Experts say that the positive psychological impact of creating traditions for your family can be long-lasting.Getty Images
When Donna Rose Addis was a child, her mother used to give the linoleum floors in the kitchen a deep scrub. She’d do this every six months or so, mixing a solution of soap and water, pouring the foamy liquid all over the floor.
Then, and before picking up the sponge, she’d call over Addis and her brother – not to help her scrub, but to play.
“We’d go sliding through the room, treating the floors like a slip and slide,” she says. “It was a quirky tradition that no one else did, but it became this fun little ritual for our family.”
Now an adult, Addis works as a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at the University of Toronto, where she studies perception, cognition, and cognitive neuroscience. Looking back, she recognizes that family traditions aren’t just fun to remember – they shape our core memories.
“When you experience an event repeatedly, you build up a memory that is more resilient than others,” says Addis. That means family traditions, whether quirky or ordinary, can be more prominent in the brain than elaborate one-off events, like a family trip to the South of France.
But family traditions don’t only serve as joyful events to reminisce – they’re also imperative to one’s well-being.
Strong memories, like the ones made through rituals, act as a thread through life, says Addis. While your family structure, relationships, home, and more changes, you’re still the same person because you hold the same memories.
“They shape your identity and ground you,” she says. Traditions help to paint a clear picture of who you are and provide positive experiences that you can draw upon to form your sense of self. Treat your kitchen like a water park on occasion? It illustrates your fun, carefree side, and the memory can act as a reminder throughout your life of those character traits deep inside you.
While those are the more long-term benefits of having family traditions, there are also plenty of present-day benefits that occur as you continue to engage in the traditions. For one, they offer a sense of comfort and predictability, which can help decrease anxiety.
“The brain wants to predict what’s going to happen next,” explains Addis. If you have expected events woven into your schedule, you get a sense of ease, and that settles the brain. After a stress-induced week, knowing that Friday night in your household means food delivery and a new movie could be the calming light you crave at the end of the weekday tunnel.
Mahnoor Zulfiqar, a qualifying registered psychotherapist at Shift Collab therapy practice, encourages her clients to seek family traditions because of the value they bring to everyone’s well-being.
“They help to strengthen family bonds, encourage connection and communication in the family unit and provide stability,” she says. “They can also offer a sense of continuity in that no matter what’s going on, even through tough times, you have something positive and familiar to look forward to.”
The family traditions that have the greatest impact in both the present and future are those that are emotionally meaningful to you and your family, says Zulfiqar. Ones that are so special that children eventually bring them into their own families.
Carine Redmond, an Ottawa-based mom of a nine-month-old baby boy, introduced one particular tradition from her childhood into her new family: “My dad always made a point of reading to me every night – and it was whatever book I wanted, like The Baby-Sitters Club,” says Redmond. “He didn’t mind, and I now realize how special that was, so I’m carrying on that tradition with my son.”
Traditions don’t have a positive effect if they’re forced or overdone, says Zulfiqar. In other words, if they create frustration among family members, they’re not going to become a happy memory down the line.
“Dialogue and flexibility are important when creating and maintaining traditions,” she says. They shouldn’t come with rigid rules where it’s a forced activity. And they shouldn’t cause family members to frequently miss out on other events to make the tradition work.
Zulfiqar is seeing a rise in individual parents making traditions separately with each child, which can be easier to orchestrate than traditions with multiple family members with varying schedules.
“While family tradition is important, having something personal for each child can also be valuable,” she says. “It helps to build a meaningful connection with that parent, which can shape a child’s interpersonal relationships later on in life.”
Plus, if you’re lucky, the tradition may help get your floors clean, too.