The Secret to Stronger Bonds: Building New Traditions with your Children
Discover the magic behind creating traditions, from roller coasters to annual letters, and why every dad should start one today.
April 19, 2024 - I’ve always been fascinated by the rituals and traditions of families. My wife and I come from very different backgrounds, and we’ve needed to compromise, invent and merge traditions to connect our children to our pasts and each other. It was so much fun learning (and stealing!) new traditions from the Ambitious Dads I interviewed. This is the output of those conversations…
Two summers ago I took my then 5-year old on our first daddy-son trip to Puerto Aventura, an amusement park similar in size to Six Flags. He hasn’t stopped talking about it. We spent the night. He rode his first roller-coaster, even got denied from another because of his height. It was perfect. When he saw he was too short he simply exclaimed, “Daddy, next year I’ll be tall enough!” So yes, we went back the following year, and he gleefully rode the vomit-inducing coasters he was too short for the year before and found others he wasn’t yet tall enough for. To this day he measures his growth in new rides. We’re planning our next trip in June, this time with his younger brother in tow.
I spend lots of quality time with my sons, but this daddy-son trip was one for the books. He always talks about it and always asks when we’re going back. It’s become a tradition. I’m already dreading his teenage years when he'll outgrow the kiddie coasters and graduate to the gravity-defying ones that put the fear of God in me. No doubt we’ll do them.
In my Ambitious Dad interviews, the topic of rituals and traditions (rituals being more connected to religious and symbolic concepts) were often highlighted. One Ambitious Dad, whose children had already finished high school explained with regret, “What I should have done differently was pick out a few things I could have done on a regular basis and develop them as traditions. I see now how easily they’d have been remembered and repeated.”
Why Traditions are Important
Family traditions, and daddy-child ones more specifically, give our children a sense of identity, belonging and security. When we have a sense of where we come from we can have a better sense of where we are going. Traditions do this. They create shared memories and bonds that our children love because they crave connection and love predictability. This is especially true in unfamiliar circumstances (and in a world of constant change). Simple activities can be transformed into rituals like singing a funny song before taking medicine or celebrating a failure every night at the dinner table to build resilience and risk taking. Rituals, specifically, can also help our children learn and feel competent - think of elaborate religious rituals like a Passover seder or Christmas Eve dinner and the knowledge learned over time.
For me, one of the greatest takeaways about this topic is the knowledge that while our focus is stretched - juggling work and family - we can intentionally design traditions that provide consistency for our children, even when we aren’t able to be in front of them as much as we’d like. Traditions have the power of getting us out of the routine and making time feel special. It’s so worth leaning into.
What to Consider in Designing New Traditions
There is definitely a bit of secret sauce in creating traditions that stick and evolve over time. Flexibility will help keep them relevant and enjoyable. After all, they’re not traditions if they lose their luster within a month. Here are several things to keep in mind while brainstorming new possibilities:
Your passions: There are lots of things we do for our kiddos that are 100% child-centered and may not deeply connect with our imagination, memories or passions. Take the amusement park example I started with. That connects with my childhood and I just love it. I get to be a kid again! Maybe you love reading, cooking, storytelling, or personal development (like me!) - all of these could be good anchors for your traditions.
Consistency through accountability: Traditions take effort and follow through, so get some help. Get together with other dads and create a tradition together, or ask one to hold you accountable and vice versa. Of course, your partner can play this role.
Meaningful engagement: The tradition should have depth and meaning, and also be fun. It’s not just about the activity itself, but the connection it fosters and the values it reinforces.
6 Traditions to Spark Your Imagination
Here are 6 unique traditions that have been shared with me. I think the greatest impact from the list below is the ideas it can spark. So take a look and come up with at least 1 to add to your repertoire with your children this week or month.
Annual review: Writing a document once a year to our children helps us to reflect on a year of growth and change and gives our children a chance for gratitude and new beginnings. This is a favorite of Ambitious Dad Asheesh Advani who explained, “I put together a letter of the things I’m most proud of and some of the things they’ve accomplished over the year that they may have forgotten.” Asheesh also includes an activity in this process that he calls Start. Stop. Continue. Together they brainstorm what new activities they should begin, which ones need to be ended, and which ones should continue to be a focus of his children’s lives.
Kitchen traveler: Children are curious about the world, and most of us love food, so why not combine the two? Once a month our family picks a country and learns a bit about it. Then we try to cook a new recipe from there. Bonus points if you can take your children shopping in advance for the ingredients. Occasionally I have our boys choose the country, and other times we know someone from there and invite them over. You can really get creative.
Gratitude or Dream Jar: Together with your children, paint a container that you put someplace conspicuous and can regularly drop notes into it about things you're grateful for, or quite separately, dreams for the future. Then read them together once a month or season.
Season Tickets: My father used to have season tickets to the Red Sox short-season, single A baseball team and we’d regularly catch evening or weekend games together. I still remember it dearly. Are there season tickets you can get to a local sporting team, theater, or cultural activity?
Bedtime Question Journal: There’s no debating how difficult conversations can be when our children are exhausted at night, but we can seed ideas with them at this time. Neuroscience is replete with evidence that reflecting on a question at night can put our subconscious to work while we dream. Keep a journal by your child's bedside and write down one question each night (or week) for them to answer in the morning. Questions like “If you had the power to invent something new that helped people, what would it be?” Or, “What do you think makes a child truly happy?” You’ll be pleasantly surprised over breakfast when your child blurts out a sudden response.
Daddy-child trips! I started these when my oldest was 5. It felt like the right age. 24 hours is more than enough if you position it as a special trip together. This is the absolute favorite thing in my dad repertoire.
Please add to the comments with other unique traditions and rituals you’ve launched with your children. The larger the bucket of ideas and possibilities the more experimenting we can all do to build lasting memories.
Love this one, Jeff. Great ideas.
These are such great ideas. Stealing them as a future mom