With most of us home full time these days, we have a lot more time on our hands than usual! And at least at our house, most sports and activities are on hold, so we don’t have much going on outside our home to fill each other in on! We are getting creative with our dinner discussions to keep our mealtimes lively and engaging for everyone. Normally we don’t use devices at the dinner table, but lately we have had fun “inviting” a grandparent to dinner over facetime. It’s a fun way to connect and keep the kids engaged with the phone call while they eat! Another fun thing to do that could be combined with the video chat idea or simply used around your table, is to go through these discussion questions to visit and learn more about each other:


If you could time travel where would you go?

Name as many African countries as you can.

What would you like to do on a family date night?

If you were building a sustainable city, what would be in it?

When you’re sick, what foods make you feel better?

How do you express love without using words?

Is there someone at this table who went out of their way to help another this week?

My 8 year old is also loving the “Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: For Kids!” series and has fun sharing how to get out of tricky situations like “how to clean your plate of something you hate,” or “How to increase your skimpy allowance.”. We also read through a Would You Rather book which typically has us all laughing or totally grossed out. Options are endless and it doesn’t have to be hard to get the dinner discussion up and running again! Let me know in the comments if you use any of these ideas!

    Stefanie Hathaway
    Monthly Newsletter Contributor since 2016
    Email the author! stefanie@dvo.com