As the parents of two munchkins, my husband and I have had to lay down some rules. For example: no electronics in the bedroom, always tell the truth, and homework before fun. When the kids were smaller, we also had “Try one bite of everything on your plate.” (That one still sometimes gets pulled out when I feel adventurous and try a new recipe.) Many of these rules are probably very familiar to parents across the world. But we’ve had to institute a few unusual ones, too. One, a holdover from my childhood, is no singing at the table. I’m still not sure why, but I think the logic behind it is, if you’re singing, you’re not eating. And as a kid, I was a slow eater. Very slow.

Most weeknights, our family comes together to have dinner and share about our day. We’re all encouraged to share one good thing, one bad thing, and one interesting thing. Several years ago, we noticed an unusual trend. During dinner, Munchkin One would quote a memorable movie line that was appropriate to the situation. Munchkin Two would give the expected next line. Before you could take another bite of your mashed potatoes, they’d repeated half of the movie’s script, complete with sound effects. Now, there’s a small part of me that felt a motherly pride with their steel-trap memory, something I lost about ten years ago. But after experiencing the movie line phenomena a few times, we lost something precious. My husband and I would walk away from supper without any clue to how their day went.

At their age, I would come home from school, sit on the yellow stool just inside the kitchen doorway and spill my guts while my mom made supper. I had a few rough years dealing with school bullies, and I needed that verbal dialogue as a kind of decompression. If I was still bothered by a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, I’d practice my piano lesson and lose myself in the music. But my kids don’t follow in my footsteps. Each of them comes home, does their homework, and then plays video games. So that connection at the dinner table is crucial.

In response, we created, “No movie lines, TV lines, or music lyrics at the table.” Sometimes my husband or I will slip with “Everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?” (from Star Wars IV) or “I don’t know what they taught you in France, but rude and interesting are not the same things.” (from French Kiss.) But my kids store pages and pages of dialogue from all the Pixar movies, Disney movies, and most recently, anime shows. (You know you’ve experienced a rare thing when your English-speaking kids sing a whole song in Japanese.)

So with the no movie line rule, we eliminated the movie play-by-plays, and they shared what happened at school. But sometimes with Munchkin One (now a teen), we hear, “Cause we were like, ‘whooooa,’ and I was like, ‘whooooa.’ and you were like, ‘whooooaaa…’”

As you can see, it’s a work in progress.