There is a short article, Myth of Family Meals in Parent-Child Bonding Gets Debunked , which speaks in a common-sense way though the title is rather misleading. What the underlying study and the article point out is that family meals are a result of healthy and strong relationships between parents and children rather than being a magical cause of such relationships. The article tells us: “Recent research in the Journal of Marriage and Family, however, found that most of the benefits of regular family meals were not actually the result of eating together. Rather, social scientists Kelly Musick and Ann Meier found, they stemmed from other factors in the family environment that facilitated regular meals, such as sufficient income, strong family relationships and authoritative parents.”
The study says more talking between teens and parents seems to take place in cars than elsewhere, but that doesn’t speak against a variety of shared experiences. Being together, sharing experiences, talking with each other, will—in most cases—strengthen a relationship. Eating meals together fall in such a category and so would raking leaves together or painting a room together.
But the question is, “What truly bonds human beings?” In this case, I’ll endorse an answer coming from sociologists and historians based upon analyses and contemplations of empirical information of a different sort than that found in the studies discussed in the above-referenced article.
We form communal bonds by learning how to live with and within our dependencies upon each other.
By speaking of “authoritative parents,” not always admired by modern social scientists, the scientists who did the research are at least partially admitting such and maybe did admit such in the full report of their study. Parents don’t magically acquire some sort of authority by being anointed by some spirit from a better-ordered realm. Parents are authoritative because they are the ones who feed and house and cloth and teach their children or, at least, should have control over all those activities. This doesn’t mean parents always know the right way to care for and raise their children. There are others—such as grandparents and aunts and uncles, doctors, and clergymen—who can provide good advice or at least stories of how they’d formed families or seen others form families. It’s not necessary that the participants in this process of forming dependencies are aware of the material foundations of what should, we can pray, turn into loving relationships, but they have to accept, consciously or unconsciously, the bonds being formed by dependencies.
Anyone who’s observed a baby growing up in even the most loving family will realize that battles start early about who’s in charge; a baby thinks to control his mother and certainly her breasts for his own purposes. The mother teaches the baby that she’s in charge though greatly concerned about his needs and desires. These battles come and go throughout our lives and may even arise again in later decades when an elderly mother might be dependent upon those children who were once nourished at her breast and were taught the basics of human knowledge on her lap or as they watched how she went about her work and her socializing. Then again, even if Grandma is impoverished, Mom and Dad might be dependent upon her for advice in dealing with their own children. In the best of cases, much of this goes pretty smoothly, largely because the tendencies toward proper behavior are encoded in the different and differently activated genes of mother and father and children, in the genes of all human beings who are individual human beings and also inherently social beings.
As insightful thinkers such as Talcott Parsons and Robert Nisbet have noted: human beings don’t come together to be together, they come together to accomplish something. That something might be socializing around the campfire or it might be fighting a neighboring tribe or foraging for food. This is when everyone begins to see their dependencies upon the fellow with the good memory for generations of stories and the man who can take down a deer with almost each arrow and the woman who knows well which plants or mushrooms are poisonous. We form human communities by bonds of dependencies and not because of allegedly higher sentiments.
Dependencies are problematical in this age of the myths about free-standing individuals. Dependencies are also unavoidable and—certainly in my opinion—lead to great goods, but we’re taught that we can and should free ourselves from any dependencies we don’t choose for ourselves and we’re taught to choose to be dependent upon the centralized powers, the national governments and corporations. We can have strong communities only if we’re willing to become dependent upon those communities, families and churches or synagogues and local political communities and even nations don’t form by magical processes but rather by hard work and the acceptance of dependencies. If we choose to teach our children to be dependent for their most important needs upon the central governments, the centralized school systems quite out of control of families and local communities, the sports leagues, corporations which provide jobs and fast-food and hours of video or audio entertainment, then those children will form strong bonds to the gods of the marketplaces. If we teach them that they are bonded to their families and churches and neighborhoods only as a matter of sentimental choice, then they will form at best sentimental bonds, weak bonds, to these other communities. If we teach them, if we’ve made it a reality, that marriage is a contractual relationship where husband and wife aren’t truly dependent upon each other, then they will form only sentimental bonds, weak bonds, to their spouses.