Finding Health, Wellness, and Belonging in Ritual      
By: Ann Kolodji, Ithaca College Health Promotion & Physical Education

The new year offers us a chance to reflect on the previous year and plan ahead for the months ahead. Rituals are an important aspect of human life. They help us develop connections with others, mark important events, and reduce anxiety in our daily lives. Rituals are inherently linked to our health and wellness in both direct and indirect ways.

Take a moment to think about the rituals you may have taken part of in the last few weeks. Did you attend a religious service, light the candles on the kinara, sit down to eat a special meal, or take part in a morning meditation practice? Defining “ritual” may be challenging depending on who we ask. Researchers have varying perspectives on how they conceptualize rituals. They are more than simple daily routines. Although when emotional significance becomes attached to repetitive events, they can be transferred into deeper rituals. My friend, Jill, told me about her routine-turned-ritual experience. When she started driving her anxious daughter to kindergarten they would sing songs. Over time, the song, “Sing,” made famous by the Carpenters developed a deeper meaning. Now in third grade and taking the bus to school, Jill and her daughter get up together on Monday mornings and sing this special song together as preparation for the week. It’s become their collective anthem for strength and self-esteem.

One simple way of defining rituals is as symbolic acts of communication that contain a hidden subtext known only to the participants (Fiese, 2007). They transmit values, goals and traditions often across generations. Rothenbuhler (1998) developed a set of criteria for rituals:

	Performance based		Social
	Noninstrumental yet serious		Voluntary
	Expressive of social relations		Evaluative
	Regularly recurring		Condensed
	Emphasizing form		Aesthetic
	Emphasizing the sacred, the valued		Powerful

Much of the research examining rituals has investigated them in the context of the family. The presence of family rituals has been associated with greater physical and psychological health in children. Maintaining family rituals helped children adjust to parental alcoholism, divorce, and remarriage. The more meaningful rituals in a child’s family, the more likely they were to develop secure attachments as adults (Homer, Freeman, Zabriskie & Eggett, 2007). Couples who partake in ritualizing report increased relationship satisfaction and commitment (Baxter & Braithwaite, 2006). Family members who participate in ritualizing experiences feel a stronger sense of belonging and security within their families despite struggling through adversity. In fact, rituals can help them shore up strength in times of struggle by giving them a sense of identity or uniqueness. Children managing severe asthma reported less anxiety when their mealtimes were ritualized experiences that involved genuine communication and care (Fiese, 2007).

The family meal is an example of a ritual that connects to numerous traditional health education topics from nutrition, to communication and responsibility. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 72.8% of children six to 11 years old eat dinner with at least one parent seven nights a week. The percentage drops to 58% for teens 12 to 17 years, but if the time frame is three to seven nights a week, 89% of teens eat with at least one of their parents. Family mealtimes have become an area that educators can support and offer encouragement to parents in their school communities. Providing recipes for family cooking times, or encouraging students to interview parents about certain topics at the table, teachers can help parents recognize the importance of the family meal whether it’s daily or weekly.

In addition to valuing rituals in the family lives of ourselves and our students, it can be incredibly rewarding for educators to acknowledge the role of ritual in the educational setting. Schools serve as cultural touchstones for students replete with unique traditions, values, and rituals. Rituals in the school setting may be explicit, like the pep rallies honoring a favorite sports team, or the food drive collecting canned goods for a local charity. Such events are often symbolic, imbued with collective identity and unity. We know that students who feel a sense of belonging in their schools engage in fewer risk behaviors both in and outside of the educational setting. Many teachers have rituals that become part of their personal teaching style. One teacher I knew had story time where every Friday he would share a short, funny personal story from his life. It became a source of pride for the students in his classes who would share the stories with others who had yet to experience his class. Rituals may be located around an individual teacher, student, or embodied in the culture of a whole school or community.

Possick (2008) talks about the importance of preparing for a ritual, and how this experience can be just as critical as the ritual itself. The idea of preparation is clearly relevant to educational settings. Take a moment to reflect on the ritualized preparations in your own school. The anticipation involved in planning a school play or dance is contagious. The excitement over setting up a field trip that may involve research, reading, and itinerary organizing stretches the ritual out over a period of time, strengthening the sense of experience and bonding. When I was working with a group of students in an after-school program, we had family meals every other month where the students would plan and cook a big meal for their families. The majority of the students came from Puerto Rican families, so much of the food involved traditional foods they ate at home. The planning, shopping, and cooking was done all by the 10 to 13 year-old-students and carried as much excitement as the actual event that was characterized by music and dancing.

The role of cultural identity is critical when we examine both family and school ritualizing. Lauria & Miron (2005) conducted a qualitative interviews comparing African American students’ satisfaction across different schools. “The school constructs solidarity by insisting on a 100% African American school population. The struggle for identity is waged by the school against a wider society that tends to reduce all black (males) to a ‘nameless statistic’ (p. 129).” It’s necessary as educators to recognize the importance of ritual within specific communities and racial groups in our schools, and how that contributes to students’ sense of purpose and value. Another example is how for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students and their allies, the Day of Silence has become a ritualized form of protest and pride. By honoring the wide variety of rituals that are meaningful to our students and their families, we reinforce the importance of ritual and commitment and further support the healthy and well-being of ourselves, our families, and our students.

resources:
Day of Silence
Family Routines and Rituals May Improve Family Relationships and Health, according to 50-year research review
Rituals and Family Strength
Family Rituals and Traditions

references:
Baxter, L.A. & Braithwaite, D.O. (2006). Family rituals. In L.A. Baxter & L.H. Turner (Eds.), The Family Communication Sourcebook (pp. 259-280). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Fiese, B.H. (2007). Routines and rituals: Opportunities for participation in family health. OTJR: Occupation, Participation and Health, 27, 41S-49S, 2007.
Homer, M.M., Freeman, P.A., Zabriskie, R.B., Eggett, D.L. (2007). Rituals and relationships: Examining the relationship between family of origin rituals and young adult attachment. Marriage & Family Review, Vol. 42(1), 5-28.
Lauria, M., & Miron, L.F. (2005). Schools as new social spaces of resistance and accommodation. In Urban Schools: The New Social Spaces of Resistance (pp. 129-148). New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
Possick, C. (2008). The family meal: An exploration of normative and therapeutic ritual from an ethnic perspective. Journal of Family Psychotherapy, 19(3), 259-276.
Rothenbuhler, E. W. (1998). Ritual Communication: From everyday conversation to mediated ceremony. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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