Sunday Suppers and Screen-Free Evenings
My children do not remember most of the things I’ve bought them. They remember the Sunday my husband set up sparklers in the backyard after dinner for no reason at all. They remember the summer we ate corn on the cob with our hands and no napkins, laughing at the mess. They remember being with us — fully, without a phone glowing between them and us.
Family bonds, I’ve come to believe, are not built in grand gestures. They are built in the small, repeated rituals that tell the people we love, again and again, you have my full attention. And summer, more than any other season, hands us the perfect excuse to practice this.
There is something almost sacred about a Sunday supper stretched long into a Canadian summer evening — the sky staying soft and golden until nearly nine, the conversation meandering because there’s nowhere else anyone needs to be. We started a tradition in our home a few years back: no phones at the table, and no one is allowed to leave until Grace After Meal is said, however long that takes. My husband groaned about it at first, if I’m honest. Now he’s the one who reminds the children to pause their “Sunday evening TV time” and enjoy Sunday family dinner.
It isn’t really about the food, of course. It’s about creating a container of time where connection is the only agenda. In our normal, scheduled lives, we speak to our families in passing — over shoulders, between tasks, while thinking about the next thing on the list. Summer gives us permission to slow that down. The long evenings themselves seem to conspire in our favour, refusing to rush us toward bedtime the way winter’s early dark does.
I’d encourage you, whatever your family looks like, to choose at least one evening a week this summer and protect it fiercely. Cook something simple. Sit outside if you can. Let the conversation wander wherever it wants to go. Resist the urge to check the time. There is an elegance in unhurried presence — in choosing, deliberately, to give your people the gift of your undivided self, even for just one evening a week.
Our children are watching how we spend our attention far more closely than they’re watching what we say. Let this summer be the one where they remember the sparklers, the sticky corn, the long light — and not the sight of the back of our phones.
A gentle prompt for your journal this week: What would a truly screen-free evening look like in my home? What is stopping me from trying it this Sunday?
This is the second part in a four-part series on deepening friendships and strengthening bonds. You can read Part 1 here.
