dating, but you can pull family members aside and chat casually, one-on-one, about life at UCLA instead of disclosing information to the entire table.
“¢bull; Experiment with establishing boundaries: If you feel that certain topics should really be off the table, try asserting yourself, saying, “Maybe we can talk about that later,” or “I don’t really want to talk about that.”
“¢bull; Find an ally: If you anticipate being asked something particularly challenging, find an ally, such as a brother, sister, aunt or uncle and let them know what you’re planning to say so they can support you.
“¢bull; Use humor: Humor can be really helpful in making light of difficult or uncomfortable questions.
Elinor Ochs, professor of anthropology and applied linguistics and the director of the UCLA Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families, shared her thoughts on the significance and impact of family dinners.
On the significance of dining together:
“It’s important all around the world. People, when they want to reconnect, they will enjoy a meal together. In the United States, as well as in other industrialized nations, it seems particularly important in that family members do not spend a lot of their waking hours together as a family unit. In the contemporary United States, most people are working during the day and children are at home during the day. … Hence, dinner becomes an important moment to find out what’s been happening in each other’s lives.”
On the difference between everyday dinners and holiday meals:
“The Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families actually looked at the extent to which children and their parents ate together and found that only 17 percent of the time did parents and children actually eat all together around a table. … When you have a holiday dinner, … we think about people coming together and eating at the same place at the same time. … When you are eating at different places or at different times, you don’t have the problem of people grilling you. But, when you come all together, it affords the possibility of that happening too much.”
On students feeling hounded at mealtime:
“The danger of dinnertime interactions is that they become potent moments for not just reconnection, but for probing each other’s lives. Parents, in particular, want to know what’s been happening in their kids’ lives and it doesn’t matter if the kid is 5 or 25. … Kids actually have very little room to find out about their parents’ lives. So what happens to someone who goes to UCLA and comes home for a break and they have not only their parents but their aunts and uncles and grandparents and who knows who else is around, then it becomes even more magnified because then it’s not just a meal after a day apart, it’s a meal after a relatively long period apart. So, there are going to be more questions and more people asking questions. … It can be both a source of great sentimentality to be together, but also a source of stress.”
On suggestions for a more pleasant mealtime:
“It might be interesting for students to start asking parents about what happened with them while they were gone so some of the conversation gets tipped back to the parents’ lives so it’s not just one way. I don’t know if that would make it more pleasant, but it would be interesting and it would be a challenge, because in earlier research that I did, most of the time what happens around dinnertime is that the lives of children and the lives of women get discussed, but the lives of fathers much more rarely are revealed.”
