David Petrie: How Family Dinners with Young Children Could Help Curb Bullying

David Petrie: How Family Dinners with Young Children Could Help Curb Bullying
The Dairy Council of California jumped onto the family-dinner bandwagon by issuing a press release claiming that family dinners could create lifetime benefits including better grades, lower intakes of sugary soft drinks (which means more milk) and a possible 40-percent reduction in the chance that a child will bully someone else.
This last statistic is what caught my attention. A 40-percent reduction related to bullying was huge. Did certain conversation topics make a difference? Was there an average time parents spent talking to kids? Did lecturing count?
Our "Favorite Part of the Day" family dinner ritual could help keep kids from bullying. Maybe. It's simple enough to try.
Here's how it works:
1. Each person needs to share something good that happened that day.
2. The good thing can't be "right now" (meaning dinner). The person needs to share something about his or her day that other people (like me, who is stuck in an office all day) might not know.
3. "Screens" don't count. This means kids (or adults) can't talk about television shows, online social networking or video games.
4. A person can ask to "pass," but a pass only allows the person to go last. Each person still needs to share.
5. No one can leave the table until everyone has shared a favorite part of the day.
Sometimes a child will say, "I didn't have a favorite part of the day. Nothing good happened." This presents an opportunity to help that child turn the day around. And then there are times when a child mentions an event that makes you cringe, like when they witnessed some other child do something embarrassing, or even something that qualified as bullying. These instances present opportunities to help the child realize his or her favorite part of the day might have been someone else's least favorite. Then the parent can explain what the child should do the next time around.

The majority of people are too busy, and some are not willing, to spend quality time with their children.
The media is one of the major powers in the equation of getting rid of bullying. We just hope they use their power wisely, and help us to change attitudes towards bullying.