A 2024 survey commissioned by the Girl Scouts of the USA found that nearly 70% of girls ages 5 to 13 experience loneliness, with the feeling intensifying as they age. And as loneliness increases, self-confidence decreases, the survey found. While 86% of girls from age 5-7 feel able to tackle challenges, this percentage drops to 80% for ages 8–10 and then to 73% for ages 11–13.
Loneliness has become such a pervasive issue in the United States that in 2023, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it a public health emergency and even referenced it as an epidemic as a result of its widespread impact on physical and mental health.
As a child psychiatrist, Christine M. Crawford is very familiar with the nation’s loneliness problem.
“We’re seeing rates of loneliness not only go up among adults, but also among children – even very young children,” said Crawford, associate medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
So why such an increase in reports of loneliness? What are the major contributing factors to the problem?
Digital devices and social media, Crawford said.
“People are so connected to their devices and social media. You could be living in a house with different people – a whole bunch of people – but because everyone is so connected to their phones, people aren’t as engaged as they used to be with family,” Crawford explained. “They aren’t having conversations or checking in on each other.”
However, a simple change in family routines can not only help combat loneliness but also boost overall mental, emotional and physical well-being: the addition of a family meal to the weekly schedule.
Earlier this year, the University of Oxford’s Well-Being Research Center, in partnership with Gallup, released its annual World Happiness Report, which serves as a global report card on the state of happiness. This year’s report included a chapter dedicated to how sharing meals supports happiness and social connection – even more so than jobs or income.
FMI – The Food Industry Association underscores the importance of family mealtimes with the Family Meals Movement and cites research proving that family meals can improve quality of life for both kids and parents alike, leading to better nutrition, higher grades, improved self-esteem, reduced depression symptoms, decreased use of drugs and more positive social behavior in children and adolescents. For adults, family meals are associated with lower stress and depression, better family function and stronger family bonds.
Family meals combat loneliness and offer connection
A major benefit of family meals is that they offer a regular time for family members to put away devices and focus on each other, Crawford said.
“People are having meals in their room by themselves, having meals with their phones in their hands while they’re eating, and so these opportunities for connection, for families to actually get to know their kids, these are missed opportunities,” Crawford said.
That’s why putting away the devices for actual face time around the table is critical, Crawford said.
“You have to put the devices away, because you need to be free of any distractions,” Crawford said. “Whenever we receive notifications on our phone, we’re so trained to immediately pick it up. Even if we don’t pick up the phone, just knowing that there’s a notification that lit up our phone distracts us mentally, right? And so you’re thinking to yourself – while your child is having an important conversation with you – ‘Oh, why is my boss reaching out at seven o’clock? I wonder what’s going on. I think after dinner I should go and check my email.’”
Family meals allow time for well-being check-ins
When parents consistently sit down with their kids at the table, they have the opportunity to observe patterns and changes in behavior that could signal distress or mental health struggles, Crawford said.
“There are so many parents who are actually missing signs and symptoms of various forms of distress experienced by their kids because they’re not really seeing them. (Family mealtimes) present an opportunity for you to see your kid every day, to notice any patterns and changes in their behavior and to be able to address it,” Crawford said.
“I meet with too many parents when their kids present in a state of crisis, and I often ask the question, ‘Well, how long has this been going on? How long have you noticed these changes?’ And they’ll say, ‘Well, I’m not quite sure, because they’ve been keeping to themselves.’ You have to know your kid. You have to be able to notice patterns in your kid’s behavior, and the only way to do that is to show up consistently in spaces that are free of distraction, so you can really connect with your kids.”
Family meals teach healthy lifestyle skills and healthy eating habits
Mealtime can also offer an intentional space for children to learn about nutrition, cooking and mindful practices related to food. In 2020, a Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior study found that family meals improve fruit and vegetable consumption.
Family meals offer “a good kind of skill-building for our kids to learn about how to cook, learn how to eat in a nutritious way and learn how to engage in mindful practices around eating,” Crawford said. “People are not consuming the most nutritious foods because they’re eating so quickly and not being mindful of what it is that they’re putting into their bodies and why they’re putting it into their bodies.”
Family meals model healthy boundaries and stress management
When parents put their devices away, they model being fully present at home, separating their work life from their family life, Crawford said. Dinner table conversations offer an excellent opportunity to model how to talk about emotional distress and share coping tools and strategies for managing stress.
“It’s good modeling for kids to see parents separate themselves from work when they come home. Home time is home time. And when they’re at work, they’re at work. But for so many families, parents’ work like life bleeds into the home life and can really have a huge negative impact on the relationships within the family,” Crawford said. “So I think it’s good modeling to communicate to your kids when I’m home, I’m truly and fully present with you, and work is just some other thing that I do during the day. Kids are feeling overwhelmed, feeling like they always have to be on, and it’s because their parents look like they’re always on. So parents need to put their phones away too.”
Despite kids’ seemingly flippant responses to their parents’ questions, asking them conveys a powerful message they need to hear.
“A lot of parents believe that when their kids aren’t fully engaged in the conversation, and when they’re giving one-word responses that the conversation had no meaning at all, and that’s actually not true because you’re communicating to your kid ‘I care about you, and that’s why I’m going to keep showing up and checking in on how you’re doing,’” Crawford said. “Also it’s communicating to your kid, ‘I want to make sure that you have all the tools in your toolbox that you need in order to thrive, not only as a kid, and as a teenager, but when you enter into adulthood.’ So even though it looks like your kid couldn’t care less about what it is you’re saying, they are hearing you, and they are filing all of that stuff away.”
Families who have trouble coming up with conversation topics or find mealtime communication awkward can download and print one of FMI’s Table Talk Placemats, which offer simple conversation starters and prompts for deeper dialogue.
Family meals foster deeper, more meaningful relationships – regardless of how you define “family”
Sharing a meal encourages more than superficial conversations that are often engaged in on social media. When family members – or even friend groups who function as families – take time to gather around the table, open up about their daily experiences and genuinely check in with each other, it leads to deeper, more meaningful connections and combats the “loneliness epidemic” that results from knowing people only on a superficial level, Crawford said.
“Given the stress of everything that kids and families are exposed to through the media, and through social media, as well, and just from hearing about things in our community, it’s important for us to check in to see how people are really doing,” Crawford said. “When you’re sitting down and you’re having a meal and you’re asking your family members the question, ‘How are you really doing?’ that is a great opportunity to model how to talk about your stress and to also share what sort of tools or strategies you are using to cope with that stress. We also have to be intentional about teaching our kids tools and strategies to be able to manage the stress that they’re going to be exposed to just being a human on this planet Earth.”
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