The Book of New Family Traditions (15 page)

Widen the Circle

Author Esther Ilnisky suggests that parents get their children to pray for others using what she calls “identity prayers.” They can pray for all the kids in the world who share their name, or are the same age. She also suggests children who are having problems at school should pray for God to help not just them but also all the other kids at the school having a hard time. Ilnisky is the author of the book
Let the Children Play.

Prayer Search

Any house of worship can provide guidance in finding suitable religious prayers for bedtime. The multidenominational website
www.beliefnet.com
includes a prayer library, which you can search by denomination or “need” or by text search.

Sport Rituals

Although my bookworm son still hasn’t met a single sport he likes, most kids today participate with some degree of passion in one or more sports. Also, many families are fans of teams, actively cheering on their favorite pro teams, alma mater teams, and watching major sporting events like the Kentucky Derby, Super Bowl, and lndy 500. Rituals can celebrate victory, ease defeat, and help us perform at our peak.

Let’s face it, sports are primal and visceral and emotional. Every sport, and every team, even every stadium, has its own set of specific rituals: team mascots, songs, cheers, and the standard gear worn by hard-core fans. There are iconic traditions like baseball’s seventh-inning stretch. Whole books could be written about this stuff, and have been.

For your household, especially if you have a sports-crazy kid, you can use ritual to help your child work through the highs and lows that come with competition. Sports help prepare kids for life because they can’t always win, and rituals help us deal with whatever life hands out.

Ritual is also a tool that helps us dig deeper into each experience, making it that much more memorable, so it’s a perfect match for sports, whether you are playing or watching.

Play Like a Champion Today

These words have long appeared on a famous sign at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana: Players touch it for luck before they head out onto the field to play football. There is something simple but powerful about the statement, and maybe you could adopt it as your family sports slogan. It’s a good message about focus. You could also create a short ritual to perform with your child athlete before every game or match that is similar to a huddle. Beware of inventing anything too elaborate or time-consuming, because if your kid or her team wins, you’ll be doing it a lot.

Divine Guidance

Many great athletes ask for God’s help before beginning a game or contest. Kathy Chesto, a Catholic writer, always said this prayer with her track-star son before he started a meet: “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength / They shall mount up with wings like eagles/ They shall run and not be weary/ They shall walk and not be faint.”

Celebrate Wins and Losses

I heard about a Little League coach who brought helium balloons to each game. The kids would release them to the skies if they won and puncture them with a pin if they lost. Some prefer to celebrate a game well played, regardless of the outcome. All the people in my family are fanatical Cleveland Browns fans, and we always eat sundaes after watching a game on TV, either to celebrate or to console ourselves. (To help them win, we always wear team gear when we watch, hold hands during crunch plays, and tear apart our Ref doll, whose arms are attached with Velcro, during bad calls.)

Team Colors

To cheer on any team, hang crepe paper around your kitchen in the team colors and try to serve food in those colors. Milk and mashed potatoes are among the foods easily dyed with food coloring. Or make big sugar cookies and ice them in two different colors, one on each half of the circle. Make small paper flags in team colors, glue them to toothpicks, and stick them in various foods or table decorations.

Personal Best Award

Store a few sports tokens such as key chains, mini-trophies, or posters to give to your children after they work especially hard in a game. Maybe they didn’t score the winning goal but made a breakthrough in catching a tough pass: Show them you noticed.

Your Family Olympics

Once every year or two, throw your own family Olympics. Invite the cousins or friends and neighbors if you want. If you have a pool, make swimming one of the sports, and if there is a basketball hoop in the driveway, have a shooting competition. You can play it seriously and by the book, or make up silly games and invented sports that little kids can shine at. Don’t forget to create a colorful opening ceremony, where you parade around the yard and down the street.

Fantasy Leagues

The practice of putting together a pretend sports team and then forecasting how your pretend team will do against others isn’t new. But with today’s tech tools, it’s gone completely epic, and it’s gone way past football to just about any sport with a decent fan base. Soccer. Golf. Surfing? There are loads of websites, books, and apps for picking your team, strategizing, and keeping up with the statistics of the players you pick. For extended families, across multiple generations, this has become an extremely popular family ritual. In the last couple of years, my husband’s family has gotten swept up in fantasy football, and they e-mail and text one another endlessly to discuss what players to pick before games and see which family member is “winning” each week.

If you want to learn more, CBS Sports and ESPN both have excellent websites that track lots of different sports. An online guide that explains the basics is
www.fftool box.com/how_to_play.cfm
. Perhaps you can dream up some great rituals to celebrate the winners in your tribe, both virtually and in person. Those who play in my family have a trophy: The name of each season’s winner is engraved on that trophy, and the winner gets to keep it until she or he is unseated the next year. Some families that have all the players in the fantasy league living nearby celebrate the season’s end in person (while trash-talking the victor as colorfully as possible).

Weekly Rituals

Having a weekly ritual is like a family-time insurance policy: The payoffs are definitely worth the time invested.

Dates with Dad

When people say they despair of staying close to a teenager, I tell them about Jim McCandless. Jim worked seventy-hour weeks and felt he was growing distant from his son, just starting junior high. They started weekly outings, and Jim moves mountains to keep that special night open. The key: His son dictates the activity each week, whether it’s playing catch, bowling, or visiting the local hobby store. Father and son were amazed at how much better they got to know, and enjoy, each other by keeping this weekly date.

Weekend Campout

Teresa Schultz-Jones lets her three kids “camp” in the family room on one weekend night, but only “if they behaved well the previous week and did their chores.” The kids sleep in sleeping bags, watch videos, stay up late, and sometimes get pizza.

Kids Cook Night

When Suzy Kellett’s quadruplets got old enough, she gave each one a cookbook and scheduled them to take turns cooking dinner on Sundays. (She calls it “Open Mic Night.”) The rules are: “You must cook something you’ve never cooked before, and you must invite at least one guest.” Her kids love it.

Wresting Night

Yup, you read that right. Karly Randolph Pitman’s husband had done some wrestling coaching with local schools, and for fun the family declared Thursday nights as Wrestling Night. This is not an elaborate thing. “It started when the kids were really little, and the rules are no pinching or biting. My husband would show them a few moves, but mostly it’s just piling on, rough-housing.” But it’s parent authorized and supervised. And, at least one of her kids did go out for the sport later in school. The point here: Different parents

have different gifts and backgrounds, and sharing their special skills with the family can make for some memorable traditions kids will brag about for years.

Surprise Excursions

Many families reserve Saturdays for errands, athletic practices, and household chores, and try to set Sunday aside as a special family day. One family I know goes to church in the morning, then saves Sunday afternoon for a special family excursion. The mother and father take turns picking the outing, keeping it secret until the last minute. One Sunday they’ll go apple picking at a local orchard, and the next week, it will be a visit to a museum or historical site. When the kids are a bit older, they will take turns picking, too.

Walking Talks

Every Sunday, take a one-hour walk in a beautiful park or nature preserve. Take turns picking a conversational topic that everyone in the family can enjoy. You might answer a question like: “If you had a time machine, where would you travel?” or you can take the plot of a popular movie, for example, Toy Story, and jointly spin a yarn about your own toys in an adventure while you sleep or go on vacation. My family’s version when we were watching all the
Lord of the Rings
movies was to create our own add-on “fellowship,” which would accompany J. R. R. Tolkien’s characters on their adventures. My husband and I would often add a major historical figure, and our son would add Homer Simpson for comic effect.

Sunday Night Rewords: Guai Cards

The experts always say it’s more powerful to “catch your kids being good” than it is to scold them for doing bad. So some parents create some type of weekly ceremony to praise and reward family members who live up to the family’s stated values.

Marla Michele Must of Michigan was inspired to create her Sunday night ceremony partly after watching the TV reality show
Survivor.
She liked the solemnity of the ceremony in which the contestants sit in a circle, with candlelight, and then discover who is being thrown off the show. “We do it in my bedroom, with candles,” says Marla. She sits in a circle with her three kids for what they call the “Guai Ceremony.” The family has two older biological siblings and a younger daughter adopted from China, and the word
guai
is Chinese for “being obedient.” (Sometimes Marla also refers to them as “mensch cards,” the Yiddish word for a decent, helpful person.)

“I call it a family-incentive program,” says Marla. “To me it’s all about their emotional intelligence: I’m attempting to raise my children to be mindful and compassionate.”

Typically, the cards are awarded for doing something considerate for another family member or for something above and beyond one’s chores, but the kids can’t crow about their accomplishment: A sibling or their mother has to “catch them being Guai.”

The Guai Cards are simple cards that Marla prints on her computer. Each is worth one dollar, and typically each child will earn at least four a week. If they win ten, they get a nice prize, like a Lego set. But when one of them has reached that level, the others also get a prize, something smaller.