The Restaurant Hack That Teaches Kids Executive Functioning Skills

As a parent, I’m always looking for ways to make sure that I’m raising my kids to be kind, capable and independent humans. Which means that my Instagram page is flooded with various parenting tips and advice, most of which are either way too ambitious (looking at you, bento-box-level school lunches) or so generic they’re basically useless (insert “just stay calm!” advice here). But I recently came across a post about “the dinner rule” that made me stop scrolling.

In the video, entrepreneur and family coach Scott Donnell shares the quirky ritual his family of six uses when they go out to eat: the kids order for the entire table.

Sounds…chaotic? Maybe. But maybe not. As Donnell points out, this exercise teaches kids all kinds of valuable skills including communication, memory and public speaking. To pull it off, your kid has to look the server in the eye, speak clearly, use their pleases-and-thank-yous and—crucially—pay attention.

Curious to see if this works but without any immediate plans to take my own kids out to dinner, I asked PureWow’s VP of Editorial Content Candace Davison to test it out with her 7-year-old daughter. (FWIW, Donnell suggests starting this with kids at about age 5 or 6.)

“She wound up feeling proud of herself for relaying everyone's order correctly, and now that she's done it a few times, she looks forward to taking the lead at restaurants,” Davison noted. Meanwhile her husband added, “I think it's a fun opportunity to give her real-world experience and build confidence, with relatively safe parameters. We practice what she'll say a few times, and at first, she was nervous, so we talked about speaking clearly and confidently.”

So there you have it: a side of executive functioning served right alongside your kid’s chicken tenders.