The ability to “stick together” even in the face of problems is one of the hallmarks of a healthy family. I call it Cohesion, and one of the purposes of this site is to teach you how to build cohesion in your own family. Let me start by showing you what cohesion looks like:
“Mum wouldn’t have been happy if I’d left Jonny behind”
With the finish line only 500 meters away, Jonny Brownlee only needed to hold on to his comfortable lead so that he could claim the $30,000 grand prize. But as he rounded a corner and headed to the finish line, the heat and the difficult pace overtook him. His legs were turning to mush. Slowing to a stumble, he collapsed into a volunteer on the sidelines. Jonny’s race was over just a few meters from the finish.
But just then, his older brother, Alistair rounded the corner and saw his brother. Wrapping Jonny’s right arm over his neck, he pulled him back onto the racetrack just as another competitor passed them both. Watch the video to see what happens next:
Not only did Alistair’s timely help for his brother allow Jonny to finish the race, Alistair also sacrificed his own chance at second place in order to push his brother over the finish line first.
This is an unforgettable display of family cohesion, but it’s the kind of loyalty that wasn’t built in a moment. The Brownlee family had to build family cohesion one experience at a time. (Click that link to see a delightful photo of the boys playfighting as youngsters). Along with consistent opportunities to play together (which is the focus of this entire site), I think that there are three particularly powerful methods for cementing family cohesion:
- Family Stories
- Family Traditions
- Family Rituals
Family Stories Create Family Cohesion
Essentially, Family Stories are living histories or stories that you and your children tell again and again. They become part of your unique family narrative. Research shows that children simply do better when they know their family stories–how Grandma learned to thrive despite a significant speech impediment, how Grandpa’s extended family rallied to raise him after his mother died of complications in childbirth.
Stories about how Grandpa was arrested for stealing chickens once, or how you got an F on your first college exam will help build resilience in the next generation because they help children understand that mistakes and problems are a normal part of life and that they can be overcome. No family is always happy, but no family is always unhappy either. Knowing that makes it easier to accept challenges when they come knocking. Cohesion is a family’s ability to adapt and support one another in the good times. But it is even more critical when times aren’t so great.
Family Traditions Create Family Cohesion
Family traditions help create the “shared identity” that all family members need in order to feel a “necessary sense of belonging,” according to Steven J. Wolin M.D. and Linda A. Bennett, Ph.D.
These traditions follow patterns of predictability, and because we can count on them, we feel safe. Traditions tell a child, “some things may change, but this won’t change” and that feeling of permanence and stability is enormously helpful as a child develops. These routines and traditions are “associated with marital satisfaction, adolescents’ sense of personal identity, children’s health, academic achievement and stronger family relationships, according to the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Family Psychology.
YouTube Family Night
In the early days of YouTube’s existence as a social media phenomenon, we were gathered in the living room trying to decide what to do for Family Night. We traditionally set aside Monday evenings for time to have fun together. A niece who was living with us told us we just had to see a video she had run across on YouTube about two adorable British brothers. The video, Charley bit my finger, went viral and is still a YouTube favorite. At this writing, it has been viewed more than 857 million times. Charley won our hearts and started a new family tradition in our home. YouTube Family Night became an opportunity for our teenage children to showcase what was impacting them on social media. They competed to outdo one another to find the very best that YouTube had to offer–sometimes shocking us with what they thought passed as entertainment.
They still do this as adults when we gather for periodic Sunday dinners. The tradition hangs on, even when it can be annoying to get the boys away from the TV and “just one more view” of Paulette Huntanova the gymnast or a rest home version of Gangnam Style or some other viral foolishness.
YouTube family night endures as part of the larger tradition of Family Night that began when our children were infants. It involved everything from backyard soccer games, to religious lessons, to kite-flying expeditions, and it has been one of our family’s cherished traditions.
The Allred Family Newsletter
Another tradition that was born mostly by accident was the Allred Family Newsletter. About once a month, I’d make a list of the family activities we had enjoyed together and each child would “volunteer” (I use the term loosely) to write a paragraph or two about the event. This became our family journal and over the years it expanded to fill several binders.
Family Rituals Create Cohesion
The difference between a family tradition and a family ritual is mostly just semantics, but Psychologist Barbara H. Fiese, Ph.D., defines a ritual this way: “Rituals…involve symbolic communication and convey ‘this is who we are’ as a group and provide continuity in meaning across generations. Also, there is often an emotional imprint where once the act is completed, the individual may replay it in memory to recapture some of the positive experience.”
The Cemetery Christmas Tree Ritual
One of our favorite family Christmas traditions was waking up early the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving to drive 50 miles in the snow and stand in a long line at 6:00 a.m. in the frigid air hoping to be one of 50 lucky recipients of a Christmas tree permit. This was my father-in-law’s idea. An avid outdoorsman, he loved the adventure of taking the grandkids out to choose a tree.
If I’m honest, none of the above truly fits into the “favorite traditions” category for me. There was something picturesque about the idea of cutting a family Christmas tree, and most years it was memorable enough to warrant continuing the tradition. But there were also a lot of years when it was muddy, the kids were cranky about being cold, the snow was so deep we couldn’t get far enough up the mountain to choose anything but the most Charlie-Brown-looking spindly tree specimen. Still, we persisted because the tradition was important to Grandpa and Grandma, and they put a lot of effort into making sure all of us had an opportunity to participate.
The year Grandpa Dee died, however, I just didn’t have much enthusiasm about the trip. I had already made up my mind that since he wasn’t going to be there to miss us, I’d go to the local tree lot and pick put a lush, bushy tree, uniformly shaped and fragrant. But at the last minute, something made me change my mind, and once the tree permit was secured, we sent our oldest son and his twin 11-year-old cousins out hunting for the perfect tree. The one they returned with was only about four feet tall–definitely NOT my idea of the perfect Christmas tree–until one of them said, “We thought we could take this one to the cemetery for Grandpa.”
And so it was, that Christmas and every one of the 19 Christmases that have passed since Grandpa died. We always put a fresh-cut Christmas tree next to Grandpa’s headstone. Every year, we meet at the cemetery and bundle up against the cold of the December 23rd twilight. His sons will tease Grandma about her winter boots (they can never resist the urge to tease her about something), possibly light a few firecrackers just to make her mad, then stake the tree into the ground with rebar they hope will help it stay upright despite the fierce winter winds that sweep through the cemetery at night.
They wind a few strings of tinsel into the tree, we each hang an ornament or two, we sing a Christmas carol and then we clamber back into our cars before we head to Grandma’s for Christmas dinner. The entire ritual takes less than 20 minutes.
Every Christmas it is the same, and there’s something about that sense of permanence that I think is reassuring to all of us. There’s the realization that when we are gone, someone will still remember. There’s still laughter, and cousins pushing one another into the snow even though he isn’t here to start the snowball fight. There’s still the fragrance of evergreen, and an orange sunset, and a little pine gum stuck to your mittens to remind you of the things he loved. There are also memories for those of us who knew him–the way he laughed and the way he said Grandma’s name. The ones who didn’t know him still understand that he’s a permanent part of the family. Just as they are.
Whether your family tradition is Mickey Mouse pancakes every Saturday morning or a piggyback ride at bedtime, these ritualized family patterns are typical of healthy families. The solidarity that family stories, family traditions, and family rituals create provides the “glue” that holds a family together when the inevitable difficult times arise.
