At Family Meals, Children Encouraged to Take Part in the Conversation GROWING up in the "70s, I sat down to a family dinner that was consistent with my parents" child-rearing philosophy at the time, which my mother likes to call "benign neglect." Over dinner, my father briefed my mother on the ins and outs of his day at the office, while my siblings and I zoned out or piped up or fought over why my older sister always got the corner seat. We sat down as a family to a good, healthy meal, but dinner was not what you would call child-centric - which was fine with us, and definitely fine with them. Dinner with our closest family friends, at whose home I stayed when my parents traveled, veered in a different direction altogether. After an elegant, home-cooked dinner, the father of the family's three boys would put down his fork, address one of his sons by name, and start talking about trains, planes or automobiles - one was going so many miles an hour, while another, moving at a different rate, was leaving from a different coast. When would they meet up? The boys all found these oral math games entertaining, and so did I, until the father posed one of those questions to me, at which point my mind went blank for one long minute before I finally burst into tears. Because of the cultural whiplash I experienced in regularly attending two remarkably different family meals, I have always been fascinated by the range of conversations that pass for normal at other people's homes at mealtime: what rituals and rules of discourse do parents invent, to what conventions do they default or aspire? Franklin Foer, editor at large for The New Republic and the brother of the writers Jonathan Safran Foer and Joshua Foer, recalls his childhood meals as freewheeling affairs where the only rule was that everyone show up. "We were never asked, "What did you do today?" " Franklin Foer said. His father, a lawyer who served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union, led his children in debates about economic policy and civil rights issues, but with an open ear: a conversation about Reagan's Star Wars policies might lead to a discussion about "why we couldn't build a giant shield over the United States out of Legos," Mr. Foer said, recalling also that "scatological humor was encouraged at our dinner table." If the Foer family dinner sounds like the South Park version of what the Kennedy families once did - expecting children to come to meals prepared to discuss current events - the Emanuel family sounds more like the Fight Club version of the same. Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago; Ari Emanuel, a Hollywood agent; and Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist, came to dinner, at their mother's insistence, ready to discuss the issues of the day; Rahm Emanuel has described the ensuing debates as "gladiatorial." But Ezekiel Emanuel, now a professor and vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, clarified that things never actually became violent. "Lots of screaming but no fistfights," he said. The emphasis at his own family's meals, which he and his now ex-wife shared with their children at breakfast and dinner, was less about preparation for public life and more of an opportunity for family members to tune into one another's affairs. "We'd go around the table, and everyone reported how their day went," said Mr. Emanuel, whose youngest is now 21. Meals started with a Jewish blessing; as for formal discussions of politics, "We were not stilted," he said. Nor were they fighting furiously: "We had three girls," he explained. It's different. Aiming high for mealtime conversation can be a family tradition - or a way of giving children something the parents wished they themselves had had. When Howard Gordon, the co-creator of "Homeland," was growing up, "dinner tended to be quick and not one that emphasized conversation," he said. With his own family, he hoped for more, which proved a challenge.