Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Despite mainstream media portrayals to the contrary, preparing family meals can be a significant source of stress and conflict for many mothers, researchers from North Carolina State University sociology and anthropology department report in the Summer 2014 edition of the journal Contexts.
In the study, associate professors of sociology Dr. Sarah Bowen, Dr. Sinikka Elliott and Dr. Joslyn Brenton, an assistant professor of sociology at Ithaca College and former Ph.D. student at NC State, looked at the notion that reforming the food system requires families to eat painstakingly prepared home-cooked meals as a unit.
“Magazines, television and other popular media increasingly urge families to return to the kitchen, stressing the importance of home-cooked meals and family dinners to physical health and family well-being,” the university said in a statement. However, the authors report that preparing such meals can “place significant stresses on many families” and is “simply impossible” for others.
“We wanted to understand the relationship between this ideal that is presented in popular culture and the realities that people live with when it comes to feeding their children,” added Dr. Bowen. To that end, she and her co-authors interviewed 150 female caregivers in families with children between the ages of two and eight-years-old, and also conducted 250 hours worth of in-depth observations in a dozen of those families.
They found that middle-class, working-class and poor families faced some of the same challenges when it came to preparing family meals, said Dr. Elliott. For instance, mothers of all backgrounds said that it was hard finding enough time to make meals that everyone in the family would be willing to eat.
Furthermore, the study – which was supported by a grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture – found that middle-class mothers were conflicted between their desire the spend quality time with their children and the expectation that they needed to provide those youngsters with home-cooked dinners.
The new study comes just days after McGill University Institute for Health and Social Policy professor Frank Elgar and his colleagues from the US and Canada published research suggesting that regularly eating meals together as a family could provide the social support necessary to help reduce the negative effects of cyberbullying on youngsters.
In that study, Elgar’s team explained that the exchanges which occur during family meal times can benefit the well-being of adolescents, and this communication and interpersonal contact can reduce some of the distressing effects of being bullied online. Their research found that family meal time could reduce moderate the link between cyberbullying and the resulting mental health and substance use issues, including anxiety and substance use problems.
However, while that study found that family meals could potentially reduce stress in victims of online bullying, the new NC State study has found that home-cooked meals can actually be a source of stress for some families – and that financial considerations are one of the main reasons why (but for different reasons, based on socioeconomic status).
As the study authors explain, middle-class mothers expressed concern that they were unable to give their kids the best possible meals because they could not afford to purchase all organic foods, while poor families found that a lack of money made it difficult for them to afford fresh produce, find transportation to grocery stores, or secure the kitchen tools (knives, stoves, pots and pans) required to prepare a home-cooked meal.
“Poor mothers also skipped meals and stood in long lines at non-profit food pantries to provide food for their children,” said Bowen. “This idea of a home-cooked meal is appealing, but it’s unrealistic for a lot of families. We as a society need to develop creative solutions to support families and help share the work of providing kids with healthy meals.”
“There are a lot of ways we could do this, from community kitchens where families work together to arranging to-go meals from schools,” added Elliott. “There is no one answer. But we hope this work inspires people to start thinking outside the family kitchen about broader things we as a society can do when it comes to food and health.”
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