WASHINGTON – Aviva Goldfarb is making it her mission to have families all over the country eat dinner together.
“In my family, growing up, we ate dinner together almost every day, and I just sort of took it for granted,” says Goldfarb, a Chevy Chase, Md., resident and founder and chief executive officer of The Six O’Clock Scramble.
“A lot of my favorite memories took place around our family dinner table, and I didn’t realize how challenging it really was to get dinner on the table,” she says.
But now the busy mother of two high school students understands the trials of getting everyone seated at the table for a meal. And she knows others struggle with the same challenge, as well.
“The hardest thing for busy parents is figuring out what to make for dinner at the end of a long day when the kids are starving, the dogs are barking, the phone’s ringing,” Goldfarb says. “My goal is to make it easier for them.”
So she is doing just that.
In June, Goldfarb launched The Family Dinner Challenge. The project is asking 10,000 people to commit to eating dinner together as a family at least three times a week for four weeks.
To make this seemingly lofty goal easier on busy families, Goldfarb did all the grunt work.
She created an online family dinner planner that “takes the scramble out of six o’clock.”
Her plans include a weekly dinner menu and a grocery list that is sent to each participant’s email inbox or phone, free of charge.
“One of the really interesting things we know anecdotally — for those of us who have dinner time with our family, with the phones off and the TV off — is how important that time of day is, and the connections that we make
