Children who eat dinner with family have better vocab
According to a study done by Harvard Graduate School of Education and the University of Tulsa in the US, researchers found that dinnertime conversation was better for stimulating vocabulary in children more than being read aloud to.
The researchers counted the number of ‘rare’ words (words not on a list of 3,000 most commonly used words spoken) that families used in conversation at dinner time and found that children learned 1,000 rare words at the dinner table, compared to only 143 rare words from listening to their parents reading stories aloud to them.
The study also found that older kids, of school going age, also benefited, finding that regular mealtime was a more powerful predictor of higher achievement scores than time spent in school, doing homework, playing sports or doing art.
Researchers also found that teens who ate family meals from five to seven times a week were twice as likely to receive A’s in school tests than those who had dinner with their families less than twice a week.