At least a couple of times a month, Carey Rysiewicz and her 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Kira, bake a batch of cookies or some other treat and head for a nearby nursing home to visit their friend Anna.
There, they’ll sit and chat (or race around the room, in Kira’s case) with the woman who has become “Grandma Anna” to them.
Sometimes dad Tom will try to make the visit, too. And in between visits, there are cards and phone calls, “just little things to let Grandma Anna know we’re thinking about her,” explained Rysiewicz, who lives with her family in unincorporated Homer Township.
This ritual began last Christmas, when Kira’s parents decided it was time to teach her about the legacy of caring for others.
“We wanted her to see that Christmas was more than stuff you get from Toys R Us and Santa Claus,” Rysiewicz said. “We wanted her to understand that it is a time when we should talk about what we are grateful for and when we as a family should be giving to others.
“So we baked a gingerbread house together and decided we’d give it to someone who would think it was special. I called some local nursing homes, and they told me about this woman who was a widow and whose children had died, too, and who really didn’t have much family left.”
The first visit grabbed their hearts. “When we were leaving,” Rysiewicz said, “Kira turned to me and said, `Mom, if we leave, Grandma Anna has no one to play with.’ “
They’ve been returning ever since.
Rituals like this, if repeated week after week, year after year, are likely to strengthen family ties, parenting experts say.
Indeed, in today’s hurried world, where intimacy and other needs often are unfulfilled because of the breakdown of the family unit through divorce, long-distance separations of extended families or overwhelming job demands, families more than ever need to find ways to give meaning to their lives and have fun together, according to psychologists. Rituals have historically been a good way to accomplish this, they say.
Christopher Higgins is clinical director for EHS Family Care Network, an Oak Lawn-based outpatient family mental health care treatment center. “Family traditions and rituals are crucial,” he said. “Today there are so many changes in society that place so much stress on the family structure and create so many higher expectations for children.
“Little League practices, which used to be one night a week, now are three, and parents have to attend them all or they are considered bad parents. What kind of time for family does that leave?”
The Rysiewicz family’s ritual generates great warmth and closeness, experts say. It also requires the family to focus not just on themselves, but to band together to care for someone else. Not the TV. Not Kira’s toys. Just family and what it means.
“We think passing down our values is the essence of what our family is all about,” said Rysiewicz, a former 1st-grade teacher who is expecting her second child in May. “It’s also something special we can do together as a family.
“As a teacher, I saw how important traditions and rituals can be for families,” she said. “We make it a point to set aside time to go to the museums, read books together and just do things as a family.”
Higgins said family rituals are important because they set specific time apart for family togetherness.
“They serve to organize the family,” said Higgins, a father of three preschool-aged daughters. “In my work, if something needs to get done it has to be on my calendar. Same with my family. We have to put aside specific time to be with our families. Just as you know you go to mass every Sunday morning, there’s no doubt that this time is for family.”
What’s more, in bringing family members together, rituals and traditions provide a format for building on and improving the relationships between family members, he said. The repetitive nature of rituals also provides structure and “grounds us in an uncertain world,” Higgins said.
“Of the 150 family case studies I review each week, most of the problems stem from the fact that families just don’t have these everyday rituals or ways to come together any more,” Higgins said. “Even something that seems as simple as reading a book at night to your children provides that badly needed structure and routine.”
The Rysiewicz family’s visits speak volumes about the creative ways families are trying to counteract this trend of less ritual, fewer meaningful activities, said Daniel DeWitt, a psychologist who specializes in family matters. The Joliet native began his practice in Joliet and now is in Barrington.
“Family rituals and traditions are an important means of binding the individual to the family and providing that sense of belonging,” DeWitt said. “They are important in helping families grow and develop.”
The good news, DeWitt and other family experts agree, is that despite the obstacles, there has been an increase in recent years of families turning to ritual and tradition as a way to reconnect.
But many just don’t know how to go about it, DeWitt said.
“In my clinical work with fathers, I often (hear), `My family is important to me, but I don’t know what to do with them aside from household chores or vacations,’ ” DeWitt said. He is the author of The Fathering Report, a national newsletter for fathers. “They always want to know, `What do other fathers do?”‘
As a father of two sons-Dusty, 6, and D.J., 2-DeWitt has faced the same problem.
But he’s quick to point out that some of the most treasured family traditions are the most simple, “ones that just bring out the family’s playfulness,” he said.
One such example is the DeWitt dad-and-sons’ weekly Saturday afternoon trek to a hot dog stand in Barrington. They order “to go,” then go meet mom, Pat, also a family psychologist, at the nearby office where the couple have their counseling practice.
“The boys get a big kick out of it,” DeWitt said. “But mostly they love it because it’s something they do every week with Mom and Dad.”
“The exciting thing about traditions today,” Higgins said, “is that we can re-create or reinvent them to fit our new definition of family.”
In many cases, families are forming non-traditional groups-single moms getting together with other single moms and their kids, or transplanted families finding each other to become families together, he adds.
Since Maureen Litteriello’s divorce last August, she has tried to reinvent the concept of family traditions with her daughter, Lauren, 5.
“It’s really turned everything upside down as far as traditions go,” said Litteriello of Oak Lawn. “Before I had my daughter, I never really realized how important traditions and the routine of rituals were. But I’m trying to do something special for Easter.
“I don’t have a lot of family in the area, so we’re planning to do a big dinner with one of my sisters who is single and a girlfriend whose husband isn’t around very much. We’re going to do the whole coloring Easter egg routine and everything.”
Whether it is bonding with the Easter bunny or simply taking time out from T-ball and ballet practice, families throughout the southwest suburbs are celebrating their unique qualities in a variety of special ways, experts agree.
Just ask Tina and Henry Sawa of Palos Park.
Though their children are just 5 and 2, the couple feel strongly about drawing from their own family religious and everyday traditions and passing them on to another generation.
“It’s part of our heritage,” Tina Sawa said. “We feel very strongly that we should try to pass these special times on to our children. I have so many magical memories of being a child.”
For the Sawas, their Catholic religion and its holidays are important to pass on as well.
“We really stress the religious traditions at times like Easter,” she said.
Like many parents, these southwest suburban families hope to create a legacy their children will grow to cherish.
“There are just so many problems in today’s world and it just seems that these family times together give your children a solid structure and foundation, ” Rysiewicz said.
Though family traditions certainly are more prominent around the holidays, they’re not limited by the calendar.
In the Litteriello household, every Monday night is Ice Cream Night. “Right after supper, we’re off to the ice cream parlor,” Litteriello said. “We wouldn’t miss it. She has ice cream, I have a muffin and coffee, and we talk. It’s just a special time for us, just the two of us.”
