Research suggests that kids who eat dinner with their families are healthier, better-adjusted, smarter, and better-looking* than kids whose families don’t dine together, but what are people actually supposed to talk about during these family meals? Joshua Gans, author of Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting**, describes his efforts to figure out, over dinner, what his kids are doing in school in “Dining Family Style,” a new article on the Ed Next website.

For another take on why kids are impossible to talk to once they hit adolescence, you can listen to this week’s Ed Next podcast, in which Paul Peterson and Chester Finn wonder, “Are Middle Schools or Middle Schoolers the Problem?”

*Some of this is documented in “The Guilt-Trip Casserole: The Family Dinner,” which appeared in the New York Times this fall.

**Parentonomics is a very amusing book that shows what happens when an economist applies the tools of his trade to tasks like supervising homework, attending parent-teacher conferences, and organizing birthday parties.