Home for Dinner

6

Table Talk That Goes Beyond “How Was Your Day?”

In most families, the bread and butter of dinnertime talk centers around the question, “How was your day?” In some families, this simple question opens the floodgates: Kids will talk about recess, or about a rebuke someone endured from a teacher, or about an intriguing moral dilemma that arose in class. But some kids will only respond with a one-word answer: “Okay.” In other families, one member grabs all the airtime and rattles off a string of anecdotes about what happened during the day; meanwhile, everyone else will be tapping toes, impatient to get a word in edgewise.

In this chapter, I give some suggestions about how to overcome these and other table talk challenges so that you can increase ...