Well, here’s my only rule: Keep all liquids far away from the laptop while eating! 
Oh yeah, it was expected that we would all be home for dinner, and TV was not allowed unless it was agreed in advance that there was some special program that happened to fall during dinner. Dinner was time to catch up on everyone’s goings-on and discuss family business.
We were not required to drink milk with dinner (I’ve hated drinking straight milk since I was about 4 years old); juice or water were standard. Pop was only for birthday parties. Everyone sat at the table until everyone else had finished eating. (Luckily, we were all slow eaters.)
My rules are similar, and I’ve become more familiar with them (instead of automatically assuming) since I’m teaching my two new stepdaughters not to be complete heathens. It’s a challenge.
Our table is not very big, so I mostly serve from the kitchen counters. Every kid is required to try everything I serve at least once. They get a few freebies on things they’ve tried and genuinely don’t like, but I absolutely do not serve alternate meals. Very often, they find that they really like something that they claimed to hate, simply because they’d either not tried it before or because they’d tried a version cooked really badly.
My biggest challenge these days is for everyone to chew with their mouths shut, and not to talk with their mouths full.
We keep the TV off during dinner. No toys at the table. Leave the cat alone. Don’t call food gross. Wait until we’re all seated before you dig in. Do not wave your food around in the air or play with it with your fingers.
On pizza night, we have much more relaxed rules.
It was much easier to teach kids from toddler level than starting at six and nine is proving to be, but they’ve improved a lot in the past year.
Yep - that’s another one (or is it two?)
I can’t stand eating with people who chew with their mouths open.
We had several meals during the year where we were expected to exhibit proper table manners but in general we ate dinner on trays in front of the TV. I hated the fancy dinners and using proper manners even though it is handy in a professional setting. So now that I own my own house I refuse to have a dinner table and the only option is dinner on the couch in front of the TV.
As for rules they were the same as what every one else has said for the table dinners but when it was on trays in front of the TV; whoever got up first cleared every one else’s tray who was done eating and talking was only during commercial breaks. But between the two rules dinner could last for hours because you didn’t want to be the first one up and have to do dishes and no one ran out of things to say.
Does anyone/Has anyone ever been a party to family meals where Father did all the serving? I saw an old 1950s “educational” short that showed how families should do the meal thing.
The two main points that I remember were a) Father did the serving, and b) No one started eating until Mother had been served.
I would rather have you chew with your mouth open than scrape your plate. I would rather have you pick up your plate and lick it than make that horrid scrape scrape scrape noise.
These are pretty much our “rules” too, although calling them rules is probably overstating the case. When I’m alone I eat at the counter, intentionally drop food for the dogs, drink from the milk carton, etc., but when I eat with other people, whether it’s co-workers or family or whoever, I clean up my act out of respect for them.
Decent table manners aren’t really that hard.
I’d like to add a few that my mother was a stickler for:
- come to the table with a shirt on, that doesn’t mean *put it on *at the table
- wearing a hat at the table during meals is never acceptable, whether it’s at our house, a friends house, or at a restaurant. ANY restaurant.
- napkins on laps while seated
- napkins on the seat of the chair if you have to get up for something
Sticks with me even today.
I vaguely remember that being the case at holiday meals where there was a piece of meat to be carved at the table, but we don’t do that anymore, even when Father and Mother are present.
A couple people have commented about how awful having strict dinner table rules must be. It never seemed too bad to me, it was just the way dinner was; I didn’t know any differently. Looking back, I really enjoyed those dinner table conversations. My dad challenged my sisters and myself by questioning pretty much everything we learned. I remember discussions ranging from whether or not the Constitution said everyone is equal to our thoughts on papal infallibility.
Dinsdale, we had similar rules when I was growing up (70s/80s), with these differences:
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No alternate dishes even if you make them yourself. If you don’t like a dish, Mom or Dad will put an acceptable minimum amount on your plate if you don’t do so yourself (an incentive for keeping mum if you’re not enthused). If it makes you barf, tough. (I actually got myself to barf a little bit once when we had some new fancy thing with plantains in it. The idea of a banana-like substance with savory spicing and meat was just too much.) In an emergency, such as pork chops, you may be allowed to use flavor-altering agents that no one else is using, such as leftover packets of Horsey Sauce from Arby’s.
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You must clean your plate, or petition for an extraordinary exception. Until the following morning, absolutely no dessert or snacks of any kind permitted after extraordinary exceptions.
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You may *ask *to be excused when you are done eating, but don’t expect your wish to be granted until everyone else is done too, unless you have a good reason.
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Whoever did not cook (or help cook) must either set the table or clear the table. Clearing the table always includes filling the dishwasher, and may or may not also include washing up stuff that doesn’t go in the dishwasher, such as disgusting greasy pots and/or pans. It is not fair to preemptively set the table every night so that your sister always has to wash up, although this is a civil rather than a criminal matter.
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You must participate in conversation and respond politely when asked direct questions, even if you are a teenager and life sucks and your parents ask the stupidest questions evar. (more observed in the breach)
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If you are Dad and you finish off a dish (after asking if anyone else would like any more), you must make the Garbage Disposal noise while emptying that dish.
I hope to have similar rules at our house if we have kids, though I would probably allow self-prepared substitutes in cases of potential barfing.
I never had the “if you don’t like the food, make something else” option when I was growing up, so the alternative was “learn to like or at least try the majority of the things put in front of you”, which taught me to be a more adventurous eater. In addition to Dinsdale’s rules, we had a general “don’t eat anything with your hands unless it’s obviously finger food or a dinner roll” guideline that was more of an observed trait rather than a hard-and-fast rule. We also didn’t generally pass dishes in the same direction, as we often had doubles of a lot of the side items and condiments at big dinners, and with smaller dinners, we’d fill our plates buffet-style in the kitchen before we got to the table. As I am the youngest child and my brothers were significantly older, I did a lot of my learning how to eat by the example that the rest of the family set. Luckily enough, everyone else had good manners, so it was easy enough for me to follow along. I still have some odd habits from that, though, like a reluctance to eat a lot of foods (pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, ribs, etc.) with my hands.
These days, it’s just me and Acid Lamp, so we generally just sit together and eat at the kitchen island. If there’s more than just us, we’ll set up the table, but we generally it’s easier to just “set the table” in the kitchen than walk the extra 20 feet and set up in the dining room.
Geez, I have to import a few of you guys to my other thread for moral support
Hmm our rules.
Don’t chew with your mouth open.
No toys/books/what have you at the dinner table.
No tv on, though exceptions are made on occasion for the news or special shows and its in the next room just barely loud enough to hear usually.
No hats on at the table.
Only milk or water to drink. Juice or soda is a treat reserved for when we go out to eat.
Use your fork and knife, not your fingers unless its finger food.
Don’t start eating until after grace is said and everyone is there (this is pretty flexible at times).
Wash hands before coming to the supper table.
Take what you want, eat what you take. (The don’t pile your plate rule… which also helps in cleaning your plate because if you don’t take too much you won’t force yourself to over eat. There’s always seconds anyway if you’re really hungry, but I don’t sweat leaving food on the plate). I will also put veggies or something new on Velociraptor’s plate though, and he must try at least two (smallish) bites.
Say please and thank you when asking for more/something passed (I usually plate everything and we serve more as needed though sometimes we use serving dishes).
Ask to be excused, or if we’re with guests/are the guests sit nicely until everyone else is finished.
You know, basic courtesy for family dinners.
Just for you! A Date With Your Family.
This is almost exactly the way I was raised. We had assigned seats It is not hell on Earth, but once people got to a certain age and had jobs, dates, etc., the rules were relaxed.
Dining in front of the TV has become the norm. I miss the family mealtime thing sometimes, but since its just me and Mr. K, it’s not a big deal anymore.
Basically, my parent’s rules were "be civil " and “if you don’t want to eat with us/what has been cooked, there’s the kitchen”. Not thanking mom or dad for cooking wouldn’t get us in trouble, but obviously was appreciated. We alternated who’s cleanup it was, but everyone cleared their own plate. My parents saw no reason to care if I wore a hat at the table at home, or if one of us had to leave before dinner officially ended. Fairly frequently when we did all sit down to eat together we’d have the radio or the TV on.
The traditional sit-down family dinner happened maybe once a week. All of us, including my parents, almost always had various meetings or classes or other commitments that, to us, were far more important than eating together.
Sounds like dinner when I was a kid, except we didn’t ask a specific person to pass something, because there were so many of us that it just fell to whoever passed it first.
We did sort of have assigned seats, because my 4 older sisters would fight over any stupid little thing, and it was just easier if everyone had their own seat. Plus, our table only seated 6, for our family of 7, so I spent a few years sitting on the kitchen stool, and then dragging the desk chair in from the living room for another few years.
And heaven help us if any of our friends called during dinner time… We were supposed to let them know that phone calls were forbidden from 5:30-6:00.
I’ve relaxed some of the rules with my kids, again because our table doesn’t fit the whole family (4-seat table, 6 people living here), and we certainly don’t have room to pass dishes around the table, so I serve buffet-style most of the time, or just plate the food myself. And a couple of my kids are at an age at which they’re still trying to figure out which end of the fork to use, so we’re still working on basic eating techniques around here.
In my English family we had rules similar to the ones being mentioned here, and my Dad was a stickler for them. The only thing that was different was that he would insist on the radio being on so he could listen to the news, and he demanded silence while this was happening. He was a primary school head teacher and had been talking and moving all day, whereas Mum and my brother and I wanted our Dad back and to tell him about our day’s happenings. This caused a lot of conflict and we would get yelled at a lot when we just couldn’t contain ourselves any longer, and then Mum would leap in to defend us because it annoyed her too…
Even now in their house he has the radio on for breakfast time and woe betide you if you try to talk! Evening meals he doesn’t do it any more.
In our house now in Japan, I find that the kids have a very pressured lifestyle with little time to flop. We all get home at about 5:30 to 6:00pm and somewhere between then and 8:30 we have to get some down time, dinner, homework, the next days’s prep, bath and bed time story in. It is far too crowded so the past couple of years I have been feeding the kids in front of the TV on trays. It means that the down time and the dinner time are happening at the same time, and it means that we can get started on homework at about 7 to 7:15 without too much wailing.
It helps that my husband doesn’t live with us right now as he works about three hours drive away, so he comes home at weekends when he can. I don’t feel the need to have “family dinners” when the whole family isn’t here.
We do I confess eat out a lot at weekends (I work full time and I don’t like cooking much!) On those occasions we demand nice manners, sitting up straight, pleasant conversation etc and the kids can rise to the occasion and enjoy it.
We do also have one or two meals a week at the table at home, and table or tv, the kids are expected to wash their hands, eat a reasonable amount with no complaining (I don’t make stuff they hate but I do make stuff they are not too keen on) and to take their stuff to the sink when done.
And I am mean about juice! In our house I buy one litre of vegetable juice a week. Each kid can have one glass a day till it’s gone. Then it’s milk or water, baby!