The Book of New Family Traditions (16 page)

Marla keeps a printed sheet on her refrigerator reminding her kids to do right and listing some of the things they can do to earn Guai Cards. Here are a few:

•
Taking a garbage bag out to the garage without Mom asking

•
Showing extra kindness to a brother or sister

•
Not making things into a contest (letting another go first, for example)

Partly because they get to decide when a sibling gets a card, Marla says, they really do pay close attention to one another’s behavior, but it goes beyond that. “They really notice how it feels when someone does something extra nice for them, and conversely, when a sibling upsets them.”

Weekly Family Nights

There are many ways to organize a weekly family night, including around religious traditions. Having even one hour to share, learn, and play together will do a lot to keep you close.

Prayer and More

The Suks of Evanston, Illinois, had family nights every Thursday for years, and they started with a kid-friendly dinner, “something like tacos that everybody loves,” says Letitia Suk. The meal started with a hymn reserved for that occasion, and this was also the only time the family prayed together. “We would go around the table, offering prayers to everyone from the president to a favorite grandmother,” says Letitia. After dinner, the family often went on a special outing, like a walk to the park.

Social Justice Night

The Vogts of Covington, Kentucky, started weekly family nights to pass on Catholic religious traditions and a passion for social justice to their four kids. Family night starts by lighting a candle; then the family sings “Jesus Christ is the light of the world.” Each week is devoted to a single topic, often related to peace or social justice, that is explored with a Bible verse and then a related activity. The theme might be an upcoming holiday or the hurt of racism. One night the theme was blindness, and family members took turns being blindfolded.

Family Home Evenings

Like many Mormons, the Hilton family of Las Vegas, Nevada, has these weekly family get-togethers on Monday. The children are young, so they last only about twenty minutes, including a special treat. The kids take turns picking a song and a prayer, and Nanette Hilton or her husband chooses the lesson. “It might be a lesson about honesty, or if a grandparent has died, the topic might be death,” says Nanette.

Great Resource on Family Nights

Susan Vogt gathered many creative ideas for weekly family activities into a terrific book called
Just Family Nights: Sixty Activities to Keep Your Family Together in a World
Falling
Apart.
Some of the themes covered are stewardship, protecting the environment, appreciating cultural diversity, and dealing with violence in the world, not just sibling squabbles at home, and prayer or spirituality. One night’s theme is homelessness; another night, the family explores conflict resolution by trying out activities to defuse anger, such as punching a pillow. The program for each evening includes additional suggested resources.

Family Banner

Deborah Pecoraro is Catholic and started weekly family nights when the family lived in a predominantly Mormon area. “My kids felt prejudice from some of the Mormon kids, and we wanted to make them proud of their own religion,” she says. Deborah took her theme from a Catholic prayer titled “God Made Us a Family” and created a special family banner out of felt.

How to Make a Family Banner

One of the purposes of Family Night is to create a feeling of team spirit, a sense of shared beliefs, and your banner will help express that.

Materials

At a fabric or craft store, buy two yards (six feet) of felt in the color you want for a background. Banners are long but skinny, so you will want to cut the fabric at home so that it’s five or six feet long, by about two feet.

Also buy scraps or small squares of other colors, including white and black.

Instructions

Design:
Plan your design on paper first. Give each family member some space, perhaps twelve inches square, in which to create their self-portrait. Save space above, below, or between the portraits for the family name and logo. A logo might include symbols of your heritage, like a shamrock for Irish roots.

Cutting:
Have everyone cut out the felt to make their portraits, including details like neckties, hats, and baseball bats. Add pets, favorite toys in felt. Glue them to the background.

Hanging:
Cut three or four felt pieces two inches wide and three inches long. Fold them in half, then stitch or staple to the back of the banner, forming loops. Buy a dowel rod from the hardware store to slip through the loops and hang your banner—all the time or just for meetings.

Weekly Family Meetings

Family meetings may include similar elements like prayers and snacks but tend to have “family business” as their central purpose. That includes dealing with issues like scheduling, finances, and behavior. This is a fabulous forum for airing your core values, and a great way to practice communication skills. Stephen Covey, author of
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families,
says that regular family meetings help kids move from “me” to “we” in their thinking and that they were the single most effective thing he and his wife did while raising their kids. The sidebar shows some guidelines I’ve developed.

Ten Guidelines for Great Family Meetings

1. Let Mom and Dad have the last word, but everyone gets a say.

2. Start by sharing the best thing that happened to you all week.

3. Keep the pace brisk and businesslike generally, but meetings should be brief for young kids, maybe fifteen minutes.

4. Go over the week’s outings, sports practices, doctor appointments, and so on, with the family calendar on the table.

5. Take turns being the leader when the kids are old enough.

6. State problems without blaming, then brainstorm together. One child might say, “It’s a problem that I’m the only one who washes the dishes.” He should explain why this is a problem, and the family can jointly discuss solutions.

7. Give a “family star of the week” award to the family member with the most awesome accomplishment.

8. Take five minutes to discuss big-picture questions such as: Where should we go for summer vacation? Is it time to get a dog? This will help make the sessions seem less like nag-fests and create that sense of family as team or tribe.

9. End with a fun activity or dessert treat. This could also be when allowance is paid out.

10. Keep next week’s agenda on the refrigerator: Anyone can add to it.

Tip:
Barring emergencies, have the meeting at the same time and place every week! Better to have a mini-meeting than get in the habit of skipping.

Say Something Nice

In the Brosbe family, you have to start the family meeting by saying something nice about someone else. Ellen Brosbe says, “It might be mundane stuff like ‘Thanks for letting me play your video game,’ but it’s important for them to thank each other.” The four kids have to take turns sharing a bedroom, so “rotating rooms” is almost always on the weekly agenda. Other issues that get discussed are everything from reminders to refill the orange juice pitcher to broad discussions like “Should we keep going to synagogue?” Ellen says her kids began getting surly about meetings when they reached their teens, but she says a lot of family issues got ironed out at these weekly sessions.

Getting to Know You

Writer Jennifer Grant is a mother of four living near Chicago, and her clan has a family meeting at 6:00 PM on Sundays. There are gaps during the summer, but the meetings are pretty regular during the school year. The kids each get a parfait glass filled with 7 Up—and a cherry! The parents usually have a glass of wine, though Jennifer’s husband sometimes opts for a martini. The basic purpose of the meeting is simple communication, a chance for everyone to touch base before a new week begins. There is always a simple playful activity, what Jennifer calls a “getting to know you sort of thing.” Everyone might finish the prompt: “What I like most about myself is....” Or “What I think people in the family misunderstand about me is....” “I think one reason my kids get along so well is that these family meetings give them trust in one another,” says Jennifer.

A Tradition of Debate

The Vogts had weekly Family Nights
plus
weekly meetings. Heidi Vogt, daughter of Susan, says that she and her three siblings got annoyed that family meetings were undemocratic. “We would bring up things we wanted, but they would vote us down even though we were the majority,” says Heidi. “But we did get a chance to express our views, and I see now that it gave me a sense of what they really valued. We could never get them to put in cable TV, but they explained it’s because they felt they had better uses for that money.”

Note to Reader
: When I first interviewed the Vogt family, it was more than a decade ago and I remember asking Susan how her kids felt about all the rituals and meetings. She told me to ask Heidi, because she was always the biggest complainer about having to go along with all the family traditions, especially meetings. I interviewed Heidi while she was in college, at Yale, and she told me that even though she was often reluctant, these values-oriented meetings affected her deeply. After college, she joined the Peace Corps. Later, she was a journalist, covering the war in Afghanistan. Her mom went on to write a terrific book called
Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference
, in which she describes how she and her husband raised their kids. Interspersed in the pages are reactions from Heidi and her siblings to their upbringing, rituals and all.

Dealing with Grumps

The Hassell family always starts their Monday family meetings with a prayer. The kids take turns being in charge of refreshments and supplying a good discussion topic, which includes major family purchases. If one of the children shows up at the meeting in a bad mood, Mary Bliss Hassell says, “We have a family discussion about how to treat someone who is grumpy,” and they soon bring the defiant one into the fold.

Family Fun Night

Another way to slant your weekly family ritual is toward sheer fun, carving out one night a week when the television stays off while family members play games, eat treats, and act goofy. You could also call it Game Night.

There’s no better guidebook for doing this than Cynthia L. Copeland’s book,
Family Fun Night!
First off, Copeland is extremely thorough, so when she does a chapter on board games, she provides a long list of board games that are good for families, including some unfamiliar ones. Then, she closes with tips on inventing your own family game. There are chapters on movie nights, card games, video games, read-aloud family nights, talent show nights, and family memory nights, among others. For low-budget ideas, there is a list of ten family nights costing less than $10.