Family Dinner together EVERY Night? Really?

[Anonymous]

For those who do this with babies, can you elaborate on your schedule? Our 6-month-old started solids a few weeks ago and eats at 5/5:15. Breastfeeds at 6, then bath, then story, then bed around 6:45/7. He really needs to be in bed for the night by then, and given this I'm not sure how to push his "dinner" later. And we certainly are not able to have dinner cooked by 5.

Any advice on this would be great--I really do like the idea of a family dinner but it's hard for me to see how it's feasible for us right now.

[Anonymous]

My kids (3 and 5) are beasts if they don't go to bed by 7pm... don't nap anymore and have always needed a lot of sleep. For that reason we don't often eat as a family...the kids eat together by 5pm and DH and I eat after they go to sleep. Of course, when DH can get home early and on weekends we eat together. I'm not worrying about it now because we do enjoy meals together often enough and I assume as they get older and have a later bedtime we'll be able to eat as a family during the week.

[Anonymous]

Yes, I am sure there are zillions of attorney positions with better hours...in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the great depression...when law firms are laying off scores of attorneys...when there will likely be a govt spending freeze in the coming days.

I am sorry but you are wrong. The poster said she works for a firm and her husband works for DOJ. They are not unemployed people looking for jobs - they are highly skilled already employed people who could, if they wished, look for less demanding attorney positions. They CHOOSE not to do so.

I also work for DOJ as a GS-15 attorney, yet I work from home 50% of the time and my hours are 8:45-5:15pm the other days.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
That confirms my hypothesis -- I'm the person who suspects that a lot of people who manage to eat dinner together as a family each night, plus do all the bath and stories plus bed -- all after 6:30 -- are maneuvering around just 1 child.

Not us. We have two children (ages 6 and 8) and we have been eating as a family each night since our oldest was a baby. DH doesn't leave work until 6 pm so he doesn't get home until close to 6:45 pm. I get home with the kids by 6 pm and cook dinner. Baths are at 7:30 pm, then stories, then bed by 8:15 pm. We do not have any family help, no au pair, no nanny, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Not us. We have two children (ages 6 and 8 )

Fixing the smiley face.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
That confirms my hypothesis -- I'm the person who suspects that a lot of people who manage to eat dinner together as a family each night, plus do all the bath and stories plus bed -- all after 6:30 -- are maneuvering around just 1 child.

Not us. We have two children (ages 6 and 8) and we have been eating as a family each night since our oldest was a baby. DH doesn't leave work until 6 pm so he doesn't get home until close to 6:45 pm. I get home with the kids by 6 pm and cook dinner. Baths are at 7:30 pm, then stories, then bed by 8:15 pm. We do not have any family help, no au pair, no nanny, etc.

That's super admirable, but with school aged kids not such a big deal to wait till 7 PM of course.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
That confirms my hypothesis -- I'm the person who suspects that a lot of people who manage to eat dinner together as a family each night, plus do all the bath and stories plus bed -- all after 6:30 -- are maneuvering around just 1 child.

Not us. We have two children (ages 6 and 8) and we have been eating as a family each night since our oldest was a baby. DH doesn't leave work until 6 pm so he doesn't get home until close to 6:45 pm. I get home with the kids by 6 pm and cook dinner. Baths are at 7:30 pm, then stories, then bed by 8:15 pm. We do not have any family help, no au pair, no nanny, etc.

That's super admirable, but with school aged kids not such a big deal to wait till 7 PM of course.

I'll reiterate what I posted:

>>we have been eating as a family each night since our oldest was a baby

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I also work for DOJ as a GS-15 attorney, yet I work from home 50% of the time and my hours are 8:45-5:15pm the other days.

please tell me what division/office you work for. i have never heard of a such a thing. my husband is a gs-15 doing litigation at DOJ, and i can't imagine he would ever be taken seriously in his division with those hours. when there is a brief due, he can't just clock out at 5:15 and leave it for someone else to finish.

i would love to eat dinner with my family every night. but when i took my law firm job and my husband took his DOJ job years ago we weren't thinking "gee. which job will let me eat dinner with my unborn child every night?" we were ambitious. and once you start working and specializing in something like securities litigation, it's not like you can all of a sudden just say "gee, i'd like to cut back my hours and do policy or memo writing for the government on my own hours from home" once you have a child, and then those few cushy jobs in the government will be magically yours.

the job choice was made a long time ago, before we had kids. and anyone who thinks you can just magically cut back your hours and find those few gs-15 40 hour workweek jobs is dreaming. practically all of the government agencies i'm qualified to work for are on a hiring freeze.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
That confirms my hypothesis -- I'm the person who suspects that a lot of people who manage to eat dinner together as a family each night, plus do all the bath and stories plus bed -- all after 6:30 -- are maneuvering around just 1 child.

Not us. We have two children (ages 6 and 8) and we have been eating as a family each night since our oldest was a baby. DH doesn't leave work until 6 pm so he doesn't get home until close to 6:45 pm. I get home with the kids by 6 pm and cook dinner. Baths are at 7:30 pm, then stories, then bed by 8:15 pm. We do not have any family help, no au pair, no nanny, etc.

but you don't work out of the house, correct? i'm thinking the person with this hypothesis is talking about families where both parents work out of the house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

but you don't work out of the house, correct? i'm thinking the person with this hypothesis is talking about families where both parents work out of the house.

I work full-time out of the house as does DH. I have been -- and continue to be -- the primary person who handles drop offs and pick ups of both kids. (I think DH handles drop-offs/pick-ups a total of four times in a calendar year.)

And, frankly, it was far easier to have family dinner together each night when both kids were in daycare near my office -- it was a single drop-off and pick-up location. Once a child starts school, things get All Kinds of Complicated.

[Anonymous]

I had to switch jobs (from fairly-seasoned large firm litigator to non-litigating agency GS-14 in a field to which I previously had little exposure) in order to ensure that I could have dinner with my family every night. I had only ever thought of going DOJ, but after I having a family, I realized the schedule would not work. To me, the benefits of dinner with my family (including the resulting huge decreases in probability of future drug use) far outweighed my own ambition.

Don't blame your decisions on prior decisions; you make them every day. They don't have to be the same as mine as we are all have different priorities, but you have to own them!

If you think for a minute a two-attorney family with firm and DOJ experience can not rearrange their lives to allow for family dinner, you are very mistaken. Given a bit of time and effort, you could both have time; you may be making something more like $250K annual income in less prestigious positions, but if you tried really hard, I am sure you could live on that. Please don't put yourselves in the same category as the unfortunate that do not have such options. Every day, you choose money and/or ambition over being home for dinner. Own it!

[Anonymous]

9:01 poster-did you have the same schedule when your kids were babies? If so, how did you manage to keep them happy until dinner at 7? While that schedule sounds great, I just can't see it working for DS, who is under 1, right now.

[Anonymous]

Oh brother, it is very nice that some people manage to have family dinner together every night of the week, but seriously some people just cannot due to work obligations and other factors. I am a CPA and do taxes for a living. I got into work today at 6:30 am so that hopefully I can leave by 6 pm and hopefully not work this weekend, but we can't all be home in time for dinner every night. My dh is laid off and unemployed right now, so I have to perform well at work if I want to keep my own job. I try for family dinner most nights, but it doesn't always happen due to work deadlines.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I had to switch jobs (from fairly-seasoned large firm litigator to non-litigating agency GS-14 in a field to which I previously had little exposure) in order to ensure that I could have dinner with my family every night. I had only ever thought of going DOJ, but after I having a family, I realized the schedule would not work. To me, the benefits of dinner with my family (including the resulting huge decreases in probability of future drug use) far outweighed my own ambition.

Don't blame your decisions on prior decisions; you make them every day. They don't have to be the same as mine as we are all have different priorities, but you have to own them!

If you think for a minute a two-attorney family with firm and DOJ experience can not rearrange their lives to allow for family dinner, you are very mistaken. Given a bit of time and effort, you could both have time; you may be making something more like $250K annual income in less prestigious positions, but if you tried really hard, I am sure you could live on that. Please don't put yourselves in the same category as the unfortunate that do not have such options. Every day, you choose money and/or ambition over being home for dinner. Own it!

Wow...you really are quite obnoxious. And foolish if you think that having dinner every night with your family is going to magically result in your children never doing drugs. Good luck with that one...

[Anonymous]

This discussion reminds me of of a comment a friend made when we bought our house 12 years ago. We bought a new house, close in to the beltway. Not extravagant, but in a good neighborhood. This friend was somewhat outraged and commented "don't you want to stay home when you have kids?" assuming that we could not afford the house on one income (she was right, we would not have been able to then).

It kind of stunned me because it had never occurred to me NOT to work. And I was surprised that she had already made the decision that she wouldn't. A decision many of my friends made. Different strokes for different folks.

We each made our decisions, and we each live with them. As others have said upthread, own them. I don't apologize for working, but I've made conscious decisions about what I do, and where I do it (I'm the one who works for a non-profit in Reston so I can have a reasonable commute with reasonable hours). I'm sure my background and education could have taken me to the for-profit world with a bigger paycheck. Not the choice I made.