Cooking as a Working Parent

Many working parents feel the pressure to juggle the obligations of parenthood with work and other responsibilities, so the seemingly simple task of preparing a family dinner can quickly become a maze of conflicting requirements with emotional and psychological dilemmas. The need to plan an interesting, tasty, nutritious meal for multiple family members strikes at the end of a long workday when you may find yourself at your most mentally drained and therefore least equipped to handle a task. Given these pressures, it may be tempting to simply reach for the nearest takeout menu or do a quick run at the drive-thru but doing this frequently results in sacrifice to your family’s health and your wallet. 

Beyond nutritional needs, spending time with your loved ones once a day gives you a chance to catch up, bond, and show your children that you value them while teaching them manners and respect. Allowing children to participate in the preparation and clean-up of cooking a family meal also fosters a sense of responsibility and independence, which can be critical for their development.  Perhaps, for this reason, family dinners have been associated with lower levels of substance abuse for children. This article presents 14 essential tips to ease your path forward, including handling logistics and mental stress, allowing you to fit the joys of family dinner into your packed lives.

What is the Big Picture?

Make the Time for Family Meals

The reality is that unless you make family dinner as important as other critical tasks such as work meetings, finishing that budget report, and other essential tasks, that sacred meal with your loved ones is probably going to fall through the cracks. An easy way to emphasize the importance of this task is to put it in your planner, whether you keep an ink and paper planner or you use Outlook or Google calendar, carve out a specific time of the day to sit down for a family meal.

Set Realistic Expectations

While many of us may imagine a five-course meal served nightly to our eagerly awaiting loved ones, keeping your expectations realistic is the name of the game here and will reduce some of the pressure you may feel. Perhaps you can only commit to one or two communal meals a week, or you find it easier to have breakfast together or to use paper plates rather than china. At any rate, the emphasis should be on spending time together.

One good way to take pressure off your back may be to meal prep on the weekends when work pressures are lowest. This will give you more time to buy and prep ingredients.

Lay Down the Law When Necessary

Cooking can be challenging enough without every child demanding the dishes he or she prefers and refusing to eat otherwise. While you should always try to cook food your children will enjoy, at times, however,  it is necessary to set boundaries. Demanding that the kids eat the food you prepared without complaining and that they behave civilly at the table is a great way to take pressure off your back while giving your children a sense of structure. If you show firmness early on, meals will become more enjoyable and run more smoothly in the long term.

Make Sure You Have the Tools for the Job

Having a kitchen that is equipped for the task at hand is crucial. Multiple online sources including the New York Times Modern Pantry page offer exact guidelines on how to ensure your kitchen is adequately equipped to handle the tasks of a home dinner.

Cut Corners When Possible

The reality is that as a strained parent, adopting measures to save time should cause you no qualms whatsoever. Buying pre-cut vegetables, using grocery delivery services (and putting the essentials on automatic re-order) can make cooking run more smoothly and efficiently and, while costly, will likely still be cheaper than takeout.

Implement Strategic Snacking into Your Approach

The concept is fairly straightforward: racing home from a long day in the office, you find yourself famished and unable to hold yourself over until dinner. Your children are back from basketball practice and looking for a quick bite to tide them over. While it may be tempting to reach for the fast-food menu and call it a day, a quick healthy snack can offer the solution to ward off hunger long enough for a home-cooked meal to be prepared.

Even When Eating Unhealthy Meals, Try Adding Some Healthy Side Dishes

If at a moment of stress or simply because you feel like it, you have opted for fast food for you and your family, this need not mean that all nutritional considerations have been thrown to the wind. You can add a simple healthy dish like chopped vegetables as a side to ensure the meal still has some nutritional value.

Allow the Kids to Participate

Asking your children to contribute to food prep, setting the table, or cleaning the dishes gives everyone a sense of efficacy and a sense of contributing to the family. Furthermore, even children can contribute in their way by setting the table or simple tasks such as tossing the salad. This will also allow you to progressively teach your kids kitchen skills, such as how to chop vegetables, spice food, and do the dishes over time.

As time goes on, you will also be able to give your children increasing autonomy in the kitchen, building up these critical life skills and their sense of independence. Furthermore, the internet today is full of recipes that children can learn, allowing them to be more involved in the culinary process and to scale up and assume a higher level of autonomy with time as their skills progress.

Have a Go-to Meal for Emergency Situations

In a pinch, you should be able to prepare something quick and tasty with a minimal amount of readily available ingredients. Foods such as pasta with tomato sauce and tuna fish or a simple omelet can be thrown together with a small number of ingredients that do not go bad (and can thus be kept in store in bulk all the time), and with a  minimal investment of time and energy. Ensure that this meal is something everyone likes so your last-minute effort does not result in an unpalatable meal for your loved ones.

Making Meals Meaningful

In addition to the culinary aspects of the event, there are many things you can do to make the time with family matter more. This will allow you to turn family dinner from a simple meal into an event that instills manners and a sense of familial identity.

Teaching Good Manners and Behavior 

The family meal is an excellent opportunity to instill lessons about polite and respectful behavior at the table. This includes sitting in an orderly way, asking for food respectfully, not interrupting someone who is speaking, and respectfully using their utensils and napkins. In this way, the family meal becomes a way to teach good conduct, respect, mindfulness, and manners as well as sharing food and experiences.

Keep it to the Point

Eating together offers a moment for people to connect, participate and practice good conduct amid our busy lives. However, they can also be a strain on the attention span of the average young child and don’t necessarily need to be long to be meaningful. While an occasion such as a birthday or celebrating the end of a semester may warrant a longer meal, keeping it short and sweet, especially for young children, maybe the way to go.

Conclusion

While the business of our lives may make us feel that having a home-cooked meal with our families is beyond us, it is a release from the cycle of our professions that makes dinner with our families so essential and enjoyable. By keeping expectations firm yet realistic and following the guidelines presented in this article, you can create an experience that is enjoyable, meaningful, and memorable without being overly burdensome and inconvenient.