Francine du Plessix Gray

We may be witnessing the first generation in history that has not been required to participate in that primal rite of socialization the family meal. The family meal is not only the core curriculum in the school of civilized discourse; it is also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and our animal greed, and cultivate a capacity for sharing and thoughtfulness. 

Dinner rituals have nothing to do with class, or with working women's busy lives, or any particular family structure. The author has dined with families in Siberia, welfare mothers in Chicago, bowls of watery gruel in the Sahara--all made memorable by the grace with which they were offered and by the sight of youngsters learning through experience the art of human companionship. The teenagers in "Kids" are deprived of the main course of civilized life--the practice of sitting down at the dinner table and observing the attendant conventions. Many of the teen-agers in "Kids"--the more affluent ones--are the offspring of the "me generation," members of what Christopher Lasch called "the culture of narcissism." And those parents may be the most at fault. Might it be that they have stinted on the socializing of their children by focusing on their own rituals of self-improvement? But the family meal should continue to be a ceremonial, sacred time. We risk rearing yet more kids who wake up asking "What happened?"

Francine du Plessix Gray from Starving Children essay