What Is a Ritual?

All the little daily routines you go through to calm a cranky baby or toddler fully deserve the name of ritual. You soon learn which transitions, outings and requests are going to prompt tantrums and tears, and chances are, you’ve developed specific ways of easing your child through these rough spots. 

Maybe it’s a silly song you ALWAYS sing to get your baby relaxed and ready for the bath, or the way you add drama to supermarket visits by ALWAYS stopping by the lobster tank in the seafood department and trying to think up silly names for the lobsters. 

For little ones, these rituals can work like the overture to a familiar piece of music: the ritual lets them know what’s coming, thereby giving them a sense of comfort. They can hum along.

As children get older and can deal with delayed gratification, problem-solving rituals can also reduce conflicts by deferring some of their demands to another time and place and making a ritual of this wish-fulfillment.

This is a formula that has worked for us numerous times over the years. In first grade, Max started complaining that he didn’t have enough free time: “I go to school every weekday, then Saturday it’s karate and Sunday it’s church,” he groused, and this didn’t seem unreasonable to me. Thus began Max Freedom Day, a Saturday each month in which he could choose to skip karate, and I could never schedule something loathsome like a haircut.

When it comes to turning lemons into lemonade, problem-solving rituals are the best recipe going. And the lemonade that results is so sweet, that kids often demand more. Many beloved family traditions among families I have interviewed started out as problem-solving rituals.

Such as “Yes Day” in my book, which was created by Darcie Gore when she got tired of saying “no” to her daughters. Every time they want to play dress-up or bake cookies or visit the zoo during “arsenic hour” or some other impossible moment, the girls write their wish on a piece of paper and place it in the Yes Jar. One Saturday a month, the family creates a perfect day to live out these deferred wishes.

One of the secrets of such rituals is that they give kids a real say, making them active participants in their own lives, not passive receptacles of your authority.

I interviewed some scientists who were studying how ritual works on the human mind, and they told me that ritual rewards can psychologically distract kids from scary transitions and help them make the leap to a new status. For example, one mother I knew told her daughter that when she was ready to give up her pacifier, she would have a special big-girl party. The girl couldn’t picture herself as a child who didn’t need a pacifier, but concentrating fiercely on the goal of that party, she was able to forget her fear and make the leap. Once the party celebrated her new pacifier-free self, she could see herself in those terms, and though tempted to sometimes revert, she didn’t.

By using problem-solving rituals routinely in our family lives, we’re providing our children with incredibly valuable training that they can use all their lives, whatever size problems confront them.