A survey of 517 parents found that more than 60 percent ate dinner together more often during the pandemic than before it, and two-thirds said the family laughed together more at the table. The study was published in October 2024 in the journal Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice.
The finding is a small bright spot from a hard stretch. It also shows what can happen when a household suddenly has more time around the same table, even if nobody planned it that way.
What the study found
The research was led by Anne Fishel and Melinda Morrill, according to the American Psychological Association’s announcement. The team surveyed 517 ethnically and socioeconomically diverse parents across the country in May 2021, asking how often their families ate dinner together and how those meals felt compared with the time before the pandemic.
Respondents rated changes on a scale from “much less” to “much more.” Over 60 percent said dinners together became more frequent. The ScienceDaily summary of the paper lists the share of parents who reported more of each positive interaction at the table:
- 67 percent said the family laughed together more.
- 60 percent said they talked more about their identity as a family.
- 60 percent said they expressed more gratitude.
- 59 percent said they felt more connected around the table.
- 56 percent said they talked more about their days.
The pattern held across income, education, age, gender and race, according to the study’s authors. Fishel said in the release that the pandemic changed many aspects of daily life, some of them for the better.
Why the timing mattered
When stay-at-home orders spread across the country in March 2020, many households lost their usual routines overnight. California issued a statewide order on March 19, 2020, and New York and Illinois followed on March 20, according to the encyclopedia’s entry on stay-at-home orders. Such orders generally allowed trips for essentials like groceries while closing or limiting other businesses.
With school, work and activities moved home, evenings opened up. The researchers noted that parents did not necessarily set out to eat together more. The extra dinners happened as a side effect of everyone being around, and the study suggests the quality of those meals improved along with their number.
Cooking at home also became the default for many families, and cooks looking to free up the oven at Thanksgiving can compare a few countertop options, and a set of clever kitchen tricks for home cooks helps with the rest. A list of casseroles that defined American family dinners shows how many one-dish meals have fed families on a weeknight. Readers who want the history of that habit can look at a piece on how the Sunday family dinner became less common, which covers the changes that pulled households away from the table before 2020.
New ways of eating together
The study did not only count meals. Many families used videoconferencing to share dinner with relatives who lived elsewhere, and most parents who started doing so said they planned to keep it up after the pandemic ended, according to the American Psychological Association.
Families also brought more of the outside world to the table. More parents reported talking about news and current events during dinner. The researchers said this may give children a safe place to voice worries, though that is an interpretation rather than something the survey measured directly.
For hosts planning holiday meals, the idea of mixing a video call into the usual spread may sound unusual, but a roundup of Thanksgiving traditions that families rarely discuss shows how many odd habits end up as part of the day.
A project built around the family dinner
A nonprofit called The Family Dinner Project builds its work around the same idea. According to the project’s website, it is “a nonprofit program dedicated to helping families through food, fun and conversation about things that matter.”
The group’s approach is practical rather than elaborate. Its Budget Friendly program offers recipes and resources for making a week’s worth of dinners for less than $7 per person, according to the site. Dinner does not have to be a big production, and a simple home-cooked meal counts.
When Americans actually sit down
The question of when dinner happens has changed over centuries. Dinner was once the main meal at midday, and the fashionable hour drifted later across the 1700s, according to the encyclopedia’s entry on dinner. By around 1850, English middle-class dinners were typically at 5 or 6 p.m., so workers could get home first.
The same entry cites an analysis of American Time Use Survey data from 2018 to 2022 that found dinner peaking at 6:19 p.m., with most households eating between 5:07 and 8:19 p.m. Pennsylvania and Maine peaked earliest, at 5:37 and 5:40 p.m., while Texas and Mississippi peaked at 7:02 p.m.
What the numbers can and cannot say
The results come from a survey of parents, so they reflect what respondents remembered and reported rather than direct observation of family meals. The percentages describe the share of parents who said they noticed an increase, not a measured change in laughter or gratitude. The survey was also taken at a single point in May 2021, with parents comparing that moment with earlier habits.
Even with those limits, the study offers a clear takeaway about food and family life. When households had a reason to sit down together more often, many parents said the meals felt warmer, and many hoped to hold on to some of that. The authors reported that most parents who adopted new practices like video dinners expected to continue them.
The tradition does not require a pandemic to start. A regular night, a short list of easy recipes and a table cleared of devices are the ingredients most family dinner advice comes back to, and the 2021 survey suggests that plenty of families found their way there on their own.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Jason M. C., Han – CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons
