The Book of New Family Traditions (18 page)

Resource for Monthly Family Service Projects

Sondra Clark began volunteering when she was quite young, and by the age of twelve, she was working on volunteer projects in Kenya and Uganda. Now a young adult, she has really done her homework and produced a very family-friendly book stuffed with ideas for community service projects.
Seventy-Seven Creative Ways Kids Can Serve
is
a great
book to give to your budding community activist, but these are terrific ideas for projects for a whole family. She starts with very simple ideas like creating a backyard sanctuary for wildlife or collecting tennis balls for the local animal shelter and works up to more demanding projects. As a pre-teen, Sondra became obsessed with Jane Goodall’s career working with chimpanzees, and one of the nonprofits she recommends is Goodall’s Roots and Shoots project.
RootsAndShoots.org
, the website for the organization, gives kids and families lots of ways to make a difference. Another Sondra Clark pick is DoingGood
Together.org
, a website run by a Minnesota family that is full of doable projects for families.

to the local hospital for children who are patients. Other possibilities: Your kids could make monthly visits to a local nursing home and read to elderly residents. They could bake cookies monthly and deliver them to the local fire or police station. Or sign up with a local environmental group to help clean up a nearby park. By going back to the same place, kids can form real relationships with those they help. (You may want to change the recipient of your help annually, as children grow and their interests change.)

Monthly Neighborhood Potluck or Pizza Blast

We’re all too busy to stay as close to our friends and neighbors as we’d like. One answer is no-fuss entertaining that is built into our schedules. Designate the first Friday or last Sunday of every month for your Family Pizza Party, but vary your guests. This is the time to meet a new neighbor, get to know the parents of your kids’ best friends, invite the woman in your yoga class who looks interesting. Or ask the same four or five families and rotate between each other’s houses. Keep the menu simple: pizza, salad, and drinks.

Or start something similar to what New York Times writer Patricia Leigh Brown wrote about in an article: a monthly potluck dinner with her neighbors. The tradition is referred to where she lives as “First Wednesday” dinners, and they went on in her San Francisco neighborhood for decades. No dishes were assigned, everything was casual. At the start of every month, an index card would simply appear in her mailbox with the words: First Wednesday, written in magic marker.

Freedom Day

My son complained that he was overscheduled. “I go to school every day, karate on Saturday, and church on Sunday. When is it
my
day?” he wanted to know. So I designated the last Saturday of every month “Max Freedom Day” when he was young, and he did what he wanted to do on those days (within reason). He would usually skip karate, and I could not schedule hateful appointments like haircuts. The whining over scheduling largely disappeared, and he had something to look forward to all month, every month.

Family Book Groups

There is no more sustaining ritual in my life than my monthly reading group—why not extend this fun to include my own family? A Family Book Group can encourage the love of reading, but it also provides a fun, shared activity. There is a generally greater conversational give-and-take than if family members were to watch a movie together, and unlike such rituals as family meetings, parents get to interact more like equals than authority figures.

Mother-daughter book groups are popular now, especially with pre-teen girls. But father-son book groups are also a great idea. And you could form a book group that paired your entire family with several other families, providing the kids are close enough in age to enjoy the same books.

Six Simple Rules for Family Book Groups

1. The more authority kids have, the better.
As much as possible, let them pick the books and lead the discussion.

2. It works well to have members take turns being leader.
The leader should prepare questions in advance to guide the discussion, and present some background about the author or book topic.

3. You can serve a snack or meal before the discussion begins
and let the group members use this time for chitchat.

4. Once it’s time to discuss the book, stick to the topic for at least half an hour.
Be disciplined.

5. Even a book group doesn’t need to be sedentary and can encompass creative as well as physical activities.
To get the kids moving, dance or do some workout moves to begin. For little kids, ask them to invent a dance or exercise a character in that month’s book might do. In addition to talking about the books, include a component of the book group evening when the kids might draw or paint a character, or let them act out a scene.

6. It’s important to have everyone respect others’ opinions.
No judging. Members can disagree without having an argument.

More on Family Book Groups

Five Good Questions to Ask About Any Book:

1. Did you like the book? If so, why? If not, why not?

2. Which character was your favorite? Would you have behaved in the same way as that person?

3. Was there anything unusual in the way the author told the story? (flashbacks, multiple narrators, unusual slang, and so on)

4. How does this book compare to other books the group has read and discussed? Are the characters more or less believable? Which had the most exciting plot? Best ending?

5. What did you learn from this book? It could be something about an historical event, perhaps, or a sense of how other people live now and make choices in their lives.

Deciding What to Read

You can get a list of discussion-worthy books from your local library or bookstore. Many bookstores and libraries around the country also host multigenerational book groups on the premises, in case you would prefer having a book group that meets outside your home and includes others.

An excellent site for picking kid-friendly books is
KidsReads.com
, which reviews both classics and current books and even gives tips on starting a kids’ book group. Also helpful is that there are short reading guides for a long list of award-winning children’s books that include discussion questions specific to each title.

A good book to help parents choose books and get tips for making reading a big deal in your family life is
Reading Together: Everything You Need to Know to Raise a Child Who Loves to Read,
by Diane Frankenstein.

Awesome Resources on Book Groups for Girls—and Boys

Much has been written about the great joys of mother-daughter book clubs, including the way they encourage teen and tween girls to continue speaking to their mothers. Two excellent books on all-female groups are
The Mother-Daughter Book Club
(
revised edition
) by Shireen Dodson, and
Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs
by Cindy Hudson. There is also a very helpful website,
www.motherdaughter bookclub.com
, run by Cindy Hudson.

However, as the mother of a son who has always been an avid reader, I’ve been frustrated at the absence of alternatives for boys. Now there is a fantastic website called
BookClub4Boyz.com
(note the “Boyz” with a “z”), written by Laura, the mother of four sons. This website is just packed with great advice and suggestions about what to read. She even has a topic button on the site for “Biggest Belch Award,” listing titles with the type of gross humor beloved by boys. My son sure loved the Captain Underpants books in grade school! One of her tips for a reading group with boys: Start out with twenty minutes of full-out physical activity, so they can settle down afterward and quietly discuss the book.

CHAPTER 3

Family Festivities and Ceremonies

Birthdays

Everything Balloons

One of the best ways to celebrate birthdays is with balloons, which are not only a perfect symbol for the pumped-up excitement of a kid on this day but are also incredibly versatile.

Chairs and Beds

Get a bouquet of helium balloons and tie them to your child’s chair at dinner, to designate the “birthday girl” or “birthday boy.” Or tie a Mylar
^®
helium balloon to the end of your sleeping child’s bed (it must be Mylar
^®
to last overnight; a regular balloon filled with helium will sink by morning).

Balloon Countdown

As toddlers, her kids constantly asked, “How many days till my birthday?” so Debbie Midcalf created a balloon ritual for counting down the days. A week or so before the birthday, she blows up balloons, one for each day, and hangs them on a string across the dining room. All the balloons are the same color, except the last one, which represents the actual birthday. Every day, her child gets to pop one balloon, then count how many are left.

Balloon Forest

A great way to decorate your dining room for a birthday feast is to get twenty-five to fifty regular balloons, in bright colors, inflated with helium. When you get them home, separate the ribbons and let the balloons bounce up to the ceiling. Keep the ribbons long, just reaching to the top of the table, so you have to look at each other through a forest of ribbons. An ordinary room becomes magical.

Balloon Wishes

After blowing out candles, take your child outside with three helium-filled balloons. Let the child make three wishes, and for each silent wish, let go of one balloon.

How to Make a Balloon Tunnel

Ron Greenberg celebrates the birthdays of his daughters by constructing a “balloon tunnel” on the stairs. When the birthday girl awakes, she must be the first one to squeeze into the tunnel, slide downstairs on her backside, and pick up the wrapped present at the bottom, her first of the day.

Materials and Instructions

Ron starts with about fifty helium balloons. Using ribbons, he ties half of them to one side of the banister and half to the other, and they are crisscrossed in the middle. Because the helium holds them up, there is plenty of room for kids (and adults) to slide underneath them, but not enough room to stand. To close it off and give it more of a tunnel feeling and look, Ron threads crepe-paper streamers through and around the ribbons holding the balloons.

Great Birthday Celebrations

Celebrate Growth and Encourage Maturity

Gertrud Mueller Nelson, author of
To Dance with God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration,
gave her kids two envelopes on their birthdays. One was marked “New Privilege” and the other “New Responsibility.” A child turning six might be given the privilege of staying up an extra half hour at night, and the responsibility of feeding the dog his dinner. This ritual “gave them a sense of importance and made them feel grown up,” says Gertrud.

Giving Instead of Getting

The Hassells of Winterport, Maine, wanted to cultivate a generous impulse in their kids, so they started the ritual that when a child in the family has a birthday, he or she buys gifts for everyone else. The birthday child still gets a special dinner and cake with candles (plus presents from grandparents and friends). But all the children also look forward to their siblings’ birthdays, knowing they’ll get presents on each of those occasions. Mary Bliss Hassell says kids get used to anything if that’s all they know: She began this practice when the youngest was a toddler.

Memorable Birthday Photos

When her daughter Dorothy turned one year old, novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz got the idea of photographing Dorothy in a dress that had belonged to her own mother. Every year on Dorothy’s birthday, Jean takes more pictures of Dorothy in “the dress,” and each year, it comes closer to actually fitting. The photo sessions are full of clowning and silly poses, and the pictures have been compiled into collages that line one staircase. When her son celebrated his first birthday, Jean started the birthday photography tradition for him, shooting Asher in a white dress shirt of his father’s.