You can’t underestimate the importance of all sitting down to eat together and it’s important children know they have a time when they can sit down with their parents and be listened to. It is this that creates a close family who gets on well and has fun together.
A question for working parents: Do you use dinnertime to be involved with your children? It’s not the food that’s important as much as the time and connection.
Apparently, even with the monetary and psychic rewards of paying jobs, we still yearn for that cozy, clean nest – home. Despite what was taught in the 70s, deep down, we have a perfectly respectable desire to create an attractive, peaceful haven for our families and ourselves.
Eating is a cultural act - a healthy diet therefore, affects not just the individual’s health but also the health of society. If this concept has been ignored in public health campaigns, as it has, it is no surprise that the past 40years of dietary advice has failed. And, unless it adapts to the history and sense of community of those to whom it is addressed it is doomed to fail hereafter.
In this interview for MercatorNet, Catherine McMahon of the Home Renaissance Foundation asked Charles Handy about his vision of the home as a place of work. Charles Handy will be a keynote speaker at the From House to Home International Conference, 20-21 November 2008.
