“this is who we are”
Barbara H. Fiese (2002)
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A family may follow the same routine for years without giving much thought to its origins. Why, then, does the loss of one particular practice sometimes feel like the loss of something more significant?
Developmental psychologist Barbara H. Fiese has investigated this distinction through research on family routines and rituals. Her work examines how repeated activities organize daily life while also carrying shared understandings of identity, continuity, and belonging.
In a 1992 study involving 77 families with adolescents, Fiese investigated how two generations understood the symbolic and routine dimensions of family practices. A decade later, she and colleagues reviewed 32 publications spanning half a century of research, distinguishing practical activities from rituals experienced as meaningful collective events. Their findings did not establish that traditions automatically make families healthier or happier. Instead, they gave researchers a way to ask a more discriminating question: what changes when something people do together becomes part of how they understand themselves?
The Gesture Nobody Thought to Explain
The screwdriver was the wrong size, and everyone at the table knew it. A loose chair leg had become the latest subject of the family's annual afternoon of repairs, an occasion that had begun decades earlier when replacing something was usually out of the question. Someone had brought a torn jacket, another a lamp that worked only when its cord was held at an angle, and a third person had arrived with no broken object at all. The room had been arranged for work, but most of the afternoon was spent talking through the problems and deciding which ones were worth solving.
The family member who began these afternoons was no longer alive. At first, the others had continued partly out of affection and partly because they did not know what to do with the date on the calendar. By now, some of the younger participants had little memory of the original host. They knew the ritual as an event at which you could ask an unembarrassed question, fail at a modest task, and hear how someone else approached it. They did not know whether the afternoon had originally been meant to teach thrift, self-sufficiency, or simply how to make a crowded household function.
This is an illustrative scene, not a documented family history. Its tension is more important than the broken chair. One participant suggests buying a replacement. Another argues that repairing it is the point of the gathering. Someone notices that the person who always organizes the tools spends most of the day preparing and cleaning up while everyone else enjoys the company. The practice has survived its originator, but there is no single agreement about what exactly deserves to survive. A cherished inheritance can become an occasion for generosity and a source of unreasonable obligation at the same time.
The disagreement reveals a question that nostalgia often conceals. When we repeat an action associated with someone we love, are we preserving an intention, maintaining a relationship, or defending a familiar procedure? Those purposes sometimes reinforce one another, but they are not identical. A practice can remain recognizable even as its purpose becomes unclear. It can also retain the purpose that matters most after nearly every visible detail has changed.
Most people will never know which of their habits others remember. We may imagine legacy as something constructed deliberately through achievements, institutions, possessions, and carefully communicated principles. Yet influence is also transmitted through ordinary ways of spending time, welcoming questions, sharing skills, making decisions, and responding when something goes wrong. These actions are not inherently meaningful simply because they recur. Their significance depends partly on what others experience through them and whether they choose to make that experience part of their own lives.
When Repetition Becomes Meaning
Barbara Fiese's work helps explain why an afternoon of repairs might feel different from a list of chores. A routine coordinates what needs doing; it can be necessary, efficient, and entirely worthwhile without carrying much symbolic importance. A ritual may involve the same practical actions, but participants understand them as expressions of a shared identity or connection. The difference is not the object's age, the frequency of the gathering, or the seriousness with which the participants follow the instructions. It is the meaning they attach to being there and doing it together.
In a 2002 review of 32 publications, Fiese and colleagues distinguished observable family routines from rituals that communicate symbolic meanings. They reported associations between these practices and aspects of family functioning, while also identifying inconsistent measurement, convenience sampling, and uncertainty about direct and indirect effects. The research provides language for recognizing a meaningful difference in how people experience recurring activities. It does not tell us that creating another family tradition will produce stronger relationships, nor does it establish that the longest-lived custom is the best one.
Fiese's 1992 study examined 77 families with adolescents and found that symbolic and routine dimensions of family rituals could be distinguished in family reports. Associations with adolescent identity and belonging varied with how participants understood those practices, including disagreement between mothers and adolescents. The implication is not that children should be required to value their family's traditions. It is that the meaning attributed to a custom by its organizer may differ from the meaning experienced by another participant. Those differences are part of the practice's social reality, not distractions from it.
Consider the repair afternoon from several positions. For an older relative, mending a chair may evoke the ingenuity of someone now absent. For a younger participant, the useful part may be discovering that an adult will patiently explain a mistake. Someone with limited time or mobility may enjoy the gathering but find the work itself impractical. The person who buys the supplies and clears the table may wonder why the language of family tradition is invoked whenever they ask for help. A custom may be treasured by all of them for different reasons, and its continuation may depend on hearing what those reasons are.
Catherine Bell's cultural account of ritual is useful here as an interpretive perspective rather than an experimental finding. Rituals arise within social and historical settings, where their meanings are expressed and contested through practice. That perspective resists two temptations: treating familiar customs as sacred because they are old, and treating them as disposable because their practical purpose can be achieved another way. A gathering is not valuable solely because the chair is repaired; neither does the repaired chair prove that the gathering has been meaningful.
The distinction can expose a hidden burden. A tradition may preserve belonging for some people through expectations that diminish the freedom of others. One person's pleasure in a carefully prepared meal may rest on another person's unpaid effort. A celebration may communicate continuity to established relatives while making a new member feel that participation requires adopting someone else's history without question. When fidelity to a procedure becomes the measure of loyalty, the custom begins to compete with the human relationships it was meant to express.
The appropriate response is not to insist that all inherited practices be loosened. Some exact details genuinely matter: a familiar song, a phrase spoken in a particular language, or a method learned from someone whose hands are no longer there to demonstrate it. Changing them might diminish an experience that others reasonably value. But we can distinguish those meaningful details from requirements that persist only because they are easier to enforce than to discuss. The question is what the practice gives people, what it asks of them, and whether those terms still make sense.
What We Carry Forward, and What We Change
At the next repair afternoon, suppose the family changes the plan. Anyone can bring an object, but nobody is expected to fix it. Some tasks require a professional; some items should be replaced; others need not be repaired at all. The gathering begins with a shared meal, tools come out only if people want to use them, and the preparations are distributed more fairly. A participant who once stayed away because there was always too much work now comes for the conversation. Another misses the satisfaction of repairing several things and proposes a separate workshop. Neither response is evidence that the family has lost its way.
What has changed is the family's willingness to ask what it received from the practice, rather than treating the practice as a command. Perhaps the original host would have welcomed the new arrangement. Perhaps not. The family cannot resolve that uncertainty by inventing an intention for someone who is absent. It can acknowledge the history honestly while accepting responsibility for the relationships that exist now. Respecting an inheritance does not require pretending that the past can dictate every future use of it.
This is a more demanding understanding of continuity than faithful repetition. The family has to recognize the difference between the tool that carries the memory and the human possibility the tool once created. Was the afternoon principally about avoiding waste, learning competence, enjoying company, or making questions safe to ask? The answer may vary among participants. Their ability to keep talking about it can itself become the strongest feature of the tradition, even when its activities change.
Ordinary inheritance extends beyond families. A teacher may begin each class by inviting students to reconsider an answer rather than defend their first attempt. Years later, former students may carry that habit into unfamiliar work without remembering where they learned it. A colleague may make a practice of explaining the reasoning behind difficult decisions; others may continue doing so after the colleague leaves. We cannot know in advance which of our actions will travel, and persistence alone does not prove that those actions serve others well. The more useful question is whether they expand another person's capacity to act thoughtfully.
This also places a limit on our claims to legacy. We do not have a right to be remembered through other people's routines. Their circumstances will differ from ours, and they may need to discard what once worked. A tradition that survives only by imposing guilt or unequal labor may preserve its outward appearance while losing the value that made it worth keeping. Conversely, a practice can disappear in its original form while helping someone learn an enduring way of approaching other people.
The family's worn tools may eventually be donated, and the annual gathering may become an occasional meal. Someone may still pause over a loose chair and remember the conversation around the worktable; someone else may remember only that questions were welcomed and mistakes did not need to be concealed. Those memories do not preserve an identical scene. They show what different participants found worth carrying into their own lives.
A meaningful legacy is not a procedure others must repeat. It is a possibility they can recognize, reshape, and make useful long after its beginning has been forgotten. We may never choose which small actions remain. We can choose to make our ordinary practices worthy of someone else's freedom to continue them, change them, or let them go.
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Practice: A Small Tradition Worth Keeping
Estimated time: 10 minutes
Some of the most meaningful customs in our lives are so familiar that we rarely examine what they offer. This exercise invites you to consider one small recurring practice and explore the human purpose it may serve, whether or not you know how it began. You will look for a way to preserve that purpose while allowing the practice to adapt to the people who share it today.
Expected outcome: Identify one modest tradition worth continuing, adjusting, or reconsidering because of the meaning it creates for those involved.
Scientific Context & Summary
Everyday routines and symbolic rituals
Fiese, Tomcho, Douglas, Josephs, Poltrock, and Baker (2002) reviewed 32 publications concerning naturally occurring family routines and rituals over approximately 50 years of research. They distinguished instrumental, observable routines from rituals that participants experience as symbolically meaningful collective events. The review reported associations between such practices and dimensions of family functioning, including parenting competence, child adjustment, and marital satisfaction. It also noted that studies used inconsistent measures, often drew on convenience samples, and did not reliably distinguish direct from indirect effects. The findings support careful inquiry into shared practices, not causal claims that a particular ritual produces a particular outcome.
Intergenerational representation and identity
Fiese (1992) studied 77 families that included an adolescent member. Responses to the Family Ritual Questionnaire suggested separable dimensions involving symbolic significance and routine practice, with similarities across two generations. Positive associations appeared between family reports of symbolic meaning and affect and aspects of adolescent identity; disagreement between mothers and adolescents concerning family ritualization was negatively related to adolescents' reported belonging. The sample and correlational design do not justify treating ritual continuity as a universal developmental intervention. They underscore the importance of participants' differing understandings of the same practice.
Cultural practice and the interpretation of continuity
Bell (1997) provides a broader conceptual treatment of ritual in cultural and historical settings. This perspective is useful because the meanings attached to repeated actions differ across communities and can change over time. It should not be treated as an experiment establishing the psychological effects of one family custom. The present essay draws a philosophical inference from this literature: the significance of an inherited practice may depend on how later participants understand, adopt, and adapt it. That proposition is interpretive rather than a directly measured finding in the cited studies.
Limitations and practical implications
The studies discussed here do not prove that inherited rituals are invariably beneficial, that every practice persists because its participants find it meaningful, or that a specific change to a tradition will improve relationships. Continuity may also maintain exclusion, unequal work, or social pressure. The most responsible application is reflective: examine the purpose of a practice, listen to the people affected, and distinguish preservation of meaning from insistence on an unchanged procedure.
The accompanying Practice is an educational reflection exercise, not a validated psychological assessment or intervention for changing family functioning or wellbeing.
Bibliography
American Psychological Association. (2002, December 8). Family routines and rituals may improve family relationships and health [Press release]. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2002/12/rituals
Bell, C. (1997). Ritual: Perspectives and dimensions. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195110517.001.0001
Fiese, B. H. (1992). Dimensions of family rituals across two generations: Relation to adolescent identity. Family Process, 31(2), 151–162. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1992.00151.x
Fiese, B. H., Tomcho, T. J., Douglas, M., Josephs, K., Poltrock, S., & Baker, T. (2002). A review of 50 years of research on naturally occurring family routines and rituals: Cause for celebration? Journal of Family Psychology, 16(4), 381–390. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.16.4.381
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