The Dinner Table Advantage

Here's the most underrated parenting tool in your house – your dinner table!

Not family devotions—look, they matter a lot. Not homeschooling or Christian schooling—although both of them can be a great blessing.

It's actually your dinner table. That ordinary piece of furniture where your family gathers to sit down and eat.

And when you consistently sit down at the family table and eat together: you talk. Your kids tell you things. They talk to you about their struggles before they become trials. They open up and share things that are on their heart. You, as the parent, have the opportunity to model good table-talk, good conversation, how to disagree without being mean and nasty, and how to resolve conflicts.

It's nearly impossible for your child to give you one-word answers for thirty minutes straight over meatloaf. Something's gotta come out of their mouth. And when it does, you're there to listen, to guide, to allow them focused time to be heard.

The families I've seen stay strong through life's storms? They protected their dinner table as if they were "sitting on holy ground". No phones. No TV. No tablets. No rushing off. Just food, family and presence.

You can't disciple your children if you don't know what's going on in their hearts. And you won't know what's going on in their hearts if you're not sitting across from them regularly, and looking them in the eye.

Proverbs 3:1-4 My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments: For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee. Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart: