The Book of New Family Traditions Read Free Page A

their childhoods, Ms. Galinsky learned that it wasn’t big gifts or fancy celebrations, but simple rituals and everyday traditions; modest but personal gestures of love, like made-up bedtime stories, that left the children feeling safe and cherished.
Three Studies That Prove the Power of Family Traditions
Study 1
Teenagers who have dinner with their families infrequently (less than three times a week) are three and a half times more likely to abuse prescription drugs than teens who have frequent family dinners (five times or more weekly). Teens who rarely have family dinners are also two and a half times more likely to smoke cigarettes, and one and a half times likelier to use alcohol.
 
Source: A 2007 study, “The Importance of Family Dinner,” conducted by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University ( www.casacolumbia.org ). Further, the center released a study in 2011 saying that 90 percent of adults who fit the criteria of being addicts began smoking, drinking, or using drugs as teenagers.
 
Study 2
Studies of families with alcoholic parents have shown that if the parents continue to perform the family’s established rituals and traditions, including the celebrations of major holidays, the children are much less likely to become alcoholics themselves. In a study group in which the parents were extremely scrupulous about continuing family rituals, only 25 percent of the children grew up to be alcoholic. Among those families in which ritual practice was haphazard, more than 75 percent of the children suffered from alcoholism as adults.
 
Source: Dr. Steven J. Wolin, psychiatrist and professor at George Washington University Medical School. Dr. Wolin said in an interview with the author that he has long been fascinated by cases in which children from extremely troubled backgrounds still manage to grow up well-adjusted. With colleagues, he conducted a series of studies of families of alcoholics during the 1970s and 1980s, writing many papers on the results. In the Journal of Studies on Alcohol 41 (1988), he and several colleagues published a paper, “Disrupted Family Rituals: A Factor in the Intergenerational Transmission of Alcoholism.”
 
Study 3
Children who grow up with solid, satisfying family rituals, including such traditions as dinnertimes, weekend outings, vacations, and holidays, adjust much more easily and happily to college life.
 
Source: Dr. Barbara Fiese, a professor at the University of Illinois and director of the Family Resiliency Center there, has written often about the importance of meaningful family traditions in such publications as the 2006 book, Family Routines and Rituals (Yale University Press). Her many reports on the topic include “Reclaiming the Family Table: Mealtimes and Child Health and Well-Being,” published by the Society for Research in Child Development Social Policy Report 22 (4) (2008). The professor discussed her overall findings in an interview with the author.
 
These and other studies confirm what we know intuitively: Rituals and celebrations help kids feel connected and valued. This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of “quality time.” If parents make an effort to create traditions, and then routinely, reliably practice those traditions, they are sending a message very loudly that their kids aren’t just a bothersome distraction from plowing through the to-do list but are the central focus of life.
So we all want memorable, meaningful family traditions. But when do families need rituals and celebrations? And where do they come from?

CHAPTER 1
    Ritual Recipes: Getting Started
    Many families start with holidays, a natural place to begin. There are also the rituals that just creep up on us: You serve pancakes with chocolate chips one Sunday, and then the next Sunday, the kids wonder, “Why aren’t we having the special Sunday pancakes?” A ritual is born.
    But where else do rituals belong? What is enough? Can there be too