The Book of New Family Traditions (13 page)

As a working (telecommuting) mom, Susan Wagoner is way too busy to keep up her scrapbooking, but she finds it much easier to maintain the blog. “It’s great to be able to share our life with family back home, but I confess my primary motivation is to get these cute stories and pictures down on ‘paper,’” she explains. “I’m planning on exporting the blog into a book each year or so.” Also, the blog exists as a reminder of different major happenings. Although Susan posts only a few of the photos from each day, she carefully saves all her digital photos on her computer, organizing them into monthly folders, so they can be appreciated and shared later when her daughters grow up.

One of the features included in the Wags Party of 6 blog, which is common to blog services, is that when you go to the Wagoners’ blog, not only does it display the most recent post first, but it also displays a list of other blogs they like. In this case, the list shows blogs kept by other members of the extended family. These are automatically updated whenever a new post is added, so that Susan can go to her own blog and get an instant update on what else is going on within her tribe: After the name of each blog, there is the title of the latest post and the time it was posted.

Family Blogging 101

The most popular free blogging platforms include Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress. All three of them have fans, though many say Blogger is the easiest to use for the technophobe, whereas WordPress and TypePad have more flexibility.

Go to
Blogger.com
(a Google product),
TypePad.com
, and
WordPress.com
to get specifics on how their formats work, and tour some existing blogs. Resources like these will also keep you updated about all legal requirements. For one thing, the Federal Trade Commission requires that bloggers declare any free products or paid advertising they receive on the blog or face heavy fines.

For a good step-by-step tutorial on what is involved in starting a blog for WordPress, try
HowToStartABlog.org
. There is a good explanation of how the various blog services differ at the website
DigitalFamily.com
, though Janine Warner’s website is mostly for professionals.

Memory Makers: Photos and Videos

There has been an explosion of services online that allow families to save, organize, and share their digital photographs and videos. As both a mother and grandmother, I’m a regular user of these technologies and love the contrasting sense of immediacy and permanence they can provide. My stepdaughter regularly downloads digital photos of her daughter into
Shutterfly.com
, so my husband and I can easily view a couple of hundred recent photographs, then select a few to print out and save. She also uses the service to create beautiful hardcover keepsake books, including one I got for Mother’s Day during her daughter’s first year.

The Big Scrapbook in the Sky

There are a growing number of online photo-storage and printing services that allow parents to “park” their ballooning supply of digital photographs at a central location, where they can be organized into virtual or printed albums that friends and family can enjoy. Here is a rundown of just a few of the better-known services.

Popular sites include
Shutterfly.com
, Mix
book.com
,
Snapfish.com
, and Kodak Gallery .com. Check them all out and compare both prices and ease of use. Shutterfly makes really beautiful books but requires sticking to its library of templates. Mixbook is gaining ground because it’s more freestyle, allowing users to create their own designs easily. All of these sites allow you to turn your photographs into books, calendars, greeting cards, and other items that make good keepsakes (and family gifts.)

Another hugely popular site is
Flickr.com
, which allows you to create virtual albums of photographs and videos. The free Flickr service limits the number of photographs and videos you can upload monthly: If your photo and video stash is way bigger, you can pay the monthly fee for a Pro account. An important feature for families is that Flickr has privacy controls, so you can decide who views your material.

Games R Us

Nintendo, Sony, and the rest have changed the notion of games forever with their new devices. Video games have made it possible for people to enter virtual places and live out their fantasies via an alter ego called an avatar. Games have also migrated to cell phones and portable devices like iPads, making games both more portable and more addictive than ever.

As a mom who was dragged kicking and screaming into the gaming world by her teenage son, I can attest that there is no putting this genie back in the bottle. Again, parents must inform themselves about what is available, set realistic limits on what their kids play and for how long, and look for the ways the various gaming devices and websites can be used to spark family fun and connection.

Meet Me Online Next Week to Play

Playing games of all kinds was always a big tradition in Malinda McCormick’s family. So she was fine with it when her son, Dillon, began spending a lot of time playing online role-playing games in high school. But she never anticipated that when Dillon went away to college, playing World of Warcraft every Sunday would become a cherished ritual between them.

“Although I knew I could call or text him anytime at college, it seemed like our conversations were becoming less meaningful and we were starting to disconnect,” Malinda explains. Her son had asked her before this if she wanted to play World of Warcraft with him, and when he came home from college in his junior year, she took up his offer. “Because he had played WoW a long time, he was a respected leader online in his guild [an online group that plays together],” his mother notes. “His guildmates were amused by the fact that I was his mom, but they took me in and seemed to watch their language when I was logged in!”

Rather sweetly, Dillon began helping his mother within the game world, helping her acquire gold and the best weapons, but the cool part is that they began talking to each other online while playing the game. “Between slaying monsters, he would mention something that happened in school, or ask how things were going at home,” says Malinda. “It was how we started reconnecting in a very natural, comfortable way.”

But the ultimate was when Dillon turned twenty-one while away at school, and Malida plotted with his guildmates to set up a surprise birthday party
within the game
! “We chose to gather at a certain time before a planned raid,” says Dillon’s mom. “When Dillon logged in, we were all in Ventrilo together (an Internet-based voiceover tool for multiple users, similar to a conference call). About twenty people logged in from all over the world and sang Happy Birthday along with me. These kids were belting out the song and shooting off virtual fireworks, while Dillon’s WoW character danced around and did back flips. What can I say? It was a mother’s duty to make his birthday special, and it was genuine regardless of it happening in a virtual place.”

Two Family-Friendly Gaming Resources

The Nintendo Wii gaming system really captured attention as a great source of family-friendly games. With multiple controllers added on to the system, which you play on your television screen, families are having great game nights and playing nonviolent, fun games. Wii bowling is a favorite at our house.

OhanaRama.com
is a safe, private platform for families to play games together, even if they live far apart. Founded by tech industry veterans and targeted at kids between five and twelve, the OhanaRama games appeal to multiple generations by taking “old school” games like checkers and tic-tac-toe online. There are also educational games.

Diane Miller of California signed up for OhanaRama after her sister joined the service, then Diane’s eight-year-old son got involved. Next, her parents started playing online, too. “What we like about Ohanarama is that it is by invitation, family only. So you don’t have to worry about who is trying to communicate with your kid online, and you have a real family connection,” says Diane. Her son plays turn-based games like checkers online with his grandparents, and there are other games, like Max Damage (which involves blowing things up), in which family members can go online and try to beat each other’s records.

Want to see which video games are good for families?

The site
FamilyFriendlyVideoGames.com
rates video games for parents, by age group. Another good resource is
GamerDad.com
, written by Andrew Bub, a father who has played video games for decades and blogs on “Gaming with Children.”

Facebook

Facebook is the technology tool that has had the biggest impact on my own family traditions. Because all my nieces and nephews have Facebook pages, as well as my sister, I’m so much more on top of their daily lives and what matters to them. I can follow my nephew’s ice hockey career and see who my niece is dating. It was largely because one of my brother’s sons reached out to me on Facebook that we put together an in-person sibling reunion in the summer of 2011. My son isn’t interested in Facebook right now, but I agree with all the experts and parents who say it’s vital that you be on the “friend” list of your kids, so you can monitor what they’re posting and who they’re involved with.

Need to Unplug Your Kids? Celebrate Screen-Free Week

In the olden days, as American kids spent more and more time watching television and got fatter and fatter, a movement began to limit TV watching. A campaign was launched through schools and other organizations to get families to try a full week without watching the tube. Studies showed that a large majority of those families that tried the experiment made it through the full week. And even those that didn’t tended to cut back on the hours their families spent watching afterward.

In 2010, the TV-Turnoff campaign changed its name to Screen-Free Week, encouraging families to cut out all screen entertainments for a full week each year in April. To find out more, and to get lots of strategies for keeping your kids busy and happy during that time of abstinence, go to
CommercialFreeChildhood.org/ScreenFreeWeek
.

One of the most popular apps on Facebook is called Family Tree, which provides families with a way to share messages and information within their families while also reaching out and tracking down relatives and plotting a family tree. See this at Facebook .com/FamilyTree, or
FamilyBuilder.com
, which designed the app.

The Christopher Family Teck Traditions

It’s no surprise that the Christopher family has loads of tech-related traditions. After all, the family business, run by Stacy Louise Christopher and her husband, Scott, is technology related, a mobile service/consulting business called Mr. Pink Computer Shrink. They run the business out of their home. Both parents and their son, Cousteau, twelve years old, each have a Facebook page and keep in touch that way, as well as by sending frequent, often joking texts on their cell phones. The Christophers, who live in Santa Barbara, are a family of free spirits. Stacy loves the sport of roller derby and continues to work as a referee for a local league. Her husband and son love skateboarding so much that they started their own YouTube channel (surprisingly easy to do), where they post videos of themselves and friends on their skateboards. Go to
YouTube.com/Qwackpipe
. Perhaps the oddest family ritual of all is one they call “Playing Dead,” which Stacy started after she read an article that said this was a popular activity in Korea. They all try to outdo each other by taking goofy photos of themselves pretending to be dead, whether photographed on a rock in the park or on the doctor’s examining table (while waiting for the doc to appear). They post the photos online and share them with friends.

Obviously, this is a family that totally embraces technology in daily life and as a way to celebrate together, and Stacy is currently working on a book about technology, parenting, and family values. Her basic take on the topic is this: “There are positive and negative ways families can use technology. But it has to be a managed relationship, with each family being clear about its personal family values.”

Bedtime

I will readily admit that I’ve made many mistakes as a mother. But bedtime, that’s something I did really well. Early on, I put together a regular bedtime ritual with my son that included prayers, reading or telling stories, and a kind of incantation in the dark in which we said “Good night” to everyone in the family, nuclear and extended. Bedtime was the same time every night (with rare exceptions), and I remember it as a blissful, reliably relaxing half hour. What I don’t remember is ever having a single fight with Max—outspoken and argumentative since toddlerhood—over going to bed.

This is such a precious time of connection for parents and children that I’m including even more bedtime traditions than in the first edition.