Late work schedules, practices, rehearsals, television, computers, religious activities, volunteer commitments . . . all these and more compete for the hours between 4 and 8 PM. What did I forget . . . oh yes, dinner!

For too many family's the answer to the question when and what's for dinner is, "Whenever you want," and "Whatever you can find in the fridge!" Within the multiple commitments of life, it is often the mundane that is ignored. But recent studies indicates that routine family life may be one of the keys to well-being and success.

How often a family eats dinner together appears to be a powerful indicator of whether a teen is likely to smoke, drink or use drugs and whether the teen is likely to perform better academically. A new report from The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University - The Importance of Family Dinners II - also revealed that teens and their parents wish they could have dinner together more often.

The good news from this study is that 58 percent of teens report having dinner with their families at least five times a week. This is an increase from the 47 percent in 1998, when CASA first measured the relationship between family dinners and teen substance abuse risk.

With the release of the study, CASA chairman and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph A. Califano, Jr. said, "If I could wave a magic wand to make a dent in the substance abuse problem, I would make sure that every child in America had dinner with his or her parents at least five times a week. There is no more important thing a parent can do. Parental engagement in children's lives is the key to ridding our nation of the scourge of substance abuse."

The CASA study found that frequent family dining is associated with lower rates of teen smoking, drinking and drug use. Compared to teens who have five or more family dinners per week, those who have two or less are: _§ Three times likelier to try marijuana;_§ Two and a half times likelier to smoke cigarettes;_§ More than one and a half times likelier to drink alcohol.

In addition to reduced incidents of substance abuse teens who have frequent family dinners are likelier to get better grades in school. Teens who have dinner with their families seven times a week are almost 40 percent likelier to say they receive mostly A's and B's in school compared to teens who have dinner with their families two or fewer times a week.

As with all non-experimental social science, care must be taken in interpreting causality. One interpretation of these kinds of results is that when families eat evening meals together, parents are "protecting" their teen children from risky behavior, by providing structure to teens' lives and by affording opportunities for connection.

But how in the world do you carve out five or more dinners per week as a family? William Doherty, cofounder of Putting Family First and the director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota, gives these simple but challenging suggestions:

Make Family Meals a Priority. See where your family stands by charting out a typical week. If you feel you don't have enough times when everyone in the family is together for a meal, then the first step is to diagnose the problem. Is it adult schedules or children's schedules? Too much individual pickiness about what people will eat? Fatigue or burnout in the chief? Have you drifted away from family meals for other reasons? The key is to identify why you've drifted and determine how badly you want to restore family mealtimes.

Be Flexible. Brainstorm solutions that fit your family. In one family the kids have an early evening snack to tide them over until 8:00 P.M. when the entire family can have dinner together. Another family has decided to be flexible on what they serve. Their focus is on conversation and togetherness rather than the demands of an extensive menu. Another way to be flexible is to add more cooks to the kitchen. Divide the days in the week up so that different people are responsible for different meals.

Start from where you are. Family meals tend to disappear gradually over time; they can be restored the same way. Do what you can with what you've got. It won't be easy, but it may very well become stabilizing presence in the life of your kids.