The Surprising Ways Your Kitchen Setup Is Standing In The Way Of Family Meals
Nowadays, every parent understands the value of family meals. When you eat together, not only do meals become a healthier, happier space for everyone, but they become key periods of coming together, communicating, and modeling the eating behaviors you’d most like to see from your kids.
Unfortunately, countless families find ‘family meals’ elusive to come by. This can happen for reasons including incompatible schedules and a general lack of willingness. However, if you’re all available and keen to give family meals a try, then there’s every possibility that something in your kitchen design is stopping it from happening.
In this article, we’ll consider what that might be, and how you can overcome it to finally make family meals a priority.
A Lack of Kitchen Visibility
Ensuring your kids have a healthy relationship with food and mealtimes means getting them involved in every stage of the cooking process. Unfortunately, communal cooking can be limited by a closed or small kitchen design that sees you slaving away while the rest of your family is elsewhere.
Open-plan kitchens are the best way around this issue. Working with a home remodeling contractor to open up your kitchen space could ensure a kitchen that’s fully visible from the television or play room where your kids spend time. Equally, by creating additional space for things like a dining table, an open plan design could mean that the rest of the family can play or complete their work alongside you before dinner. That way, you’ll all be far more integrated by the time it comes to sitting down and, hopefully, eating together.
Limited Seating
Family meals will never happen if there aren’t enough seats to go around in your kitchen. Let’s say you have two stools at your breakfast bar – your kids will always have to eat before you do. Either that or the adults in the household will end up finishing meals as they hover around, which again, isn’t ideal.
Finding ways to incorporate additional seating is key to overcoming this setback. For instance, rearranging your kitchen layout could leave you space for an island that doubles up as a dining table. Alternatively, you could opt for adding a dining table into your kitchen design, meaning everyone can comfortably sit together, and eat as they should.
Cumulative Clutter
Kitchens attract clutter, including necessary gadgets and dinnerware, many of which may end up overflowing onto your countertops or across your kitchen table. This can stop your kitchen from being somewhere you want to spend time, and can also limit space for a whole-family dinner.
Luckily, there are plenty of great kitchen storage solutions to help overcome this problem. Installing an island, as mentioned, is great as it can double up as a dining table and complete storage solution. Alternatively, you could incorporate hidden storage into seating additions like a dining bench, which keeps clutter hidden and brings additional seating for the whole family to enjoy.
Worried your kitchen is kicking family meals to the curb? Perhaps it’s time to address these issues.
