Teenagers who eat with their families are less likely to turn to alcohol, tobacco and drugs, according to a recent national study.

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“I don’t need family-dinner studies to guilt-trip me,” said Shannon Rubio, a mother of three teenage boys from Spring, Tex. “I do it to myself.”

But just in case, Mrs. Rubio, here is the latest, from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University:

Teenagers who eat with their families less than three times a week are more likely to turn to alcohol, tobacco and drugs than those who dine with their families five times a week.

Rubio works for a human-resources firm. Her husband, a tugboat mechanic, lives offshore four consecutive nights, followed by four nights off. Now that the school-season squall of sports and activities is blowing hard, Rubio comes home every evening, piles a boy or three into the car and starts driving. Football, band, water polo, varsity swimming.

Dinner? “We go to Sonic very frequently,” she said. “You’re handing out sacks of food as quickly as you can. I hate it, but I don’t know how you get around it with one parent at home.”

Since the first CASA study in 1996 saw an association between the frequency of family dinners and rates of adolescent substance abuse, numerous other studies have pointed to the importance of the family dinner. They suggest that family dinners have a positive impact on nutrition, verbal abilities, mental health and workers’ stress. The news media passionately presses the cause; it’s a cornerstone of the slow-parenting movement.

Like breastfeeding and Baby Mozart tapes, family dinner has become a red-hot item on the good-parent scorecard, by which mothers in particular judge one another and themselves. So it’s not surprising that many parents, especially mothers, who work night shifts or long hours, or who, like Rubio, have teenagers running every which way to activities, are painfully aware that nightly dinners ’round the table are something other families get to do.

Nor is it surprising that many others do veritable back flips to ensure that dinner and diners convene under the same roof, at the same time. A lawyer at a Manhattan firm rises at 4 a.m. in New Jersey to do enough work so that she can eat with her husband and three children by 8 p.m. A California writer feeds her tweens snacks so they can eat supper with her husband, around 9 p.m.

But as parents go to ever more breathless effort, or feel ever more guilt-ridden, are we becoming too literal-minded about “family dinner”?

Few would gainsay families eating together. The image of family members at day’s end being nourished and nourishing one another, a refuge against whatever the outside world has loosed upon them, tugs at the heart. In the ideal, it’s the safety zone, where tweens and teenagers, those elusive creatures, will reveal secrets.

But Dr. Philip A. Cowan, a psychologist and former director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, cautioned in an e-mail message that there is not a proven cause and effect that more family dinners equal less drug use. “To say that family dinners are associated with good outcomes is not the same as saying that family dinners cause good outcomes,” wrote Dr. Cowan. The most likely explanation for the CASA results, he added, is that families who place importance on eating together — and can organize themselves to pull it off — are those who are more likely to produce good outcomes for their children anyway.

“I don’t think we really know what a good family dinner is,” said Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies family meals and adolescents. Just do something, she suggested. “And yes, lunch counts.”