Reflection of Parents' Roles

According to the New York Times, each night in the United States, more than 50 million children eat dinner without their fathers. Given this grim statistic, it seems appropriate to wonder what difference a father makes anyway. Does dining with Dad matter, or is a father at the dinner table like a kidney or a lung — nice to have but not essential for living?

We might start by looking at the scientific studies that measure a child’s well-being by his parents’ presence at the dinner table. The most famous — the one cited repeatedly by newspaper columnists and talk-show hosts in the States— is a report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University that concludes that “the more often teens have dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs.”

Other studies, for example the 2000 CASA NATIONAL SURVEY OF AMERICAN ATTITUDES ON SUBSTANCE ABUSE VI: TEENS mentions that CASA correlated each teen's risk of substance abuse with a series of 12 possible actions the teen attributed to his or her parents. They then categorized parents in three categories-"hands-on," "half-hearted" or "hands-off." Teens living in "hands-on" households have parents who consistently take ten or more of these 12 actions: monitor what their teens watch on TV; monitor what they do on the Internet; put restrictions on the music CD's they buy, etc...; and have an adult present when the teen returns from school. The survey found:

• Only one in four teens (27 percent) lives with "hands-on" parents.
• Teens with "hands-on" parents are at one-fourth the risk of teens living with "hands-off" parents.
• Nearly one in five teens (18 percent) lives with "hands-off" parents-parents who fail to consistently set down rules and expectations-and are at four times the risk of substance abuse of teens with "hands-on" parents.

Furthermore, despite the conventional wisdom that many teens don't want their parents to establish rules and expectations, the survey found that teens with "hands-on" parents are much more likely to have an excellent relationship with their parents than teens with "hands-off" parents. So, parents, it is time for us to closely look at what we are doing with our children especailly in terms of both their and our own expectations for their betterment as well as the betterment of our families.

Howard