Parents Making Time with Anthony & Jennifer Craiker | Intentional parenting ideas & time management tips to reduce parenting anxiety and help you stop feeling overwhelmed.
Parents! Feel like you’re missing out on your kids’ lives while also never having enough time for yourself? Want to embrace intentional parenting but don't quite know how? Career pressures, shuttling kids around, volunteer commitments, and the endless tasks of caring for your home all place enormous demands on your time and energy, leading to mom guilt, dad guilt, stress, and ultimately regret. And while you’re trying to tend to your own self-care while also being a present parent who prioritizes family connection, your kids are growing up way too fast.
Sound familiar? If so—help is here! Unlike other parenting podcasts that just give you techniques for raising children or tips on childhood development, Parents Making Time focuses on helping YOU, the parent, prioritize YOUR life so that your parenting aligns with your values. Motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and family are what we are all about. In 15-minutes or less, this weekly podcast helps busy parents like you learn to prioritize their relationships, be more present and intentional with family time, and build a lasting legacy of love—without neglecting their own well-being or feeling regret later in life. It's not just about learning to prioritize tasks or mastering time management, it's about becoming the parent you want to be so that you can stop feeling overwhelmed, learn how to have more time, and create lasting family memories.
Leveraging their 20+ years of parenting experience raising three thriving kids and leading and mentoring hundreds of children, youth, and families in volunteer church positions, hosts Anthony and Jennifer Craiker teach parents on a tight schedule how to balance work and family, create unbreakable family bonds, prevent parent burnout, and find JOY in parenting. In other words, we help you stop being busy and start actually applying the concept of intentional living.
If you’re ready to prioritize family time each day without feeling overwhelmed, you can count on this show to teach you how to be fully present with your kids, build lasting memories, prioritize your spouse, make dinner time count, connect with your kids after work, stop missing precious moments, savor family time, discover intentional parenting ideas, and so much more—all while learning how to implement quick self-care tips, create an intentional family legacy, and parent with no regret. So, hit PLAY, and let’s get started!
Parents Making Time with Anthony & Jennifer Craiker | Intentional parenting ideas & time management tips to reduce parenting anxiety and help you stop feeling overwhelmed.
3 Simple Ways to Get Kids Talking at Dinner Tonight
Have you ever sat down for family dinner hoping for connection—only to be met with silence, clinking forks, and kids glued to their phones?
Even though dinner is one of the best chances to connect with your kids, conversation doesn’t always come naturally. Many busy parents assume that because you love each other, the talking part should just happen—but when it doesn’t, you miss out on those small, meaningful moments that strengthen your family bond.
In this episode of Parents Making Time, we’re sharing three simple ways to get your kids talking at dinner—so you can turn mealtime into a daily ritual of laughter, learning, and love. These intentional family time ideas will help you go from awkward silence to genuine connection in just a few minutes a day, making meal times more meaningful and engaging.
In under 15 minutes you’ll learn…
- How to ask better questions that actually get your kids talking (and not just giving one or two word answers).
- Simple dinner table games that spark laughter, stories, and connection.
- The one thing you can do that instantly makes your kids more likely to open up and engage.
Because when you’re intentional about how you spend your family dinner time, you create moments that build connection, trust, and lifelong memories.
Get our FREE resource, “Dinner Conversation Starters", by going to: parentsmakingtime.com/dinnerconversations.
00:00 Introduction to Dinner Time Conversations
00:36 Common Dinner Time Challenges
01:42 The Importance of Intentional Dinner Time
02:46 Tip 1: Ask Open-Ended Questions
04:53 Tip 2: Play Dinner Games
06:03 Tip 3: Share About Yourself
07:45 Consistency and Managing Expectations
08:48 Conclusion and Additional Resources
When you finish listening, we’d love for you to connect with us on social media!
Follow us on Instagram and like our page on Facebook to keep the conversation going. It’s the best way to get quick tips, encouragement, and resources to help you make time for what matters most—your family.
Parenting is hard. Intentional parenting can seem even harder. Motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and all that goes with those important aspects of life can make it difficult to prioritize tasks, embrace intentional living, focus on present parenting, and build family bonds. We're here to help ease your parenting anxiety so that you can stop feeling overwhelmed, find joy in your parenting journey, and build family bonds that last for generations. Here at Parents Making Time, we are all about that parent-child connection, self-care for parents, and helping you overcome mom guilt and dad guilt. If you have a question or would like to share an experience about your own parenting, please feel free to reach out to one of us! Please note, we may use your question and/or comments as a part of a Q&A Parenting Advice segment on one of our episodes.
Follow Anthony: Instagram | LinkedIn
Follow Jennifer: Instagram
Leave a rating & review: Apple | Spotify
parentsmakingtime@gmail.com | https://www.parentsmakingtime.com/
Jennifer: [00:00:00] In today's episode, we are talking about dinner time. You know the time when you're actually home and you sit around the table and you have a meal together. Today we're going to help you make that a more enjoyable and meaningful time, one that helps you connect with your family and helps make it a time that everyone can look forward to.
We're gonna be sharing three ways to get your kids talking at dinner time.
Anthony: This is Parents Making Time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.
So, have you ever had one of those mealtimes with your family that just didn't go well? It didn't necessarily go badly, but it didn't go well. You're sitting around the table, nobody's really talking. You can kind of hear utensils clanking, and you can hear people chewing their food and you know, maybe somebody is looking at their phone occasionally, maybe you're just kind of staring at each [00:01:00] other as you eat.
Then you finish the meal and that's it. We've certainly had experiences like that.
Jennifer: Yeah, definitely.
Anthony: It feels like the purpose of coming together for a meal when that happens is kind of defeated. I mean, everybody could have just eaten on their own. What's the point of gathering together around a, a table as a family?
Right.
Jennifer: Yeah. And we know that families are busy and you're not going to be sitting around your table every single night. At least Most families are not. But I think the mistake we make when we do is we expect conversation to just flow on its own. You know, it shouldn't be hard. We're family. We love each other, we should want to talk to each other.
It just should come natural. But even if we believe that or and think that that doesn't make that happen.
Anthony: Yeah. And when dinner time doesn't go well, there are a lot of missed opportunities. First and foremost, you miss out on the opportunity to just connect with the people that you love the most. Chances are your family's really busy, and this is one of the few times where you can all get together, be together as a family.
You [00:02:00] also miss out on the opportunity to learn about your child, learn about how their day is going, learn about what problems they're having, what's going on in their mind, what homework assignments they have, or tests that they have coming up or other things going on in their lives. And then you miss out on an opportunity to teach your child. We've had some of our most important conversations, over dinner time, where we've been able to talk about our values and talk about the world and things that we want to, instill in, in our children. And so the consequence of not being intentional with your dinner time is pretty significant.
Jennifer: So today we're going to share three ways you can be more intentional with this time to engage with your kids in meaningful conversation at dinner time.
Anthony: So the first way is asking specific open-ended questions that can't be answered with one word. Now this takes a little bit of time and a little bit of practice, but it's worth [00:03:00] it.
We have a child who shall remain nameless, who is notorious for giving us one word answers to questions
Jennifer: every question,
Anthony: and it's. Usually the same word. And the answer, the the answer is good. How was your day? Good. Good. How did your test go? Good.
Jennifer: Good.
Anthony: How was work today? Good.
Jennifer: I literally had that happen this week with that child.
Anthony: Yeah. And so you have to craft questions in a way that makes it really difficult for them to answer in that kinda one word format or even two or three word format. And you need to be specific. So asking how was your day? That is an open-ended question, but it's really easy for a kid, especially a teenager, or this one's , a young adult now, but to just kind of [00:04:00] not engage with the question.
And so asking something like, tell me about the most difficult part of your math test today, or something like that. And maybe that's not the best example you
Jennifer: could even say. What did you have for lunch today?
Anthony: Right. That'll get a, a different answer. But then you have to learn to build on that and, and get them, set it.
It's
Jennifer: practice.
Anthony: It takes
Jennifer: practice.
Anthony: Learn how to have a conversation. And interestingly enough, this child that we're talking about is a talker. Once she gets to talking, she'll talk your head off, but you have to like prompt her. You have to get her to engage. So, so when you're asking questions that aren't open-ended.
And that are not specific enough. It can be really difficult to get your kid to engage in a conversation with you. And so that's one way to try to get them to engage, uh, and talk to you during this important mealtime.
Jennifer: So the second thing is dinner games. And I'm not talking about card games or anything like that.
I'm talking about. [00:05:00] Conversational games. So you may have heard of one that's called Rosebud Thorn. Some people call it that. Or just Best and Worst, and we've done it as well, what's the best thing that's happened today? What's the worst thing that's happened? And then we go around the table and everybody shares.
And so you kind of get a sense of how your child's day went by them sharing what they liked and what they didn't like. And the same for you. They'll learn that about you. Another one that we've done as a family is called Would You Rather, and I, I know you know what that is, but it's questions like. Would you rather live under the sea or in space?
And then you can can have a conversation, well, why would you wanna live in space? Or Why would you wanna live under sea? Like that can lead to more conversation. It doesn't have to just be question after question. And then sometimes you might just have a jar at your table of conversation starters. Just some simple ideas of topics or questions or even current events that you might have a good conversation around.
And so somebody at the table picked a question outta the jar, and then everybody kind of chimes in and you kind of build that conversation around those things. So. You can make it fun, you can have a good time with it. You can be a little silly. It creates a relaxed [00:06:00] environment where kids are starting to open up and feel comfortable and laugh with you.
Anthony: And number three is sharing about yourself. During the conversation, it's not enough to just expect your kids to respond to questions about how they're doing or how their day is going. If you want them to be engaged in the conversation, you also need to share and be a a participant. And so something as simple as talking about how your day was at work. , Maybe something funny happened or talking about something that you're looking forward to over the weekend or sharing about something difficult that happened, but just being a part of the conversation yourself and not just trying to get your kids to talk. We found a lot of times in our conversations as jen or I have shared something about our day or our lives or something that we're working on or doing, uh, at a particular time in our lives that that opens up more conversation with our kids. Sometimes [00:07:00] they'll ask us questions or they'll chime in. Also, talking about things going on in the world, sharing your thoughts about whatever, you know, the big news story is that can prompt some really thoughtful, interesting.
Conversations with your kids that will get them engaged. These are just a few tactics that you can implement to try to, uh, encourage conversation at dinner time, and, and we found them to be really helpful. It doesn't mean that every time that we've sat down for meals together as a family, that it's worked out, but we certainly have had our, our share of.
Quiet or, or silent dinners where people aren't really talking much. But if you're consistent with these things, you'll find that over time you will get your kids to, to talk a, a little bit and sometimes even a lot at dinner.
Jennifer: Yeah. And one other thing I want to mention is you really do need to be careful and not have too many expectations.
You
Anthony: Yeah.
Jennifer: Can plan these things out. You can have a game plan, you can, you know, be ready to share whatever it is that. You wanna share that day, you can ask specific open-ended questions and you [00:08:00] can still get blank stares and one word answers because some days people just, kids people, us, we just don't wanna converse as much as other days.
So be careful about your expectations. Don't look at everything as a failure if you have one bad dinner, be consistent. Keep trying. And as we've been consistent and kept trying these things, we've seen some fruits of those efforts. So we've mentioned before we have two of our children outside of the house, and we've tried really hard when we do sit down at dinner together to have meaningful conversations, to create connections.
And what I found interesting is there are times when our girls will call home and it's somewhat close to dinner and we say, oh, well we're gonna have dinner now. And they say. Well, we'll stay with you. And so they stay on FaceTime and they enjoy being a part of that dinner conversation even now, even though they're not actually in the room with us.
Anthony: So in order to help you with your mealtimes, , and get your kids talking, we've created some dinner conversation starters that we'd love to share with you. , To get that, just go [00:09:00] to our website at parentsmakingtime.com/dinnerconversations, just put in your email and we'll send you the list of dinner conversation starters to help you make the most of those moments with your family.
Jennifer: So we're so grateful that you were here with us today. So if you've got something out of today's episode, please leave a rating or review for us and we'd be extra grateful if you shared this episode with a friend.
Anthony: Now, next time we'll be talking about a huge mistake that parents make that sucks the joy out of parenting.
You won't want to miss that one. Until next time. Make time to become the parent you want to be.