Families Still Sit Down For Dinner

Parents say they eat, on average, 5.1 dinners per week with their kids.

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Family dinner is not a thing of the past. 

More than half of parents of children younger than 18 say they eat dinner as a family six or seven times a week, a rate that’s been steady since the late 1990s, according to a new Gallup poll on Americans’ dining habits.

On average, respondents said they share 5.1 dinners with their family a week, unchanged from 2001 and only slightly down from 1997. Fifty-three percent of respondents said they eat dinner as a family at least six times a week, 28 percent said they do so four to five nights a week, and 21 percent said they do so fewer than four nights a week.

The poll found the practice of family dining common to liberals and conservatives alike. Parents who identified as liberal said they eat dinner with their children as frequently as parents who identify as conservative, and parents who said they rarely or never attend religious services were slightly more likely to eat dinner with their children than those who regularly attend services.