This article first appeared in The Providence Journal on November 27, 2005. It is reprinted here at the CCF site with the author's permission.

My youngest child, a college freshman, announced that coming home for Thanksgiving would just be way more trouble than it was worth, so he'd spare us the expense and bother by staying put in his dorm. Fire alarms went off in every cell in my being. I'm delighted to have the in-laws, friends and girlfriends at my candle-lit Thanksgiving dinner table, but my three sons and their dad are the core.

My siblings and I used to jeer mercilessly at my own mother for making such a to-do about having all her grownup kids home at the same time. To this day, she says it's the only time she feels completely safe, able to see with her own eyes that we're all right. Turns out this driving passion to have all the kids eating at the same table again afflicts many moms after the kids have left home. Who knew?

In truth, my kid's college is located such that getting home does require time- consuming contortions of public transportation. But failure was not an option. In the end, he had a pretty simple solution in his back pocket, and we concluded that he really just wanted to be begged to come home -- which I did.

After all, I'm finished now with the messy, much-resented labor of adjudicating nightly family meals and overseeing the cultivation of tolerable manners. I insist on enjoying the fruits of my labor. At this point the boys, now men, are quite civilized, indeed, there's no one else I'd rather have dinner with.

So, it was an unexpected joy to hear James Comer, the Yale psychiatrist, make a huge to-do about the family dinner table, declaring it central to building a child's education. Regular sit-down meals force the members of the household to teach one another how to make it a pleasant experience for all of them. Meals are the crucible for manners, conversation skills and family intimacy.

Speaking recently at a conference, Comer said: "It is not the test scores that allow you to be successful in life;it's the social skills that you learn at the dinner table: You come on time; you listen; you don't talk for too long; you learn to debate; you learn personal control; you learn personal expression. As for myself, I'd come home from school thinking about how to present my argument."

Comer's parents -- a steelworker and an entirely unschooled maid -- encouraged debate as an essential life skill, while forbidding actual fighting. You could win your argument with your ability to be persuasive and on the merits of your evidence -- Comer and his siblings often combed libraries and other sources for proofs that they were right -- but the sheer force of shouting was not tolerated. Comer credits dinner with giving him the tools to succeed at an education that in one generation popped him and his siblings from working class to professionals.

If Comer could have his way, all families would go back to eating dinner together -- no more fast food, no more excess of extra-curricular activities, no more I've-got-to-hang-with-my-friends, no more avoiding one another because it is so very inconvenient to teach kids how to be tolerable for the duration of a meal.

This duty definitely lies with the parents. Yes, I was loving the sight of Slater Middle School teachers eating lunch with the students, because those urban kids were getting a warm blast of attention and healthy interaction. But regular family sit-down meals -- with a green and no chips -- and daily reading to kids are the two requirements I wish every family would include in their good-parenting criteria.

Because the pay-off is immeasurable. The very maelstrom of regular family mealtime assures kids -- or should -- that someone is there for them, through thick and thin. Love, trust and resiliency grow, somehow, through the testiness of low-blood-sugar behavior, though the 4,000th reminder to put the napkin in your lap or get your elbow off the table, through please do spare us the sight of talking with your mouth full.

Of course for millennia, everyone sat down to eat a home-cooked meal because that was the only way to get food. Starting in the 1950s frozen and pre-packaged foods began appearing. In the 1960s Mom herself went to work. By the 1980's economics were such -- or the perception of what had become basic necessities was such -- that both Mom and Dad worked full-time jobs just to make ends meet. Instead of a task central to survival, making meals became a totally annoying extra hassle that came on top of the real work of the day, earning money somewhere beyond the home.

In a convenience-oriented society, families and especially kids are the very definition of inconvenient. Family meals are the most inconvenient of all.

So in many homes, sit-down meals became accepted casualties of the high-tech, on-the-go, hyper-busy modern world. Only throw-back moms like me still insisted on, say, at least five dinners a week together -- along with limiting TV, assigning household chores and other antique conventions of family life. But we found ourselves in on-going, pitched battles with our kids because the neighborhood's other parents gave their kids more "freedom," or as mine started to argue, more "respect." No wonder so many overwhelmed parents give up battling to discipline or train their children.

Getting along with each other is critical to all of our lives. Indeed, getting along with each other is, was and always will be the greatest challenge humans face individually and collectively. From divorce to war, failures to get along produce misery not just for the immediate participants, but often for all sorts of innocent bystanders.

In the age of accountability, we insist on measurable inputs with measurable pay- offs. But dinner-table skills can't really be measured. To improve learning in schools, pundits call for more tests, higher expenditures, harsher sanctions and drastic responses that promise to yield bigger numbers. James Comer and I would instead reach out to the families and find ways to help them learn to get along -- and cook -- and to model and teach their extended families how to behave in ways that are pleasant, effective and rewarding for all. Those immeasurable mealtime benefits will do more to boost your all-important test scores than virtually anything else. And they will produce other good besides.

Whatever the reality behind the story of Thanksgiving, the myth celebrates cooperation, peacefulness and getting along with one another by sharing a large, warm winter meal. We need more such meals. May your holiday season be less about commercial consumption and more about breaking bread gratefully, quietly, with intimates and new friends.