Resources — Shane Trotter

Essential Resources for Parents, Educators, Coaches, and Conscientious Citizens

There is a reason every great culture has ritualized and even sacralized community meals.

Children who do not dine with their parents at least twice a week are more likely to be overweight, less likely to eat vegetables, and more likely to be truant at school.
According to Harvard professor Anne Fishel, “dinner time conversation boosts vocabulary more than being read aloud to” and it lowers rates of depression and suicidal thoughts.
She also has found that regular family meals are more powerful predictors for standardized test scores than time spent in school or spent doing homework.
And youth “…smoking, binge drinking, marijuana usage, violence, school problems, eating disorders, and sexual activity” are less likely in homes with regular family dinners.
But, over the past 20 years, the frequency of family meals has declined by 33%
In the US, about 20% of meals are consumed in the car.

Oxford University researchers studying all of the extracurricular activities sixteen-year-olds participate in found that the only one that had significant workplace benefits later in life was reading.
“In 2018, the Pew Research Center reported that adults with incomes of less than $30,000 per year are three times as likely as affluent households to be “non-book readers.””
In 1980, 60% of teenagers reported that they read a newspaper, magazine, or book on a daily basis for pleasure. By 2016, that number had dropped to 16%.
As of 2016, thirteen-year-olds are more likely to read for pleasure than seventeen-year-olds.
The number of people who read for pleasure has declined 30% since 2004.
Only 43% of adults have read one novel, one short story, one poem, or one play in the past year.