Easy Ways to Make Your Next Family Meal More Fun

Family meals are a fantastic time to catch up with your loved ones at the end of the day and see what they have been up to all day. It’s a great chance to talk, share problems and reminisce on some fantastic family memories.

In the past, the family meal probably felt like more of an occasion that people looked forward to. However, as your children get older, the family meal is less of an event than it once was. These days, your children are likely eager to just finish their food and head off to their own personal space.

Family meals are incredibly important for keeping your family happy and close-knit and so you may be frustrated that your meals are not as they once were. The best way that you can get your family involved in dinner again is by making it fun. Here are some easy ways to make your next family meal more fun.

Get Them Involved in The Cooking

A big reason why children are so unappreciative of mealtime is that they have no involvement in it. They are just expected to show up and eat and so they don’t feel any excitement about the meal.

This shouldn’t be the case and the best thing that you can do to get your family involved in the meal is get them to help cook. Thanks to school and other commitments, your children will not always have the time to help you cook. However, on weekends and times when they are not busy, you should encourage them to get involved.

If your children are involved in the cooking process, then they will be more eager to see their results and taste what they have made. The cooking process is also a topic of conversation that you can have, and you can talk about what you had to do to make the meal and any funny things that happened when you were cooking.

You will quickly realize that your family is chatting much more than they usually are and that is because they have a topic of conversation that they may not have had before.

You may also learn that one of your children has a passion for cooking that you may not have previously known about, which means that you could start to encourage them to cook more and form a close relationship with each other.

Do Some Riddles and Games

Another way that you can get your children engaged in dinner and start some conversation is by thinking up some riddles or some mental games that your children can play while they are at the table.

Riddles in particular are a great way to get the conversation started between your family. Riddles always start discussions and it is likely that you will experience a lot of light arguments and disagreements about what the answer will be.

If you are someone that has a younger family, then you may not think that there are any riddles out there that are understandable and appropriate for your children. However, this is not the case and you can find plenty of fun riddles for children online. If you start to tell your children riddles often, you will start to run out of riddles that can excite them.

I would recommend that you make the riddle tradition a weekly thing, as this will make it more exciting and your children will anticipate the riddle day and they will be excited to see if they can solve the brand new riddle.

Help Yourself Food

Another great way to get your children engaged in dinner time is by setting up a help-yourself food situation. Instead of plating your child’s dinner for them, instead, put the components in the middle of the table and allow them to create their own dish.

As you likely know, children are incredibly picky and they tend to have an issue with anything that you cook. Instead of making your life harder, you can let your children have control of what they make and that will also make the process of eating dinner much more entertaining.

As long as you provide the base ingredients, your children will be able to make an array of different interesting and fun dishes. You can even make it into a bit of a competition and try to find out who can create the best dish out of the ingredients provided.

There is nothing better than a bit of competition to get everyone speaking and having discussions and children love to compete.

As well as having your children make their own main meal, you can also get them to make and decorate their own deserts. For example, you could give them cupcakes and have them decorate them with icing and other decorative bits and that will be a lot of fun at dinner time.