This article is authored by Sydney Gold and Danny Rahal.
You might remember family dinners from your childhood and adolescence. Perhaps it was the cheerful memories of being surrounded by your family and enjoying home-cooked meals, or maybe thinking back to your parents nagging you to stay home when you would much rather attend a social event. You might have wondered why your parents were so insistent on your attendance at family dinners. Well, research consistently suggests that more frequent family meals can lead to better nutrition and might even lower substance use during adolescence, a biological period that begins with puberty. Adolescence is a pivotal time in life for physical maturation, neural development, and changes in social relationships. Neurobiological changes during this time, including the development of brain regions that are highly sensitive to reward processing, such as the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens, is related to risky behaviors during adolescence, including substance use. People do not necessarily experience consequences when they use substances, but engaging in frequent use during adolescence can disrupt brain development and may cause a predisposition for long-term dependency as adults. Luckily, for parents, there are ways to reduce substance use among adolescents. Family Systems Theory proposes that stable family routines, such as frequent family dinners with a parent or sibling, can reduce children’s inclination for risky behavior, including early substance use.
Rahal and colleagues conducted a study to better understand why and for whom family meals can reduce substance use risk. This study examined the relationship between family relationships, frequency of family meals, and substance use in a sample of 316 10th and 11th-graders at four public high schools in the Los Angeles County area. Participants reported how often they had used alcohol, cannabis, and cigarettes, as well as whether they had ever used varied substances (e.g., cocaine, crystral meth). Rather than having participants report how often they generally had a family meal, participants completed a daily diary study, meaning that they completed a survey each night about their day. As part of this survey, they reported whether they ate a meal that day with their family over 15 days. To better understand how family meals might relate to substance use, other family-related measures were included in the survey (i.e., perceived parental support and family cohesion) and the daily checklists (i.e., family leisure time and getting along with their parents).
Results demonstrated that female participants who had family meals more frequently across the two weeks tended to use substances less frequently. Both female and male participants had similar amounts of meals with their families, but female participants who had more family meals throughout the study used alcohol, cannabis, and cigarettes less frequently and reported lower lifetime use of substances. Contrary to expectations, the gender-specific association of frequency of family meals and substance use was not explained by other aspects of the family (i.e., parental support or family cohesion) and daily family experiences. Taken together, female adolescents’ substance use was related to family meals rather than family time and cohesion more generally.
Family meals can be a stable family routine where parents have an active role in their children’s lives and discuss daily experiences with their youth, promoting adolescent well-being, but associations between family meal frequency and lower substance use only emerged for female adolescents. Family meals may only relate to substance use among females due to differences in motives for substance use across adolescents. For instance, female adolescents tend to be more inclined to use substances motivated by stress, which family meals can alleviate due to positive family dynamics, whereas males are more inclined to use substances for social motivations that may not be addressed by family meals. Female adolescents may be more sensitive to family experiences or may disclose more at family meals than male adolescents. Male adolescents may also benefit less from family meals because they may have fewer responsibilities or expectations related to the meal. Engaging them in preparing the meal, cleaning up, or discussing during the meal may enable them to better benefit from this family time.
References
- Rahal, D., Irwin, M. R., & Fuligni, A. J. (2025). Family meals are associated with lower substance use in female adolescents. Family Process, 64(1), e13039. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.13039