Dinner Disorder Jam-Packed Schedules Have Turned The Traditional Dinner Hour Into A Relic Of A Bygone Ear For Many Families

The family dinner hour, such as it is, begins in the Hopkins household this evening at a quarter past five. Carol Hopkins is dining with her son, one of her two daughters, and a niece she’s baby-sitting. Her daughter’s friend is staying for dinner, too.

A self-employed real-estate agent, Carol has a flexible schedule, mercifully, and this afternoon she baked pumpkin bread and prepared the ingredients for hamburger tacos. The table is a flurry of activity as the older children make their tacos and Carol helps her son, Nathaniel, 4, with his. The conversation is less intense than the eating.

“Do you have homework?” Carol asks Rachel, her 12-year-old daughter.

“Only math,” Rachel says.

Carol advises her to get started as soon as her friend leaves; Carol’s husband, Glenn, due home from work shortly, will supervise. Carol will be gone - for a business appointment at 6, and a meeting of her community theater group at 7. That’s when Megan, 15, her older daughter, is expected back from high school basketball practice. At least Carol doesn’t have to worry about Megan’s transportation. Her ex-husband, Megan’s father, is driving.

It’s 5:30 p.m. now. The meal is over. The children disperse. Carol clears the table and sets a place for one. She has her eye on the clock. If Glenn isn’t here momentarily, the system will begin to break down.

It wasn’t like this when Carol was growing up, in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Like millions of others in America, her family ate together most weeknights, and dinner generally lasted a full hour. “There was a rule in my house,” she says. “If the phone rang and it was for you, you had to do the dishes. We told all our friends not to call between 6 and 7.”

And then there was Sunday, when the rituals were formal. “You went to church, came home and hung out, and had dinner - usually a roast or something like that. My mother would take out the silver and china.” A Sunday ritual today is Carol’s ex-husband returning the girls from their weekend visit, and Carol and Glenn coordinating their calendars for the week ahead.

Footsteps are heard in the front hall. Glenn is home, minutes to spare. He kisses his wife in passing, and sits down, alone, to make tacos.

“Round one is done,” Carol says, as she flies out the door. “Round two is eating.”

In his 1950s drawing “Family at Dinner Table,” Norman Rockwell depicts a father, mother and daughter set to begin the evening meal. Their heads are bowed in grace, their table piled high with food. A similar moment is portrayed in a Rockwell painting on the cover of the Nov. 24, 1951, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, weekly chronicle of postwar popular culture.

Idealized though such scenes may have been, they were not an artist’s fancy. Families dined together far more frequently a generation ago, sociologists agree, and meals lasted longer. It was not that parents cared more, or children were more sociable. Everyone simply had more time.

“Joey got to tell what happened in his arithmetic class,” says Dana Vannoy, director of the University of Cincinnati’s Kunz Center for Work and Family. “It was one time when an entire family could be together and share each other’s experiences, problems, and successes.”

Then the economy changed, as did relationships. In the last generation, single-parent families have become commonplace, mothers have entered the work force in record numbers, and the work week has grown for almost everyone. Not coincidentally, the idyll of youth has largely disappeared as children’s schedules have become overloaded with extracurricular obligations that often fill seven days a week.

In her landmark 1992 book, “The Overworked American,” Harvard economist Juliet B. Schor documented the compression that has swept away the dinner hour, along with much other leisure time. Compared to 1969, Schor found, men in 1987 worked an average of 98 more hours a year (at paid employment) - and women, a staggering 305 additional hours. Both trends continue. Schor cited another economist’s work showing that parents spent about 10 fewer hours with their children weekly compared to a generation before.

Wage stagnation for many sectors of the work force is a factor: more hours are needed just to maintain a standard of living. Another factor is what Schor called “the insidious cycle of work and spend” - in essence, keeping up with the Joneses. For the middle class especially, Schor argued, materialist desires help keep parents on a treadmill (and also, in an era of easy credit, contribute to a rising tide of consumer debt).

“We don’t want to be one-upped, and we don’t want to feel badly that our children don’t have what others have,” says Linda Dunlap, who chairs the psychology department at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. As for children’s hectic lives, Dunlap points to guilt.

Many working mothers, she maintains - and she’s one herself - keep their children busy to help compensate for mom not being home. “We entrapped ourselves,” Dunlap says. “We really overcompensated.”

Ironically, the automobile must share blame for the pressures many contemporary families confront. A significant force behind the rapid expansion of suburbs in the postwar period, the car opened a new world of activities to children - while unavoidably constraining them, and their parents.

“It seems to me that in your country, most of the children are being brought up in moving vehicles,” a French colleague remarked to Urie Bronfenbrenner, professor of human development at Cornell University, and co-author of “The State of Americans,” a study of the modern family.

Bronfenbrenner’s suggestion? “We need fundamental changes in our society.”

But until - and if - they come about, meals in shifts will remain the norm.