Clean your plate. No TV during dinner. Every family has its own mealtime rules — and it influences how we eat as adults.

Growing up, Jo Hayes ate dinner at the same time in the same way every night — at 6:30 p.m. on the dot, at a properly set table and right after the evening news. Her mother, father and all six kids would sit down together, say grace and eat.

“As an adult, I hold these memories so dear,” Hayes, an etiquette expert, tells Yahoo Life. “Much of what I do now and teach as an etiquette expert is based on what I was taught over those thousands of childhood family dinners.”

It was a time to gather, chat about the day and laugh, she says. And in the midst of it all, her parents were correcting the kids on their manners. Elbows had to be off the table. No eating with your mouth open. No talking with your mouth full.

“I’m so grateful for all mom and dad taught … about creating a warm, welcoming ‘event,’ even if it was a very basic meal,” says Hayes. “These ‘events’ were the soil from which our relationships grew and flourished, and supremely beneficial for mental, emotional and relational well-being.”

Now, as an adult, Hayes does dinnertime nearly the exact same way.

She’s not alone in re-creating the way she ate dinner when she was young. Childhood is a very critical and impressionable period, says Dr. Mosun Fapohunda, a consultant psychiatrist at Cassiobury Court in the U.K. “Our brains and habits are being formed, and the family dinner table often becomes a key site of learning in regards to regulation and also routine,” she tells Yahoo Life.

Similar to Hayes, Daniel Vasilevski grew up in a family where everyone sat down together to eat each night. “It was not just fueling up; it was connecting,” Vasilevski, owner and director of Pro Electrical, tells Yahoo Life. “It was our opportunity to engage with each other.”

Now, despite the grind of long hours and the stress of running a business, Vasilevski makes it a priority to sit down with his own family for dinner every night without distractions. “It has come to be a very meaningful ritual for me,” he says. “There is something beautiful about slowing down, enjoying the food and having a conversation. It has a way of keeping us grounded and connected.” Because of the regular family dinners, Vasilevski says, he’s also more conscious of how and what he eats.

Hayes and Vasilevski continuing their family dinner habits into adulthood demonstrates broader research that found the way in which people ate dinner at home as children has a major influence on how they eat as adults.

“Parenting is always teaching,” Robyn Koslowitz, a clinical child psychologist, parenting expert and author of the forthcoming book Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted To Be, tells Yahoo Life. “Whether we realize it or not, we’re constantly shaping our children’s understanding of the world, and food is no exception. How we eat, when we eat, what we eat and what it means to eat — these lessons are taught around the dinner table, or the TV, or wherever mealtime happens.”

For Koslowitz, dinners were lonely as a child. Her father had a chronic illness and, by middle school, her mother worked a second job on some evenings. She was often alone for dinner, which usually consisted of heating up whatever she could find and reading a book by herself while she ate. “I didn’t know any other way,” she says.

But when she became a mother, she knew she wanted to do things differently. Koslowitz says she had to retrain herself to sit down, stay present, eat with her kids and create a sense of togetherness.

“It felt awkward at first,” shares Koslowitz. “But I learned that a family meal could be a moment of shared presence, a way of telling my kids, ‘This is home. This is where you belong.’”

It also comes with several benefits: Research shows that kids who regularly eat dinner with their families show better academic outcomes (for example, dinnertime conversation helps expand their vocabulary even more than being read aloud to) and increased self-esteem and resilience. Family dinners have also been shown to lower the risk of obesity, eating disorders and depression, along with reduced risk of substance abuse.

The downsides of being told to clean your plate

Still, for others, sitting at the dinner table with the family as a child was not a positive experience, and they have no desire to replicate those habits and traditions as an adult.

Helen Neale, a therapeutic counselor, parenting and neurodivergent expert and owner of Kiddy Charts, tells Yahoo Life that as a child, she was forced to eat things at the dinner table that made her gag. Now that she’s a parent, Neale says she “100%” does not do this to her kids.

“It is so important to understand that ‘fussy’ kids might very well be experiencing difficulties around food,” says Neale. Having her own children, along with her training in sensory issues, is what shifted Neale’s thinking around family dinners.

“I had difficulties eating in restaurants because I was so worried about my parents’ reactions, and I have seen the same with clients and neurodivergent children generally,” Neale says. “We have to adapt our eating habits to help children feel safe.” Now Neale and her children eat the way they want to, in a relaxed way.

Forcing children to clean their plate or eat foods they strongly dislike can have lasting repercussions, including how well they grow to understand their body’s hunger cues, Shelley Balls, a registered dietitian and nutritionist for Flawless Bloom, tells Yahoo Life.

“Kids are actually really good at listening to their hunger and fullness cues, but as we age, we tend to lose touch,” Balls says. Insisting that a child cleans their plate can create an unhealthy relationship with food, as well as lead to overeating.

How television affects mealtime

Most Americans (63%) watch TV while they have dinner, according to a February 2025 YouGov poll. The poll also found that 41% talk to the people they’re eating with, while 28% stare at their phone. But eating with distractions like TVs and phones can influence how well you’re in touch with natural hunger and fullness cues. For example, watching television with your meal has been shown to make you less aware of how much you’re actually eating and can even lead to consuming more at your next meal.

These habits can start at the family dinner table and continue into adulthood. “Many adults who report mindless eating or struggle with portion control often trace these behaviors back to distracted childhood dinners,” says Fapohunda. “When food is consistently paired with screens or rushed atmospheres, we tend to carry that into our adulthood.”

A study also found that TV-watching during meals is linked to a worse overall diet in children and a higher likelihood of eating fast food for meals. The study researchers wrote that “even if families are not paying attention to the TV, it appears that simply having the TV on as background noise is associated with deleterious outcomes.”

Siblings might make you eat faster

Siblings, particularly older siblings, can also influence a person’s eating habits and overall obesity risk.

“Modeling behavior is a significant factor,” says Fapohunda. Younger children tend to follow in the footsteps of their older siblings, so “if an older sibling is praised for being a good eater or criticized for being fussy, those dynamics can have an impact on other family members.”

Siblings can also affect the speed at which a person eats. A 2021 study published in Clinical Obesity showed that children with more siblings tended to eat faster than those with fewer, possibly because they want to wolf down their share before their brother or sister gets it. The research also found that firstborn children were much more likely to eat faster than later-born children, while only children generally ate more slowly. Eating habits like these can persist into adulthood.

“Eating fast can … be a hard habit but a good one to break to promote gut health and reduce the risk of overeating,” says Balls. “It can take 15 to 20 minutes for our brains to get the signal that we are getting full.”

So, whether you have some unhealthy habits formed at your childhood dinner table that you’d like to break, or you want to keep things exactly as they once were, Koslowitz says, it’s important to know that “food is never just fuel. It’s also ritual, connection, control and comfort — or it can be. The tricky part is, unless we stop to examine the patterns we absorbed as kids, we often pass them on without even realizing it.”