[greggsy]

It’s not antisocial… at all?

I’m genuinely confused why you would think that.

> Well educated members of an household would know when dinner is ready because they would actually help make it ready for everyone.

This is one of the most obnoxious things I have read all year.

[mytailorisrich]

Needing an app or tech device to announce to your spouse and children at home that dinner is ready is beyond antisocial, actually. It's ridiculously sad and pathetic.

And then people will complain that children these days spend their time in front of a screen...

I think @prmoustache is also referring to manners in general.

[OkayPhysicist]

Maybe you live in a smaller space than I'm imagining, but if Dad's in the kitchen making dinner and other Dad is in the garage trying to figure out what he's going to need for the backpacking trip next weekend and the youngest kid is in the office with her headphones in listening to music while doing her homework and the eldest is upstairs chatting with his friends on Discord, then the options are

A) scramble around the entire house going "dinner in 5 minutes"

B) yell the same, hope people hear it, and negatively affect your mood

C) have some sort of system that lets everyone know with the tap of a button.

[prmoustache]

You might want to learn the concept of delegation. Kid in the office can tell their sibling who can then tell other dad.

Additionally, cooking in group is a great moment to have a conversation, much more than the actual dinner where everybody is chewing.

[OkayPhysicist]

Cooking a family dinner together is a fun group activity, like a board game night. Which is great, say, one night a week. Feeding a family has to happen every night, where more can be done, faster, by a single person. And if you can't figure out how to eat and hold a conversation, you have failed at quite possibly the single oldest human activity.

And the delegation approach defeats the entire purpose of the fore-warning, which is to allow people to wrap up whatever they were doing, out of respect for their time.

[prmoustache]

> Cooking a family dinner together is a fun group activity, like a board game night. Which is great, say, one night a week. Feeding a family has to happen every night, where more can be done, faster, by a single person.

There is a limit where having more people won't really help but if one needs to peel some vegetables, press garlic, cut other vegetables, prep and season some meat, clean necessary hardwares and surfaces, one person will never be faster alone with only 2 hands available.

Besides it is not only a fun group activity but a good teaching moment as well for kids / teenagers, especially if you want them to develop healthy and cost effective habits instead relying on buying preprocessed food most of their life.

> out of respect for their time.

What kind of castle do your typical family live that it takes hours to reach to other people? We are talking seconds literally even if you have to reach someone in the barn at the extreme end of a typical garden. I am not talking about the royalty here.

[mytailorisrich]

I think you are being needlessly argumentative and a little insulting, too, starting from your reply to my previous comment (with the quip about the size of my home...) and now this one to @prmoustache, which is quite uncalled for

[fragmede]

> Kid in the office can tell their sibling who can then tell other dad.

The trope is mom tells the kid to tell dad dinner's ready, and kid just yells really loud to dad, while mom looks on with exasperation. Or was that just my childhood?

[prmoustache]

> Or was that just my childhood?

I guess so, I wouldn't have done that as a kid, nor do my own kids do that or they would quickly lose privileges.