Family rituals are routines and traditions that honor what is very important to the family (Rothenbuhler, 1998). Rituals include family traditions, such as the specific ways we celebrate holidays, birthdays, vacations, weddings, and graduations, or even our weekly family dinners and everyday bedtime rituals for children.

Rituals are valuable when family members perceive them as current and meaningful (Braithwaite, 2022). A few years ago, my friend Kris was concerned that his family was losing their tradition of decorating the family Christmas tree together. Kris purchased their live tree the day after Thanksgiving so they could decorate their tree over the weekend, as they always did. Now that the children were young adults, they were busy and involved with their friends and activities. Kris and his partner, Kim, could not get the kids to commit time to decorating their tree. It was now mid-December, and the poor tree was still sitting in the garage, undecorated and losing its needles. No one seemed to notice or care.

In my research on family rituals, my colleagues and I discovered that to be successful, rituals must remain relevant and change as needed. As my friend Kris was learning, what the family did in the past may not work in the present and/or the future. As his children were reaching adulthood, many family traditions seemed less important to them. In addition, some older family members were no longer able to take part in the same way. Kris knew the day was coming when the children would be moving out and forming their own families.

While every family experiences change differently, taking an inventory of your own family rituals is important to make choices about which rituals to keep, adapt, dump, and when to create new family rituals (Braithwaite, 2022).

As you take inventory of your own family rituals, it would not be surprising to see a need to adapt or even delete at least some of your family’s rituals. To retain or grow their meaningfulness, rituals need to be remembered fondly by the family of the past, relevant to the current family, and have the potential to meet the needs of the family in the future (Braithwaite, Baxter &........

© Psychology Today