Six Great Things About Family Rituals

As I have studied the parent coaching process and been observed by my cohort, one specific area of interest has emerged for me---I love helping people figure out meaningful rituals.  

While a ritual is often associated with religion, it is defined from Bing Dictionary as follows:

ritual
1.   established formal behavior: an established and prescribed pattern of observance, e.g. in a religion

2. performance of formal acts: the observance of actions or procedures in a set, ordered, and ceremonial way

3.  system of rites: the system of set procedures and actions of a group

The way that I see it, a ritual is a way to take something positive in your life and formalize it in a way that makes it even more meaningful.   For instance, one mom was telling me that she loves feeding the horses with her daughter and for her it is a really special time.  So I suggested that it become a weekly ritual.

1.  Rituals create consciousness!     When something becomes a ritual, it makes us conscious that we are doing something really special and meaningful to us.  For example, if your family ritual was to have a snow ball fight on the evening of the first snow.  You are may be consciously celebrating the seasons, your family, the passage of time, the idea that we can change the usual schedule to celebrate something new and different.  It  causes us to stop, to notice the snow, the feel, the texture. 

2.  Even if your kids roll their eyes, rituals are often remembered and cherished.    My dad had this ritual to take pictures of the entire bus stop on the first day of school.    I remember being annoyed by this and a little embarrassed too.  But now I love looking at the pictures of us every year smiling at the bus stop with the neighborhood kids.   It's great to imagine my dad taking a morning away from the office to snap these yearly pictures and I see that they are filled with love.  

3.  Rituals are something kids LOVE.   For instance, I started our weekly ritual of family night and now Mira is more into it than we are.  She won't let us forget.    On Christmas morning, I play jingle bells on the piano before anyone can open gifts.  They may not love my playing, but everyone loves this silly ritual and it creates an anticipation for the gift-giving.  Instead of just moving into the gifts, they have to wait for the one Jewish member of the family to bang out my song on the piano.  

4.  Rituals create a warm family feeling.   I am always on the lookout for family rituals that are interesting and that draw families together.   One friend has a weekly pizza night.   Another friend's kids have sleepovers in each kid's room on a weekly basis.  The ideas are endless!

5.  Rituals define your uniqueness.    I think a lot of people like creating  rituals because they can really define who you are as a family.    For instance,   my husband and I realized that going to a music festival each summer is a family ritual for us.  The festival is really fun, but it's more than that.  It's our family festival.  It's something that neither of our parents did with us when we were kids, but our love of music is something we consciously want to be a part of our daughters life.  In some ways, we get excited for the festival because it's tons of fun.  But, in other ways, the excitement comes from the ritual--packing up the car, waiting in line to get our tickets, finding our camping spot and on and on.

6.   Rituals can pass along family heritage.   While rituals can define your uniqueness as a family, they also can play the great role of passing along the history from one generation to the next.  In my life, this mainly applies to my Jewish culture.  When we celebrate a holiday like Passover, we do many of the same rituals that my dad did and that his parents did.   I love imagining my grandparents parents singing the same songs as we do.   It makes me feel close to my history and a part of something bigger than myself.  

The book Rituals for Our Times: Celebrating, Healing, and Changing our Lives and Our Relationships is a beloved book that helped shape my ideas on the importance of rituals.

Multiple Intelligences and Scheduling Activities--thoughts from Linda

 I love this response I got to my blog from my friend Linda!    It speaks to the multiple intelligences and spending times doing activities with your child.   It is really worthy of a careful read.  

I'm writing not as a parent but as a youth advocate and M.A. Ed. with 15 years working with home-schooled, alternatively-schooled and traditionally-schooled kids. And as someone who tends to think and write a lot about how we can provide sanity in the midst of the over-stimulation of this contemporary world, with my three wonderful nieces, ages 8, 10, and 13, in mind.

Great post, Peggy. I especially like your confessional, because in taking control of one's schedule, whether just for oneself or for the kids, we have to be willing to be real about our own proclivities as we figure out kids' temperaments.  I like the important lesson that there's no one way to do it "right." 

I am the same as you--I love myriad activities. As a kid I couldn't get enough of trying new things. I am happy my mom had me in ballet, art, roller skating, ice skating, gymnastics, swimming, tennis, piano, skiing lessons, pretty much anything I asked to do.... And I only wish we'd known about rock climbing and wilderness school! 

The thing I didn't do much of, that I look back and realize I truly wanted, is SHARED activities--I always wished my mom would do art or get in the pool or on the ski slope WITH me so we could--and this is perhaps the crux of it -- craft some narratives together. "Remember that time, when I fell on the bunny slope, and you had to help me up, and then you fell too..." 

I had those narratives, but only with other kids, not with adults. Of course I am sure my mom cherished the break time from her energetic kid. And she did sign us up once for a mother-daughter cooking class. THAT, of all the activities, really felt special, because she wanted to spend time with me. 

This is one reason I SO love and support the work you do, Peggy, to bring parents and kids together for shared self-exploration and getting to know our deep selves. It's so brilliant that you work with both at once, that your programs actually nurture the needs of both the child and the parent. I realize now that that was at the heart of what I wanted from my mom-- time for authentic exploration of "who are you? who am I??"

I'm aware that this is sounds at worst not helpful, or at best off-topic, in that it throws in yet another thing for parents to balance: kids and adults need their own activity time, their alone time, and, I'm saying here, it's the shared activity time that should not be overlooked.

Because the operative question, if you're a busy parent, is HOW to figure out the right balance, I'd like to suggest one heuristic: that we try configuring schedules of activities around something like the 'Multiple Intelligences' (Howard Gardner's theory)-- so that means you strive to allot time for the intelligences that are NOT covered by the school's curriculum and the soccer team etc. That would be the interpersonal, intrapersonal, existential/spiritual, and naturalistic ones. 

NATURALISTIC: Unless you go to a nature school or live on a working farm, engaging the natural world is not usually covered in the curriculum or in your home life. It would be nifty if something so elemental as learning to attune to our natural surroundings were not relegated to one week of camp in the summer, no?

INTERPERSONAL: Schools certainly provide important interpersonal learning time, or I should say "experimenting time", and they're slowly realizing the importance of offering actual social skills training--things like how to be a good friend, how to advocate for your needs, managing angry moments, etc. But because schools are mainly about kid-to-kid engagement, kids still need contexts for meaningfully engaging with other age-groups, including adults. (However, in my observation, this is sort of flipped for home-schooled kids, who often get a lot more practice with negotiating adult-kid engagement, but they may be  more challenged to get  interpersonal learning time with people their own age.)

EXISTENTIAL/SPIRITUAL: Unless your child goes to a Waldorf school or you have a spiritual activity in your weekly life, this part of a child's being doesn't get much exercise without overt planning and effort.

 INTRAPERSONAL: schools and extracurricular activities generally provide little or no self-reflective, self-actualizing type of inner-work opportunities; and parents are often bereft of ideas in this arena because they probably had little intrapersonal time with their own parents. This is why we're so blessed to have someone like you, Peggy, in our community, who creates programs just for this need to be met! 

So I'm aware that bringing up the arguably neglected intelligences is not necessarily helping lessen the stress of the parent who is already worried they are over-scheduling! But maybe if the paradigm, the criteria is adjusted to be about balancing TYPES of engagement, it will help both parents and kids feel more whole, more fulfilled by their activities, regardless of whether they are many or few.