July 10, 2012--Zwerling School of Debate

There is only one thing we did daily during the time I was growing up in Brooklyn--the four of us, my mother, younger brother, my father, and I always had dinner together.

Even if my father came home from work much later than usual and though my brother and I theatrically rubbed our stomaches and made grimacing faces in my mother's line of vision, and though she cared more about our food intake than almost anything, the almost-anything part included deferring to the family's one inviolable ritual--in my father's view, a good family always eats dinner together no matter how hungry and unhappy the children.

So my brother and I, ignoring our inner rumblings, waited for dad to arrive, clean up, leaf through the mail (muttering about the bills), and then after what felt like ages take his seat at the head of the kitchen table. My mother who had been hovering in the background would immediately begin to ladle out steaming bowls of soup to her starving boys.

"So what did you do in school?" dad would always ask.

"Nothing," I would always mumble.

"You go to school to do nothing?" I didn't look up and my brother buried his face in his soup bowl knowing he would be next to be interrogated. "If you do nothing in school you might as well get a job."  No one said anything. "What about you then?" He turned toward my brother who was making loud slurping noises in an unsuccessful attempt to hide behind a wall of sound.

"And stop making so much noise with your soup. Only peasants eat that way."

More than anything, since he knew my mother's family came from a rural shtetl in Poland, he feared that his boys would revert to being peasants and thus not do well enough in school or acquire the social graces he felt were required for us to have a better life than his. Which meant going to medical school.

A few years later, actually doing quite well in school but still not wanting to talk about it during dinner, we would as a family engage in something resembling conversation. Usually about a column in the sports pages about the Brooklyn Dodgers. My brother, particularly, would hold forth. He had great arithmetic skills and could calculate players' batting averages and pitchers' earned-run averages to five decimal points.

"With his double yesterday," my brother, smiling, would offer, "Duke Snider is batting .30426."

"Who cares," my father would growl, "Mantle's doing better and has more home runs."

"I think Mays is the best of all," I would proclaim. "He's a better fielder and has a cannon for an arm."

Our father would dismiss my comments as subjective, but was impressed by my brother's ability to run objective numbers in his head and thus derived high hopes for his medical career, which in fact my brother more than fulfilled.

In later times over dinner our talk turned to current events--almost always politics.

My father was a Republican and the rest of us quite liberal and so the conversation was invariably lively. Which is a euphemism for loud and angry. In addition, not much listening was going on and thus everyone, passionate about our differing views, talked louder and louder and all at the same time. When a high school friend of mine joined us at dinner one evening, the simultaneous expounding went on unabated in spite of his presence, and the next day he named what he had witnessed the Zwerling School of Debate.

Needless to say neither my brother nor I ever again invited a friend to dinner.

From these family dining experiences, I was eager to read an article in Sunday's New York Times, "Is the Family Dinner Overrated?"

That's an easy one, I thought.

It begins:

Dozens of studies in the past decade have found that teenagers who regularly eat dinner with their families are healthier, happier, do better in school and engage in fewer risky behaviors than teenagers who don't regularly eat family dinners. These findings have helped give dinnertime an almost magical aura and have led to no small amount of stress and guilt among busy moms and dads.

Well, I thought, my brother and I did in fact do well in school, but happier and (mentally) healthier? About me, I'm not so sure.

But in the next paragraphs, the sociologist authors reveal that their own studies, and those of others, are revising some of this conventional-wisdom, family-dinner thinking--"Our research . . . shows that the benefits of family dinners aren't as strong or as lasting as previous studies suggest."

Ah, it sounds as if they did some of their investigating on East 56th Street where I gulped down my dinner.

They came to conclude that it is not how often kids eat with their parents but how rich the relationship is among and between them that makes the difference in regard to academic achievement, happiness, and civil behavior.

It was mainly for those families in which parents also helped with homework, maintained interest in their children's daily lives, imposed discipline such as curfews, and, of course, brought more than food resources to the table that there was a measurable benefit from eating together. And, as with so much else that contributes to inequality, families with more income and having two parents in the household passed along to their children their advantages.

The Zwerlings in comparison to many much less fortunate did quite well. I do not want that to be misunderstood; but I suspect having our version of dinner together, if not viewed nostalgically, was frequently upsetting. And I am not talking just to our stomachs.