Kevin Kelly

We change the sheets or whatever it is.

Something that you can count on, and if you do it three times in a row, it becomes a ritual.

And that ability of anticipating the thing, of looking forward to it, of relying on it, of having it be there, and that is the foundation of a stable development in their own personality.

And so rites of passage is another aspect of that.

I think we found that just you have to invent them.

You can use religious ones, which are fine, but we don't even have very many of those in America.

So we just invented our own coming into adulthood, right of passage that we did as a family.

We had a bunch of rituals that we would do.

And they became, again, another anchoring thing in our kids' understanding of themselves.

Well, one thing we do, our family, and I highly recommend it, is having meals together with no screens.

And the Amish who I pay attention to, their definition of success, their definition of successful life, the people they most respect are those that are able to have every single meal with their children until the children leave.

So they have breakfast and they have lunch and they have dinner together as a family.

Lunch is the real ringer for most people because their kids are in school and they come back to the house for lunch.

So that's something that is very, very profound is having family dinners.

We say grace before meals.

We have Thanksgiving rituals where we do gratitude rounds and things.

There's a lot.

There's actually a good book.

called The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Feiler.

That's really good on this, looking at the research that's been done on understanding the family identity.