The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (17 page)

At this point you won’t be surprised to learn that sibling contagion is more intense among women. If a sister in Framingham got fat, her sister’s chances of subsequently packing on the pounds increased by whopping 67 percent, nearly 30 percent more than the impact between brothers. Husbands’ and wives’ weights rose in tandem, though wives affected their husbands’ waistlines more than the reverse (and given that this effect persisted up to three degrees of separation, it wasn’t just about who was doing the shopping and cooking). Here was the female effect again, showing that
within intimate networks, women are more likely to transmit behavior change than are men.
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The implication of such connectedness is clear. If close friends and family are influenced by the biscotti or bowls of frozen yogurt you scarf late at night—if
they
are what
you
eat—then your daily habits are not only public, they could have a life-and-death impact on those who feel closest to you.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT? THAT DEPENDS ON DINNER

When Lord Byron wrote in
Don Juan
that “since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner,” he probably meant sex, not his kids’ grade point averages. Yet research shows that skill in reading, writing, and arithmetic, academic standing in high school, scores on college entrance tests and much more besides, are linked to sitting down to family dinner. The more meals you eat with your child, the larger the child’s vocabulary and the higher his or her grades, an effect that is exaggerated in girls. From toddlerhood continuing through the ornery teen and then young adult years, studies consistently show that family meals are a handy predictor of a kid’s vocabulary, reading scores, and academic achievement, not to mention whether or not he or she will get derailed by sex, drugs, binging and purging, depression, or suicidal thoughts.
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Even boys who carry a particular gene variant that predicts violent behavior seem protected by regularly sitting down to eat with their families, one 2008 study shows. “If people with the gene have a parent who has regular meals with them, then the risk is gone,” Guang Guo, the American sociologist who led the study, explained.
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Not bad for a ten-thousand-year-old custom. What is striking is that it doesn’t matter what you eat. Consuming organic broccoli is not what makes kids smarter.

Why does eating regularly with their families make young kids better readers and writers, and adolescents happier and healthier, with loftier SAT scores and lower rates of drug and alcohol use
compared to teenagers who graze on their own or eat in front of a screen? Family income is important, though it doesn’t tell the whole story. While there’s no disputing that parents with ample incomes can give their kids more opportunities—including more time with parents and often better schools—there are also many well-off kids with overworked professional parents, 24/7 nannies, and a plasma display in every room who are not eating that many meals with their families. Roughly a third of middle-school kids rarely eat with their parents, a phenomenon that’s familiar to me after twenty years of clinical psychology practice. Sometimes the parents just can’t. Social historian Stephanie Coontz points out that almost 15 percent of married couples have a joint workweek of more than a hundred hours, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for meal preparation and chatting.
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One successful couple I saw in my clinic felt so ill at ease as parents that when they returned from work at the end of the day, they’d circle the block until they were sure their nanny had already tucked the kids into bed and it was safe to drive into the garage.

There is some evidence that the ritual of family meals provides ballast for a family in times of stress, reinforcing a sense of belonging, especially during transitions.
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If times are tough, at least we have this
, is the feeling. But more importantly, sharing meals is an intimate act, an expression of the closeness of our family bonds. It’s also a way for kids and parents to check in daily and connect. If the kitchen is not just a place to scarf down calories but an arena for sharing stories, confidences, lessons learned, and gossip, then families who talk and eat together might have children who are psychologically healthier and who do better in school than families who don’t, right?

That’s what researchers are finding. Banter—and specifically banter about the child’s experiences—is what links family meals in childhood to boosted achievement later on, according to Harvard psychologist Catherine Snow and her colleagues. It’s no surprise that Snow, who was one of the first researchers to
document the peculiar way mothers everywhere talk to their babies (those high-pitched, singsong Q-and-A sessions we call “motherese”), would be interested in parents’ other conversational quirks. Snow and her collaborators thought families with academically successful children might demonstrate certain social habits that are less common in other families, notwithstanding differences in ethnic background or income. If they could unearth these behavioral “tics,” they might be able to teach the tricks to other parents, they thought.

The researchers expected that children who were exposed to complex table talk with adults might develop better language skills, which would then enable them to become better readers. And those who were better readers would do better in school. To test these ideas, the researchers started tracking about sixty low- and middle-income Boston families from the time their children were three, observing and recording their behavior every year. They caught up with them ten to fourteen years later, when the kids were finishing high school and getting ready to apply to college (well, at least some of them). The researchers had given tape recorders to the families at the outset and asked them to put them on the table when it was time to eat. They ended up with 160 recorded mealtime conversations. While some of the families treated the recorded meals as showtime, asking their little tikes to stand on a chair and chant their ABCs, other parents just turned on the recorder and got on with the business of dinner. The resulting taped conversations, like this one between a mother and her three-year-old son Tommy, show that table talk between adults and their preschoolers can be as existential as it is instructional:

This vivid exchange includes storytelling (the dream), new information (the mother’s explanation), maternal TLC, counterfactuals (imagining what would happen if Tommy faced a hypothetical monster), as well as turn-taking and sophisticated vocabulary. According to Snow and Beals, this type of back-and-forth during a meal serves to move a child’s language and literacy skills onward and upward—at least compared to the type of exchanges typical of other families. Many parents talked to their children only when giving them orders.
Sit up straight. Use your napkin. Chew with your mouth closed
. Or they didn’t talk to them at all at mealtime because meals were silent, serious affairs. Or because there were no mealtimes.

For most of these families, mealtime meant sitting together for anywhere between two and forty-seven minutes. The average was about twenty minutes. Most often it was the mother who sat with the children. Fathers were present for only a third of the dinners, and “even when present contributed relatively little to the conversations,” write the researchers. So here the female effect is by default, though as we shall see, mothers exert extraordinary influence even when both parents are present. One meal consisted of two children eating cereal alone in front of the TV, while another meal was a recording of a mother and son baking cornbread. As there were only the two of them at home, there was no point to real dinners, the mother explained to the researchers.

That’s understandable, but it’s also a pity. Family meals trump almost every other activity—including reading books and playing with toys—when it comes to jumpstarting a child’s vocabulary, according to a 2001 study.
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More recently, in an astounding naturalistic experiment called the Human Speechome Project, MIT computer scientist Deb Roy and his wife, Northeastern University psycholinguist Rupal Patel, installed eleven omnidirectional fisheye cameras and fourteen high-performance microphones in the ceilings of their suburban Boston bungalow a few months before
their first child was born. They have since recorded more than 250,000 hours of audio and video—nearly every waking moment of their son’s first three years. The point was to capture the uniquely social aspect of human language acquisition right where most babies learn to talk—at home. It will likely take decades to parse the two gigabytes of data recorded every day the pilot project was running. But a preliminary peek shows that there are social hotspots where much of the action happens. These hotspots are also where most of the baby’s “word births” take place, according to Roy, and one of the hottest of those spots is the kitchen.
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A parent’s banter with her toddler over the mashed potatoes turns out to be a pretty good predictor of that child’s vocabulary level a few years later, notwithstanding how high the child’s IQ might be, how educated the parents are, or how much they earn.
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Though Roy has found a strong link between how often a parent says a word and how early the child utters it, it’s not just about the number of words the child produces.
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Face-to-face conversations can prompt empathy too, through reading people’s facial expressions and engaging in back-and-forth dialogue about “counterfactuals,” which developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik defines as thinking about “what might have happened, but didn’t—the woulda-coulda-shouldas of life.”
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It might be mind-numbingly boring to play out a hypothetical scenario involving fictional monsters over and over and over again with a toddler. But parents need to consider this: “By the time they are two or three, children quite characteristically spend much of their waking hours in a world of imaginary creatures, possible universes, and assumed identities,” Gopnik writes in
The Philosophical Baby
. Imagining these what-if worlds and understanding how the real one works are more tightly connected than you think, she asserts, providing mountains of evidence from her Berkeley lab. Apparently, if they are to develop enhanced vocabulary and communication skills, kids need unstructured social time when they’re
not being drilled on number concepts with the help of Brainy Baby videos. There is even evidence that babies who spend time in front of such instructional DVDs have significantly
lower
vocabulary levels compared to babies who interact with people.
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If developing empathy hinges on maintaining close contact—“the kind of contact that lets us actually see the grief or joy on someone’s face,” as Gopnik puts it—then shooting the breeze at mealtime with your small fry trumps Baby Einstein any day of the week.
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TEENS, FOOD, AND MORE FEMALE EFFECTS

We know now that children get more out of a family meal than nutrition. An enriched vocabulary is one benefit. Another is empathy: the capacity to imagine the thoughts and feelings of another person. The ability to get out of our heads and into someone else’s is built into our species, though some of us are better at this than others. Along with the genes and prenatal hormones that foster this ability, getting lots of practice reading other people’s facial expressions during family meals is like spring training for ball players; the kitchen table is the ideal spot to practice and make corrections before they’re really put to the test in the outside world.