"Fathering, Family Meals, and Child Health and Well-Being: A Life Course Perspective."
March 2026
NCRF
Jerica M. Berge, PhD, MPH, LMFT, CFLE, Director of the Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS) and Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz, is first author of an article published in National Council on Family Relations (NCRF) titled “‘Fathering, Family Meals, and Child Health and Well-Being: A Life Course Perspective.”
Research shows that family meals benefit children’s health, but most studies have focused on mothers. This study highlights fathers’ roles at the dinner table, showing how their involvement helps shape children’s eating behaviors, family routines, and long-term health.
From the article:
“Interpersonal relationships between family members and their roles in the family change throughout the life course for better or worse, and routines and rituals help to stabilize these changes and promote health and well-being in family members. The routine of family meals offer the opportunity for ongoing positive or negative experiences as a family that can either foster or hinder the deepening of linked lives across time. Furthermore, family meals establish a structure for creating a ritual to propagate healthy habits and wellbeing in family members that can be transmitted intergenerationally across time. Despite this, fathers’ roles in family mealtimes and other routines have not been well studied and could yield much useful information about the types of interactions that foster optimal development and those to avoid. The LCHD framework is particularly suitable for this study as it places family meals in the context of broader health development within the family, while considering the potential lifelong and even intergenerational impact of patterns of family meals early in life. Understanding more about the optimal role of fathers in routine family interactions can inform the development of early life interventions that have potential to improve health trajectories across the whole of the life course.”
Read more of this article.