Our family eats dinner together almost every night of the week. It is one of the things I think my wife and I have done well. Whatever else we could do better, we have kept making time to sit down together.

That gives us a regular chance to talk with our kids. It is easy for family conversation to become mostly logistics: what is happening tomorrow, what needs to get done, who needs to be where. Those conversations are necessary, but there is a lot about a child's day that will never come up if that is all we ask about.

My wife and I try to encourage more conversation by asking questions. They do not have to be particularly clever. Something like:

• What was something that went well today?
• Was there anything that was hard or frustrating?
• What's been going on at school that we haven't heard about?

Sometimes we ask about spiritual things. Sometimes we are interested in something that happened during the day. The subject matters less than giving the kids a chance to tell us about something in their lives that we might otherwise miss.

Of course, asking a question means being willing to listen to the answer. I want to understand why something mattered to them, even if it would not have seemed like a big deal to me. That may take another question, or just enough time for them to finish explaining. I do not want them to feel that every answer is going to turn into a lesson from Dad.

We also want to encourage them to ask questions of their own. It is easy to settle into a pattern where the parents ask and the kids answer. Learning to take an interest in someone else's day takes practice too. What happened next? Why did that bother you? How did it turn out? Those follow-up questions can help someone say more than they thought to say at first.

That is a skill I want our kids to carry into their friendships and, eventually, their adult lives. I want them to be able to explain what they think and to be curious about what someone else thinks. Dinner gives us time to practice both.

I do not expect every dinner to produce a memorable conversation. What I value is having another chance tomorrow to sit down with our kids and hear what is going on in their lives.