Families, meals and synchronicity: eating together in British dual earner families

Abstract

Based on a sample of British dual earner families with young children drawn from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, the paper examines their food practices, in particular the conditions under which families are able to eat together or not during the working week. The concept of synchronicity is drawn upon to shed light on whether meals and meal times are coordinated in family life and the facilitators and constraints upon coordination. The paper suggests that whether families eat together is not only influenced by parents' work time schedules but also children's timetables relating to their age and bodily tempos, their childcare regimes, their extra-curricular activities and the problem of coordinating different food preferences and tastes.

Basé sur un échantillon de familles à deux revenus britanniques avec de jeunes enfants issus de la Diète Nationale et Enquête sur la Nutrition, l'étude examine leurs habitudes alimentaires, en particulier les conditions dans lesquelles les familles sont capables de manger ensemble, ou pas pendant la semaine de travail. Le concept de synchronicité est mis à profit pour faire la lumière sur les repas et si les heures de repas sont coordonnés dans la vie familiale et les facilitateurs et les contraintes sur la coordination. Le document suggère que si les familles mangent ensemble n'est pas seulement influencée par les horaires des parents de temps de travail, mais aussi les horaires des enfants liées à leur âge et de tempos corporels, leurs régimes de garde d'enfants, leurs activités parascolaires et le problème de la coordination des préférences alimentaires et des goûts différents.

Keywords:

• meal patterns
• dual earner households
• children's schedules
• synchronicity

Mots-clés:

• manger ensemble
• les familles à deux revenus
• les horaires des enfants
• le sychronicité

Introduction

Much of the burden of organization is carried by conspicuous fixed times. The order of the day is the infrastructure of the community. (Douglas, 1991, p. 301)

Working mothers have been subjected to intense moral scrutiny in public discourse, and parenting in general has become a more intensive process (Fox, 2009; Hays, 1996) in which time and time for children have become a contested issue (Daly, 2001; Elkins, 2003; Furedi, 2002). Britain is a particularly pertinent case for the study of time in relation to working parents. With the rapid growth in the employment of mothers with young children, dual earning households have become typical (Eurostat, 2009). Whilst the most common pattern in British two parent households is for one parent to work full time and the other, usually the mother, to work part time¹ (Gatrell, 2007), the combined working hours of British mothers and fathers are among the highest in Europe (O'Brien, 2008). Reflecting an expressed desire by European parents to find employment which enables the reconciliation of work and family life, many UK fathers would prefer to reduce their hours (Hobson & Fahlén, 2009, pp. 220–223). Moreover this growth in hours of employment has been accompanied by the general intensification of work (Lewis, Brannen, & Nilsen, 2009) and by a rise in non-standard hours, reflecting the situation in the USA (Schor, 1992). With the current economic retrenchment in the UK, people are increasingly fearful about job loss and feel they have to accept the employment conditions on offer (Lansley, 2012).

‘Time poverty’ is typically experienced by employed parents, especially mothers (Hochschild, 1997) and is emerging as a major social problem (Garhammer, 1998, p. 327). More generally people are said to experience a speeding up of time (Rosa, 2008) resulting in a constant state of busyness and time pressure (Warren, 2003, p. 734). However, historians have noted that whilst a sense of hurriedness pervades contemporary life, there has been no objective reduction in the time available to families (Gillis, 1996). Jacobs and Gerson (2001) in the USA suggest that the length of the average working week has remained stable between 1960 and 2000, and in Europe weekly hours of work appear to have declined: the average working time in the EC12 in 1991 was 40.5 hours a week; in 2010 it was 37.5 hours a week in the EU27 and 36.4 hours a week in the 12 ‘old’ Member States (Eurofound, 2012, p. 33).

Thus it has been suggested that the causes of ‘time poverty’ and time pressure are themselves temporal: the contemporary feeling of being ‘squeezed’ for time has less to do with the shortage of time than with the issue of timing (Warde, 1999) and lack of ‘synchronicity’ or coordination of time schedules (Southerton, 2006). Underpinning the problem of lack of synchronicity is increased simultaneity, a concept that suggests the extent to which individuals occupy different social domains concurrently (Brose, 2004). Thus when parents (mothers) are at work they remain responsible for children and have to manage households and children at a distance, facilitated by technologies that sever the time – space link (Harvey, 1990) such as mobile phones. In addition, paid work is itself encroaching more and more into life outside work (Brannen, 2005; Nippert-Eng, 1996). The result is that, as both parents and workers, people are forever on call, never off message (Daly, 1996).

The concepts of domain simultaneity and time asynchronicity are particularly pertinent to the study of working family lives (Brose, 2004, p. 7). Parents (mothers) struggle to synchronise often irreconcilable spheres of their lives and to plan time–space paths which are connected to one another less and less smoothly (Glennie & Thrift, 1996). Flexible working, for example working from home, is deemed by public policy a solution, though workers have only the right to request it in the UK. Even for those who do have access to family friendly policy solutions (Lewis et al., 2009), juggling children's care with work necessarily demands multi-tasking (Hochschild, 1989), negotiating with others and curbing individual autonomy.

The conditions of asynchronicity and time pressure are constitutive of working mothers' experience of the everyday (Brannen, 2005; Brannen & Sadar Černigoj, 2012; Hochschild, 1997). Children have their activities and priorities too with timetables that often run alongside, but do not coincide with, those of their parents, relating to their bodily needs, childcare, school and extra-curricular activities (Vincent & Ball, 2007). Parents' time paths also include ‘time for me’, time for friends, study, household chores and so on. These domains intersect, often creating irreconcilable temporal experiences. Because of, or despite, pressures of working time, families prioritise ‘quality time’, that is time devoted exclusively for family togetherness and family activity (Daly, 2001; Harden, MacLean, Backett-Milburn, & Cunningham-Burley, 2012). In the context of asynchronicity, family rituals – ‘time out of time’ – assume greater symbolic significance so that precisely when ‘family time’ becomes most difficult to achieve it becomes most sanctified (Gillis, 1996).

Eating together and what is termed commensality (Fischler, 1988, 2011) within domestic environments is a case in point. In popular discourse as well as social research, ‘family meals’ are viewed as a symbol of and vehicle for family ‘togetherness’, a means by which families are reproduced as such. Family meals have been the subject of recent media coverage and campaigns in the UK (e.g. The Independent, 2006) as well as a significant body of international sociological and anthropological research (e.g. Charles & Kerr, 1988; DeVault, 1991; Grieshaber, 1997; Lupton, 1996; Murcott, 1982, 1983a, 1983b; Valentine, 1999; Warde & Hetherington, 1994). As DeVault's ground breaking study suggests, family meals construct home and family. They are social events that bring family members together and form a basis for establishing and maintaining family culture, for ‘a “family” is not a naturally occurring collection of individuals; its reality is constructed from day to day through activities like eating together’ (1991, p. 39). At the same time it is recognised that the family meal has normative status and may reflect the ideal more than the real (Wilk, 2010).

‘Moral panics’ sustained by the media about the supposed demise of the family meal in contemporary society (Jackson, Olive, & Smith, 2009) reflect and symbolise fears about the disintegration of family (and society) itself (Murcott, 1997, 2010). Despite a lack of evidence to support the thesis that family meals are declining, and empirical research which finds that there has been little change in the amount of time spent by families eating together (Cheng, Olsen, Southerton, & Warde, 2007; Jackson et al., 2009), assumptions about the decline of the family meal abound.

In the popular media, and in some research, this supposed decline is linked to the rise in mothers' employment, reflecting and reinforcing concerns about ‘working mothers' more generally (Garey & Arendell, 2001; Maher, Fraser, & Wright, 2010). Some studies from the USA which examine the relationship between family meal frequency and a range of child outcomes suggest that family meals are associated with healthier diets overall but decline with increased hours of maternal employment (e.g. Neumark-Sztainer, Hannan, Story, Croll, & Perry, 2003).² Other research finds a positive relationship between hours of maternal employment and child obesity (e.g. Hawkins, Cole, Law, & The Millennium Cohort Study Child Health Group, 2008) with some suggesting that this association may result from fewer family meals as mothers' time for food preparation and eating with children is traded off against time for paid work (e.g. Cawley & Liu, 2012).

However, as outlined above, hours of employment may be less important in explaining patterns of working family life than the experience of time and the ways different temporal domains and schedules intersect. Indeed, in relation to (‘convenience’) food, Warde (1999) has speculated that the issue of time may be less important than that of timing for understanding cooking and eating patterns. Yet relatively few studies have as yet applied an explicitly temporal lens to the ways in which meals and eating fit into the contemporary mundane working day and into the organisation of children's lives; this was a central aim of the qualitative study that is the focus of this paper. (For studies that also apply a temporal lens, see Arendell (2001) who includes family food in her discussion of how middle-class mothers manage time or Devine et al. (2006) who suggest that when work negatively impacted on family life, this was highly stressful for mothers, affecting their ability to make meals.)

The study's focus and methods

The background to the paper is the food practices and working families study that was jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department of Health and conducted between 2009 and 2011.³ In this study we sought to interrogate the association found by Hawkins, Cole, Law, and The Millennium Cohort Study Child Health Group (2009) in the UK between children's diet and mothers' employment quantitatively via secondary analysis of three large scale UK data sets⁴.

We also posed a different question qualitatively. We sought to understand how employed parents (mothers) fitted food and eating into their working family lives and how habitual practices of eating together and eating meals were influenced by the timetables of other family members. In order to address this latter question, the concern of this paper, we collected data via interviews with employed parents and their children together with a range of other methods used with children, for example, drawing and photo elicitation methods (O'Connell, 2013). We recruited the households by following up research participants who had taken part in the UK's National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) (in England). In analysing these data we have sought to explore the ways in which parents' employment shapes and influences family food practices as they are embedded in everyday social relations, norms and routines. Specifically in this paper we examine how mothers', fathers' and children's time schedules synchronise, or fail to synchronise, particularly in relation to eating together in the working week.

The case analysis we have carried out covers 40 dual earner households with children aged 18 months to 10 years.⁵ We selected households from NDNS according to a number of criteria: a range of households with higher and lower incomes, and a roughly equal distribution of children by gender and age. In analysing the data we have followed the logic of case studies (Gomm, Hammersley, & Foster, 2000). In selecting the cases presented in the paper we have sought to demonstrate the key factors that contribute to a particular meal pattern in a household during the working week and the social processes at work. To aid comparison of cases, the current analysis focused on dual earner households only.

The majority of the 40 dual earner households were white British (31/40), more girls (n=22) than boys and children had a mean age of 6. The main food provider for the family, usually the mother, was interviewed at home. However, fathers were interviewed in some families or joined in the mothers' interviews. We also carried out a range of child-focused activities with the target children.⁶

We began our interviews by asking parents and children to describe to us in detail the last working and weekend day, paying particular attention to food and eating. With adults, we followed this up with probes, including asking about whether they subscribed to the ideal of ‘a family meal’ and what they understood by it. As might be expected, given the normativity surrounding the desirability of eating together, there was a good deal of consensus that ideally it is a ‘good thing to do’. But, as the families' everyday lives reveal, what happened in practice varied. In analysing these data we were also struck by interviewees' responses to questions about habitual practices of eating meals and meal times. These responses were often matter of fact rather than normative and in brief report form. They suggest that food practices are not readily open to reflection. As Bourdieu (1979) observed tastes and dispositions are not conscious once they become habitual; they form part of family habitus and are embedded in the everyday taken for granted world in which lives are lived (Bourdieu, 1990).

The synchronisation of family lives and meal patterns

We now set out the main practices we identified in our material concerning whether and how working families achieved synchronicity in relation to meals and meal times. Twelve mothers in the sample worked full-time hours (>30 hours per week) with four doing so over four days a week. Eight mothers were working 15 hours or less, and 19 between 16 and 30 hours. By contrast, all but one of the 40 fathers worked full time, with several working long hours at times or regularly. Working lives where younger children are involved require coordination and management and, as studies have documented for the post-war period, mothers rather than fathers adapt their working hours to do this (Finch, 2006). Part-time work is ‘the way of reconciling work and family’ (Lewis et al., 2009, p. 33), and women increasingly take up opportunities for flexibility (Scott et al., 2009). Many mothers in the study fitted their part-time work hours around school timetables and those mothers who worked full-time also synchronised their hours to fit in with children's lives. They made adjustments to their work schedules by working flexi time, going into work early in order to leave work early to pick up children from school or childcare; they worked through lunch breaks, worked from home and caught up with work in the evenings. Several women employed a number of these strategies. Some fathers (6/40) adapted their working times to fill gaps in childcare where there was a need or desire to avoid paid childcare.

Most mothers, and in some cases fathers, said they valued family meals. They gave a variety of reasons for doing so: to spend time as a family to talk and ‘catch up’; to socialise children into good habits and table manners; and practical reasons to do with getting the family fed all at the same time:

Well I think it [family meals] is a time we can all get together and sit round and discuss what we've done in the day. And I'll say to them you know, what have you done today? Who've you played with? What school work have you done? What have you eaten? (Mother in high-income⁷ dual earner household, children aged 7 and 3)

… so we just thought actually it's [eating together] really good for their language development. It can be a bit of a strain, because they finish early and want to get down. (Mother in medium-income dual earner household with children aged 3 and 2)

However, a desire to eat together did not mean this happened. Under a third of the families (12/40) managed to eat together most weekdays, while the same number (12/40) managed no family meals on weekdays. Sixteen families managed meals on some days without both parents present, a pattern we refer to as modified family meals.

As a result of examining how meals fit into timetables and time domains of families as they play out in practice, the following patterns were identified. Two cases are selected in each pattern to give a sense of how different conditions intersect to produce similar observable outcomes.

Eating together as a family

As noted, 12 of the 40 families ate together most weekdays, a practice facilitated by the synchronisation of the timetables of all the household members. This pattern was facilitated by two work patterns (set out in the cases below) that enabled fathers' participation in family meals: (1) flexible work patterns adopted mainly by fathers in professional or managerial jobs and (2) shift work whereby fathers worked non-standard hours, typically those in routine or manual occupations (ONS, 2010).

All the family round the table

James, aged 10, is from a middle-class white British family. The mother works part time and is responsible for food work and managing the children and their care. James has an 8-year-old brother and a 2-year-old sister. James's mother does all the taking and fetching to school and childcare. She makes most of the meals which is taken for granted as she finishes work at 3 in the afternoon. Everyone is expected to partake of the same meal. The father, who is a manager in his family's business, aims to get home around 6 which he usually is able to organise.

The family has a large table in their open-plan living room, and the photos taken by James and his brother confirm its importance in meal routines, ‘that's where we eat most of the time’. The boys explain that their 2-year-old sister also eats with them; ‘unless she's at nursery, but she always wants to have dinner with us so that we give her a little bit of ours’.

James's mother who grew up with her mother and grandmother was brought up with the notion of the ‘proper dinner’:

I do try, and make sure they have proper dinners you know, even if it is sausage and mash they'll always be vegetables with it as well. Whereas before, if it was just me and (husband) I wouldn't have worked so much. So yeah I am more aware of what we're eating and try and make sure we all have it together. So you know that part of the day, they have to sit and eat dinner together. Unless my husband's going to be late but then I'll sit with them.

James' mother finds little place for convenience foods except as a back-up. She explains that eating together was part of her own childhood but is also a practical solution to perceived time shortage:

Because I always did it when I was a kid. And to be honest with you I find it easier. To do it once, and everyone have it than to be doing something for the children, clearing up and then starting over again for me and (my husband), it just makes more work for me and I haven't really got the time.

In addition, the mother synchronises meals to fit in with the children's body clocks and their bed times, ‘6.30 is an absolute latest for the children’ to eat.

Getting fed in a shift work family

Gemma, aged 8, is from a working-class white British family. The mother works full-time standard hours and the father works shifts. Gemma has a brother aged 5. The father's shift pattern is synchronised with his wife's working hours. Georgina's mother usually gets into work late so that she can drop off the children at their respective schools, and works through her lunch break and is home by five. The father works permanent night shifts as a lorry driver, leaving home at a quarter to six each night and returning at 6 in the morning, depending on the length of his journey. He sleeps during the day and gets up early afternoon to collect the children from school. Thus the couple avoids the need for paid childcare, which is beyond their budget.

The father is the main food provider, as acknowledged by Gemma. When Gemma's mother gets in from work, her husband prepares the dinner (everyone eats the same meal) which they eat together. He then showers and goes out to work his night shift. Gemma's mother says she does not enjoy cooking and rarely participates, although she shares food shopping. She accounts for not cooking thus, ‘I get in at gone five, he has to be out at quarter to seven. There would be no time to eat if he waited for me to come in and cook a meal, so it makes sense, you know?’

While shared meals are not idealised, reflected by the lack of a dining table, Gemma's mother still thinks sitting together at a table would be ‘nice’, ‘I do think they're important you know. It would be nice if the four of us could sit down at a table and talk but -. We did have a table but it was too big, and now the dog's just taken over the dining room (laughs) so that's it now’.

The family eats in front of the TV, with the children eating on the floor and the parents eating on their laps. Gemma's mother justifies this arrangement further; that since she and her husband work for the same firm they do not want to talk about work and that the ‘children are not yet of an age where they want to come home and want to start talking about the day at school’.

Eating together is seen as a practical matter of ‘getting fed’ (Wills, Backett-Milburn, Roberts, & Lawton, 2011), dictated by parents' working hours and a scarcity of time. Gemma's mother says she would rather not eat a meal and prefers snacks. However ‘body clocks’ are subordinated to the couple's work schedules. In this household, as in the previous, everyone eats the same thing.

There is an emphasis in this family upon multi-tasking: meals are eaten while they watch favourite television programmes; Gemma's father plans meals whilst working; and he chooses dishes in which the cooking time of ingredients are synchronised. For example, spaghetti bolognaise is ideal, because ‘you put your spaghetti in and by the time your spaghetti's cooked your bolognaise is’.

Modified family meals

The largest group of families (16/40) did not usually achieve the necessary synchronicity to realise family meals during the working week. For these households, everyone in the household eating together took place only on some days of the working week. At other times the family meal was modified. This happened for a number of reasons: on account of fathers arriving home from work after the children had gone to bed; the timing of children's activities; the children's care regimes and whether they ate in childcare; and because of the need to young children to eat early. Another source of asynchronicity (though not in the cases in this analysis) relates to children living part of the week with their fathers and hence eating with different parents on different days of the week.

A typical pattern in this category concerned a situation where mothers got home from work earlier than the fathers and children ate with their mothers because of this. Another common pattern was that in which shared meals were subordinated to children's activities and therefore the whole family only ate together on some days of the week.

Eating with mum

Malkeet, aged 6, is from a middle-class British Asian family. Malkeet is an only child and attends after school provision one day a week at his private school. Both parents work full time and have a long commute to work. However Malkeet's mother works flexibly to accommodate childcare, working from home two or three days a week and on other days leaving her workplace early to collect her son, which she says can be ‘quite tricky’. Although the mother says that the couple ‘juggles’ his care between them, in practice her husband works ‘really long hours, he'll leave home probably about six thirty, seven and come home about seven thirty, eight’.

Malkeet's mother did not dwell on the importance of eating together. Cooking was embedded in her everyday practices. While talking about making meals from scratch on a working day she mentioned that her mother was a cook in a restaurant and that she herself grew up in a large family where everyone was expected to learn to cook and where everyone ate ‘at least one meal together’. When asked the question whether she would like to eat as a family, she reflects, ‘if you're eating you can ask each other ‘How was your day?’ Or have a little conversation. So, that's important’. However, as she says, ‘unfortunately my husband comes home quite late’ and eating together is not achievable during the week.

Malkeet's mother is generally responsible for food although her husband cooks one meal at the weekend. On days when she works from home, meals are more elaborate because she has ‘a lot more time to do stuff’. ‘A typical working day, it will be just a quick curry, and a chapatti or something. Whereas if I'm working from home I'll do … things like samosas and stuff like that’.

Malkeet and his mother tend to eat at about 6.30 and Malkeet's father eats between an hour or so later. The mother justifies this pattern as not wanting to feed Malkeet too late. She discourages snacks after dinner. In this household, the large dining table is often covered with the mother's work during the week. So sometimes Malkeet and his mother eat in front of the TV, with Malkeet at the coffee table, and at other times they eat at table. According to the mother's family customs everyone is expected to eat the same meal including her husband, ‘whatever was on the table everybody had’. But she accommodates children's tastes, for example, adding chillies to the adults’ food at the end ‘so the dishes are not too spicy for children’.

Fitting meals around children's activities

Christopher, aged 2, is from a middle-class white British family. The mother works part time and is responsible for cooking and managing childcare. Christopher has two older sisters, Susan, aged 10, and Rachel, aged 6.

Christopher's mother works four days a week, from 8t to 3 during term time. She organises her working day around the children and this gives her time to prepare meals. On the days Christopher goes to nursery she drops him off on her way to work. She usually collects the two girls from school, going out at 5 to collect Christopher. Although Christopher's father works in a job which is ‘very full time’, as a professional worker he can exercise some flexibility. He takes the two girls to school two days a week and does the ferrying for the eldest daughter's extra-curricular activities at least two nights a week. Sometimes he collects Christopher on his way back from taking the eldest girl to sports training.

Christopher's mother is responsible for all the cooking. She says this is because she enjoys cooking ‘and he doesn't’ and because she is better at it than her husband, who does the washing up. Christopher's mother fits food preparation into her busy schedule, ‘I usually leave work at quarter past three, … having to go straight to school and having to get home at ten to four, you know and then at quarter to five I'll think about putting the tea on. And if we've got to go and pick Christopher up I'll put the potatoes on to boil as we're going out the door, and put the sausages in or whatever’. If her husband is home ‘on time’ he eats with them but otherwise Christopher's mother eats with the children and leaves food for her husband to microwave.

Eating together is important in Christopher's mother's view. As a way of socialising the children into eating properly, she describes the rituals of getting the children to wash their hands before meals, ‘turn the telly off and go to the dining room’ and her efforts to keep the three children at the table until the meal is finished.

Meals tend to be ‘proper meals’ in that they are usually hot and include fresh vegetables (Charles & Kerr, 1988; Murcott, 1982, 1983a). His mother describes her children's tastes as quite adventurous; she herself has a passion for food. She spends quite a lot on food and reported cooking ‘roasts’ (time consuming) during the working week. But she also takes short cuts with simple dishes. Moreover although she said she did not cater for individual food preferences, she sometimes adapted the meals so that the children did not always eat exactly the same meal, which is not surprising given the wide age range of the children.

Despite an emphasis in this family on commensality the older child's activities mean that the family does not usually eat together on week nights, ‘it depends, I don't really have a system. Just kind of, with Susan she's going to football, … she has to go out at ten past five’. Activities also meant preparing different meals so that ‘on football nights’, she gives her daughter ‘something easy’, like pizza and beans.

Asynchronicity: no family meals

Twelve households did not eat meals together at all during the week (12/40). Whilst many managed to do so at weekends, two said that they only ate together at Christmas. In some households the individualisation of tastes of family members made shared meals a rarity while in others meals were not so much ‘individualised’ as ‘collectivised’, eaten by the children with other children in different settings (school, after school club and day care). Children's needs, governed by bodily tempos (appetites), to eat earlier than parents, or rather parents' preference that they do so, meant that adults ate separately and later than children.

Individualised meals

Hayley, aged 11, is from a working-class white British family. The mother works full time and is the main food provider. Hayley has an older sister, aged 21, whose boyfriend also lives with them.

Hayley's mother works flexitime and has done since her children were born. Currently she leaves the house at a quarter to six in the morning and returns at 3 o'clock to ‘be there’ for her youngest daughter coming home from school. This also enables her to prepare evening meals. Her husband's job is less secure and more unpredictable; as a debt collector he has to travel all over the area and to work hours when he can expect to find people at home. The work patterns not only of the husband but also the older daughter and boyfriend vary. There is no family meal or mealtime in this household: ‘we don't eat at the same times, we're all in different times, wanting at different times. So we tend to just be doing our own thing, which is a shame’. However this was not always the case. Hayley's mother says she has given up on cooking one meal for everyone. As the daughter of a chef she likes good food and she also says it was cheaper to cook the one meal:

I prefer a hot dinner, and a nice meal. I was cooking for everybody because it was cheaper as well. I was cooking for me and (husband) and cooking, making a recipe - I do a lot out of Slimming World, and Weight Watchers recipes - and I was cooking for four and doing it for us two and buying, ‘cos it's in packets of, for four people normally. So I said I'll cook for them (her daughter and boyfriend). But sometimes I just get fed up, ‘cos I come in from work, cook for everyone and they just come and sit down. So I get really fed up ‘cos they don't even attempt to cook for me or clean up or anything. So I'll go so long and then I'll say “right I'm not doing it anymore”.

Hayley's mother remains invested in the idea of the importance of eating together as a family and thinks it is ‘a shame’ that this no longer happens, ‘it's really nice to do that and you can all get together and chat’. According to her account, ‘it just doesn't happen’. Nor did the family eat together at weekends.

Critical in this case is the lack of synchronicity in food tastes and preferences. Hayley's mother and father are on diets (two different ones), and Hayley eats a very limited range of foods:

It's easier to say what she does like. She eats bread, baked beans, plain pasta, nothing on it, she'll eat sausages, she'll eat mash, she'll eat MacDonald's chicken nuggets and chips, she'll eat a burger sort of separate not with things in. She'll eat pizza, basically that's it really. She'll eat cereal, she likes porridge.

Hayley's mother is insistent that she has never forced her daughter to eat which Hayley confirms: ‘Mum doesn't moan at me but dad does’. If threatened with sanctions Hayley says her mother does not stick to them, ‘No they always give it to me anyway’. Hayley's mother says she has ‘given up’ preparing meals because Hayley ‘doesn't eat things from scratch’ and only likes what Hayley's mother calls ‘rubbish’.

In spite of a lack of synchronicity of dietary tastes and preferences, Hayley's mother still prepares the meals, which she resents. She begins cooking shortly after she gets home from work and continues into the evening. Hayley's mother describes what happened the day before the interview:

I came home, left work at half past 2, and … quarter past 4 I made Hayley and her friend's dinner which was pizza and oven chips and I had steak, cottage cheese and tomatoes and then I cooked … That's about half past 4. I had mine and then I cooked my husband's tea about 6 o'clock. I cooked his chicken breast ready for when he come in from the gym, which he had salad with. I don't cook for my older daughter and her boyfriend at the moment, … Because I'm not eating much on my diet I don't want to cook them a massive big dinner and then sit and watch them eat it.

Hayley suggests that it is easier to eat different meals separately: ‘Because … me and mum might be eating something healthy and my sister and (her boyfriend) might be eating stuff like from the kebab shop’. In part, then, the family rationalises not eating together because the different foods eaten by different household members disgust or tempt others. Hence the mother cooks three different meals which are eaten separately. Family members also preferred to eat alone with their choice of television programme. Hayley and her father prefer to eat on their laps watching TV and ‘(husband) tends to go in the back room and watch telly in there because he likes sport and I'm usually watching telly in here, something different’. ‘I think Christmas day, me, [husband] and Hayley sit at the table that's the only time’.

Collectivised meals

Rishab, aged six, is from a middle-class British Asian family. His mother works full time and is responsible for cooking. Rishab has a two-year-old sister.

This couple has very long commutes to work which necessitate Rishab's mother leaving very early and his father coming home late. The children are woken at 6. The mother has to leave to get to her job by 7. The children's father takes the children to breakfast club at 8 and their mother collects the children at 5.30 from after school club. In order to be able to leave work early enough to collect the children, the mother works through lunch and sometimes brings work home. The children eat three meals (breakfast, lunch and tea) in school and childcare. Hence meals are not so much individualised in this family as collectivised, eaten by the children with other children in school, after school club and childcare. The parents also eat breakfast and lunch outside the home but eat dinner together after the children are in bed.

Rishab's mother subscribes to the ideal of eating together. Having been brought up in a family where meals were important, she says that ‘it would be nicer if we could eat more together more often’. However as this is not possible she dismisses the matter, ‘what with us being at work and life styles being so rushed, it's really difficult to fit it all in’. In addition, the father does not get home from work until after 7 during the week, ‘The only times really that we eat together as a family is at weekends’.

Rishab's mother does most of the cooking. She engages in practices of ‘time shifting’ (Warde, 1999) in which time for cooking is moved to the weekend. She prepares meals from fresh in advance including portion-sized meals for the children, ‘something like spaghetti bolognaise’, and freezes them. This rescheduling of food work means that she can spend time with the children when she gets home rather than cooking, ‘I don't get in till about 6 o'clock. So you know I could get in and start cooking straight away and stuff, but it just means then I have no time with my children at all because I'm concentrating on cooking’.

Rishab's mother also pre-prepares meals for the adults at weekends – curries which they eat in the evenings with chapattis, ‘I'll make a couple of curries at the weekend, and they just stay in the fridge so we don't have to freeze them. And …, so, in the evening I'll just make some chapatti to go with the curry. And then we'll heat up the curry and we'll have the chapatti with it’. Her husband cooks a Thai curry once a week.

There is also a lack of synchronisation of body clocks between those of children and adults. Because the children rise so early, Rishab's mother says she insists they have a strict bedtime routine, starting at 7. However, they are hungry when they get home from after school club and because the mother does not believe in snacks, this means that the children need to eat early before their parents. Even though adult and child eating times are not coordinated, their tastes are synchronised. Rishab's mother says that Rishab likes most things she cooks. In his interview Rishab confirms this and seems to accept the absence of snacks.

Discussion

Whether or not family meals are in decline, our analysis suggests that they remain a goal that most parents would like to achieve, not only because it is a way of ‘doing family’ but also for practical and budgetary reasons. They also recall the shared meal as part of their childhood. However the reality of contemporary working lives makes eating together difficult. Mothers’ accounts suggest little regret but rather an accommodation to reality, in the recognition perhaps that commitments of different family members are constantly in flux. Of the 40 cases we studied, less than a third (12/40) is able to synchronise their eating times most days of the working week. At the other extreme, among the same proportion (12/40) there is no synchronicity in meal times and/or different meals are provided for different family members. However, over a third (16/40) achieves partial coordination of timetables and eats together on at least some days of the working week, or with one parent (currently typically the mother) eating with children. It is this modified version of family meals that may become more common in the future as children get older (Gillman et al., 2000) and standardised working hours become a thing of the past.

A number of factors contribute to the (a)synchronicity of eating patterns. First, synchronicity is governed by the fit (or not) between mothers' and fathers' work time schedules, confirming the importance placed by Barnett, Gareis, and Brennan (2009) on taking account of work hours at the household level. In contrast to popular wisdom, and some survey research, mothers' working hours per se were not critical. More important was how mothers adapted their hours to fit in with their children's timetables which meant taking responsibility for preparing family meals. Even when mothers worked shorter or flexible hours and fathers worked full time, in some families fathers ate with the family. This was the case in James' and Gemma's families but not in Christopher's family where the father often arrived home too late to eat together. Shiftwork for men can facilitate more time for cooking and eating together, as in Gemma's family. But this arrangement is not cost free as it frequently involves shift parenting and takes away time from being together as a family (Lewis, 2009). A third of fathers cooked on one or more days of the week while in three cases fathers did the bulk of the cooking.

A second issue governing synchronicity is children's participation in extra-curricular activities, as in the case of Christopher's siblings, affecting whether all the children are fed at the same time. A third issue concerns children's ages, which affects parents' decisions about when to feed their children. Young children in the UK are typically fed early. In the case of Rishab who was six and his sister aged two, their everyday eating routines were also governed in turn by their parents' long commutes to work. Because of their parents' need to leave home early in the morning, the children were put to bed early and hence ate before their parents. A fourth issue relates to the coordination of food preferences. Hayley, who had a grown up sister and in whose family everyone ‘did their own thing’, liked very few foods. This created difficulties for her mother who was in charge of cooking. In addition, her mother and father were on different weight loss diets, while Hayley's elder sister and her boyfriend also preferred different meals. In this household, tastes, meal times, dishes and settings were subject to individual preferences, a pattern the mother felt she had to put up with and which made for considerable work.

A fifth issue is the organisation and coordination of eating space. Whilst the table is an ‘important symbol or even metonym of the family’ (Lupton, 1996, p. 39), sitting at the table was by no means the only pattern, even for those who ate together. Several families in the study ate meals on the sofa in front of the TV, with some children sitting on the floor. However, some mothers did not regard this as ‘the proper thing to do’. As one mother said, ‘just sitting together in front of the television’ is ‘really sad’. For Gemma's family, however, eating in front of the TV was just one way of multi-tasking in the context of extreme time pressure.

Despite normative assumptions that family meal frequency makes for improved overall diet quality (e.g. Hammons & Fiese, 2011), prioritising eating together as a family may also involve de-prioritising good nutrition. For example, in one case (not presented) children were fed substantial snacks, including chips, to keep them going until the ‘proper’ family meal was on the table. In Rishab's case, his mother decided to feed the children early in part because she was opposed to snacks. Thereby the benefits of not snacking were seen as preferable to eating as a family.

Conclusion

In the cases presented we have demonstrated that it is not mothers' employment per se that influences the practice of family meals in the working week. Rather we have shown that the issue of timing is important; how far the time paths of parents and children are synchronised (or not) at the household level. A variety of factors emerged as important in facilitating the synchronicity necessary to eat together, namely parents' combined work schedules, children's commitments, their ages and the degree to which food tastes and preferences are shared and catered for. Our analysis, while limited to a relatively small sample, goes beyond surveys that have found a link between family meals and maternal employment. Such studies (e.g. Neumark-Sztainer et al., 2003) typically fail to take account of children's ages, collapsing a range of age groups, and do not look at the ways parents' working hours play out at the household level. This paper began with a quotation from Mary Douglas which suggests that the organisation of social institutions depends upon a shared commitment to coming together at fixed times. However, as this analysis suggests, family meals in the working week are for many a matter of pragmatics even if they are something that many aspire to. Eating practices in households with young children are embedded in everyday routines and processes which are subject to change. Parents' work schedules change and children get older and their tastes and routines and commitments alter. The cases demonstrate the complexities of family life but are only indicative of the dynamic nature of eating arrangements. What is more static, however, is mothers' conventional responsibility for cooking, especially for meals which include their children and their commitment to the family meal as an ideal. Mothers adapt their working hours to fit around their families, a practice that reinforces their taking more responsibility for feeding families. Fathers typically work longer hours than mothers and though they help with cooking rarely take major responsibility for it (three fathers in the study did). Two-thirds of fathers did not participate in family meals over the working week, often arriving home later. Exceptions were fathers who had more control over their work time or men who worked shifts which they often coordinated with mothers' working hours.

In the UK, public policy and employer discourses of ‘family friendly employment’ and employment flexibility are intended to support working families. However they do not necessarily facilitate time path coordination in families with respect to eating together. One reason is that working hours are increasingly non-standardised and subjected to the intensification of work, while another is that gendered patterns of employment continue. While parents are legally entitled to ask their employers for flexibility, the decision to grant such a request lies with employers. Moreover as long as childcare is still a gendered responsibility with mothers expecting, and being expected, to work part time and/or take up flexible hours option, this will not change the working patterns of fathers. Policies concerning flexibility are not directed at the family unit. A shift in policy priorities is called for, away from individualising the problem as one of ‘parenting’, that is mothering, towards a refocusing on families and family time. Whether family meals will in future provide some of the glue that creates family togetherness is an open question. This is a research issue that future studies need to address in particular taking account of children's ages and their increasingly busy lives as well as those of their parents.

Notes on contributors

Professor Julia Brannen is a professor of the sociology of the family at Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, UK

Dr. Rebecca O'Connell is an anthropologist and is a research officer at Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, UK.

Ann Mooney is a psychologist and a Research Associate at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, UK.

Acknowledgements

The study which is the focus of this article was funded as a collaborative grant between the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Food Standards Agency (FSA) in 2009 (RES-190-25-0010). On 1 October 2010, responsibility for nutrition policy transferred from the FSA to the Department of Health (DH). As a result, the research project also transferred to the DH. The authors would like to thank colleagues at HNR (Human Nutrition Research) and NatCen for their help in drawing a sample from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, their co-researchers (Abigail Knight, Charlie Owen and Antonia Simon) and of course the families who generously gave their valuable time to participate in the study.

Additional information

Funding

The study which is the focus of this article was funded as a collaborative grant between the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Food Standards Agency (FSA) in 2009 (RES-190-25-0010).

Notes

1. Based on the Labour Force Survey data, among households with children 5% are non-employed, in 25% both parents are employed full time, in 43% one is full time and the other part time, and in 27% of households one parent is employed and the other not (Eurostat, 2009). The ONS figures are 37% of mothers in part-time work compared with 29% working full time (ONS, 2011).

2. Although counter evidence also exists (e.g. Sweeting & West, 2005).

3. Funded by the ESRC/DH (RES-190-25-0010).

4. The study included secondary analysis of three large datasets: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), Health Survey for England (HSE) and the English 2008/9 NDNS in order to examine associations between parental employment and children's diets. In these data sets no link between children's diet scores and mothers' employment hours was found.

5. In addition, eight households with a lone parent were included.

6. Parent interviews covered eating patterns and food preparation during the week and at weekends; eating in different places; shopping for food and food budgets; and eating habits and health. Depending on the child's age, their interviews included a food timeline for a week day and a day at the weekend, traffic light stickers to indicate the degree of ‘say’ over food, drawings of food they would put in a shopping trolley and picture stories. Twelve children participated in a photo elicitation exercise (O'Connell, 2013).

7. The families were divided into three household income ranges as follows: high income (>£50,000), middle income (£30,000–£49,999) and low income (<£30,000).