I first learned about the American Family Strengths Inventory (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008) when I was in Dr. Walker’s Building Family Strengths class almost two years ago. I was so interested in the six characteristics of strong families and the qualities listed within each of the characteristics! I learned that all families have at least some of the qualities identified within each characteristic, and as I started thinking about each of the characteristics in more depth, I realized I wanted to help emerging adults enhance these characteristics within their families.

I’ve uploaded the Inventory in the Building Family Strengths section of this blog. I wanted to focus the family rituals I recommended in my blog on the six characteristics from the Inventory because they help identify specific qualities present in strong healthy families and give families who want to become stronger something to strive for. The six characteristics include enjoyable time together, appreciation and affection, effective communication, commitment, spiritual well-being, and effective management of stress and crisis (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008). These six strengths of the family are the elements most useful for helping families achieve their hopes for the future. I think this inventory of family strengths serves as a useful framework for enhancing the parent-child relationship during emerging adulthood. Most of today’s post is devoted to each of the six characteristics that I’ll be addressing in the next few weeks of my blog.

 Enjoyable time together. Spending and enjoying time together is important for family members in feeling a part of each other's lives. Being together and doing fun activities help families deal with everyday stressors. A strong family finds opportunities for family members to do things together (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008). They spend enough time together to satisfy all family members. Rituals have the potential to enhance enjoyable time by providing specific opportunities for a family to spend time together. Rituals like annual camping trips give family members something to look forward to. Emerging adults and their families could benefit from guidance on how to adapt or maintain these rituals to enhance enjoyable time together. For example, a family dinner every night may no longer be possible during emerging adulthood. However, emerging adults living at home could initiate a weekly or monthly family dinner with their parents, making time to cook together or even going out to eat. For those living away from home, dinner could be shared via Skype or FaceTime. 

  Appreciation and affection. Family members in strong families help each other and feel close to each other. They find ways of showing love and appreciation (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008). They notice the talents, skills, special qualities, and characteristics that make each family member unique. Rituals provide opportunities for family members to express their appreciation to one another and to help family members feel good about each other and, in turn, have positive feelings toward those providing the praise. Family meetings initiated by emerging adults may be helpful for discussing the multiple ways family members express appreciation for each other. These meetings can also be used to learn what makes each person feel appreciated. The families of emerging adults are strengthened each time a family member feels appreciated and needed. 

  Effective communication. Effective communication takes time and requires talking and listening to one another. A strong family likes talking openly about feelings and experiences. They share their hopes and dreams, and they take the time to listen and respond to what others have to say (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008). Rituals have the potential to enhance effective communication by providing private space for family members to have conversations. Rituals, such as weekly father-daughter talks, give family members a chance to communicate with each other. “Love and friendship occur among family members when they invest time talking with each other, and when they make each other feel safe and valued as they express feelings” (DeFrain, 2006, p. 60). Emerging adults and their families benefit from developing effective communication. Those who do can discuss their differences openly and listen to other points of view. For example, the emerging adult could ask family members to answer the same question each week (e.g., if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? What kind of person would you like to be?) and share their answers on Twitter or Facebook. Emerging adults may want to follow up by suggesting a time to share their thoughts and talk about their family members’ answers in person or via Skype. To facilitate effective communication according to DeFrain and Stinnett (2008), emerging adults may need to give their family members certain “rules” such as not using putdowns and minimizing sarcasm.  

  Commitment. Everyone in the family respects the individual roles each member plays in a strong family. Strong families give each family member the freedom to make decisions and to accept each family member has a different way of doing things (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008). Commitment can be fostered when family members are encouraged to treat each other with respect and to spend meaningful time together. Rituals can help each person be viewed as an important part of the family and to show how family members are there for each other (DeFrain, 2006). Emerging adults show commitment to other family members by attending important events or holidays or special accomplishments by family members.

  Spiritual well-being. Spirituality is a powerful source of strength for strong families (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008). Strong families share their spiritual values and beliefs with each other. They agree about what is right and wrong and what is really important to them. These shared values give families a strong connection with each other. Rituals also may be beneficial for the families of emerging adults to openly acknowledge that they have different beliefs and agree to respect those differences. Family ties are made stronger through acceptance and tolerance. Rituals that encourage family members as a group or individually to think about spiritual beliefs could encourage family members to share their ideas about God. Emerging adults and their families could benefit from maintaining these rituals to enhance spiritual well-being.

Effective management of stress and crisis. As time goes by, families face certain challenges. Family members pass away. Parents lose jobs or retire. Families move to different states. Strong families are able to cope with everyday and unexpected stressors. Families provide support and stick closer together when they face stressful situations (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008). Rituals enhance the effective management of stress and crisis by helping families members cope with suffering and encouraging families to look for the positives as they face challenging situations. Emerging adults and family members who make the effort to support each other during times of crisis will grow closer as they respond to the stress together.

Some of you may see the word “ritual” and think of religious ceremonies (e.g., a Catholic Mass) or significant rites of passage (e.g., high school graduation). These are rituals, of course, but the focus of my blog is on the importance of rituals within families. According to Wolin and Bennett (1984), a family ritual can be defined as a repetitive patterned interaction practiced by families in various settings. Wolin and Bennett identified three types of family rituals: celebrations, traditions, and patterned family interactions. For example, family members may get together to celebrate a special event like a graduation or a wedding. Family traditions may include taking vacations to specific destinations, watching family videos together each week, singing the “Happy Birthday” song at every birthday, or having monthly father-daughter dinners. Establishing consistent rituals associated with dinner or bedtime is an example of patterned family interactions. 

In my family, my father and I engage in a special family ritual once a month. We have what we call a father-daughter day! We spend a whole day, just hanging out and talking. We share what we learned over the last month, what we think of our other family members, what specific things made us happy or mad and how those things impacted us. It’s really a time for us to open up to each other and to listen. This monthly talk gives us a chance to better understand each other. Also, we learn to respect each other’s point of view.

Family rituals serve various functions. One such function is that rituals maintain meaningful interaction and contact among those who participate in them (Fiese et al., 2002). Meanings of rituals are shared and well known by individuals bonded together in the family’s unique microculture. Family rituals also are a symbolic form of communication, expressing family identity and defining the boundaries of the family unit (Wolin & Bennett, 1984), such as a shared understanding of expected behavior. 

I chose to emphasize family rituals in my master’s project as a way to build family strengths specifically in the families of emerging adults. My own experience has taught me that participating in special family rituals can evoke various positive feelings, bring family members closer together, and improve the overall emotional health of the family, even in emerging adulthood. This project, my blog, is a chance for me to share specific family rituals intended to help other emerging adults build their families’ strengths. Next week in my blog, I will share a family ritual that improves enjoyable time together, one of the six characteristics of strong families (DeFrain & Stinnett, 2008). I can’t wait to hear more about your experiences with family rituals!

“Emerging adulthood” is a term coined by Arnett (2000) to identify the time between the ages of 18 and 25 years. I first heard this term in Dr. Kelly Cichy’s Lifespan Development class at Kent State University where I am working on my master’s degree in Human Development and Family Studies. According to Arnett, this is a distinct stage of young people’s development in the industrialized world. In the past, these young adults were quick to leave home for marriage or work, ushering them directly into the roles of adulthood. However, adults in this age group now tend to leave home later and often return to the parental house when their relationships do not work out well or when they cannot afford to live independently. 

The proportion of young adults living in their parents’ home has increased. Family related transitions to adulthood have fluctuated and transformed over time, especially with respect to leaving the parental home. In 1960, 77 % of women and 65 % of men had completed school, left home, become financially independent, married and had a child by the time they reached 30 (Henig, 2010). However, in 2012 only 50% of the women and 30% of the men had done so (United States Census Bureau, 2012). According to Arnett, individuals in emerging adulthood no longer take on the whole responsibility of independent living; by delaying some of the traditional accomplishments of adulthood, they give themselves (with help from their parents) the freedom to examine their life possibilities.

After learning about some of the characteristics of emerging adulthood, I began observing them in my American and Chinese peers. Some of my friends changed their jobs frequently. They told me “It’s so hard to stay in one job!” They don’t want to spend their whole lives doing only one thing. They want to try different jobs. Some friends went back to school to get a higher education, thinking the advanced degree might help them find better jobs and extend their social networks. Some friends still live with their parents or move out and back again several times, because they think they are not independent enough to handle their lives. They still need support from their parents, financially and emotionally. Some friends even question themselves. “Who am I? What should I really believe?” They are trying to understand their own personal beliefs and values.

Most young people in emerging adulthood feel like neither adolescents nor adults, but somewhere in between. Arnett (1998) found that when asked whether they feel they have reached adulthood, most people in the 18 to 25 age range responded neither “yes” nor “no” but “in some ways yes, in some ways no”. And some of us would like to think we will never grow up! But financial and residential dependence in emerging adulthood creates challenges in the parent-child relationship. Parents may need to modify their parenting practices, but emerging adults also have a role to play in encouraging positive family relationships. To help manage this progression to adulthood, emerging adults themselves should actively promote and strengthen their family ties. Personally, at age 25, when I quit my job to return to school 7000 miles away, I knew I had to work harder to maintain the gains we made when we cooked dumplings together every Friday. So I continued having family dinner with my parents long distance using Skype. Even now, I continue this family ritual because I know it helps make my family relationships stronger.

What about you? What have you noticed about the relationship you have with your parents as an emerging adult? Share your thoughts in the comments!

      Just a short post today as I begin to organize my research about emerging adults, family rituals, and family strengths for the blog. As you read my posts, you will see I am trying to cite my sources when explaining the research I have found. I am using the guidelines from the American Psychological Association so you will see parenthetical citations that include the researchers’ last names. The full references are included in the part of my blog that lists additional resources for you to review. Tomorrow, I’ll be back with a longer post about what I’ve learned from the research about emerging adulthood!

The first week of my blog will be spent introducing you to my project. Yesterday, I introduced myself, and today I want to explain why I am starting this blog. My purpose in writing this blog is to empower emerging adults to positively enhance their relationships with their parents during the transition to adulthood. Based on my reading of the research and my own experiences, I think family rituals can help with this transition. Family rituals are special events or activities families repeat over and over again. They have the potential to strengthen family relationships and may be especially significant to emerging adults and their families because rituals that used to be important to the family when the emerging adult was a child may no longer hold any meaning for family members. You probably no longer cuddle with your mom to read a story before bed or enjoy family game nights or do whatever rituals you did when you were little! 

But I think emerging adults could benefit from helping their families identify and evaluate current rituals, modify old rituals or add new rituals to meet their changing needs. Family rituals give family members stability and a feeling of belonging that may be lacking in families during emerging adulthood. I want to encourage emerging adults to initiate family rituals within their families in order to enhance family strengths, specifically within the parent-child relationship. In the next few weeks, I will ask readers to initiate family rituals with their families and to provide feedback about their experiences. I will recommend a new family ritual with some possible alternatives each week, focusing on building one of the six characteristics of strong families as described by DeFrain and Stinnett (2007). 

Welcome to my blog! My name is Ying Zhu, and I was born and raised in China. I am a third year graduate student at Kent State University. Between the ages of 22 and 28, I moved five times and lived in four different cities. At age 25, I quit my job and went back to school to continue my education, moving to an entirely new country to learn a new language, a new culture and more about my new major in Human Development and Family Studies. Although not everyone moves 7000 miles, my experience during this age period is not especially unusual. 

In the spring of 2010, I heard the term “emerging adult” for the first time in my life. It was in my Lifespan Development class, and I realized I was an emerging adult myself. I felt like I was finding the answers to my life’s questions. I was so excited to learn the words that could help explain my behaviors as well as my some of the confusion I felt during that time in my life.  

When I started thinking about my master’s project, I thought about my own experiences as an emerging adult and some of the questions my emerging adults friends were asking me. Why has my life become so complicated? Why do I feel so lonely? Why can’t my parents understand me? I knew I wanted to reach out to other emerging adults, and I thought I might be able to do that with a blog. Even if I couldn’t answer all their questions, I wanted to try to help other emerging adults think differently about their families.

And I already had experience blogging! I kept a blog as an undergraduate to share experiences and feelings regarding relationships. I also blogged as a teacher to share activities and photos from my classroom with my students’ parents. Blogging has been a great way to figure out what I want to do with myself; for me writing is a path to self-discovery. I write about what interests me, and my blogs reflect my personality.

I started doing weekly family dinners when I was in China because my parents were super busy, especially my stepmother. She worked at least 55 hours a week, and my father is not a good cook! At that time, I did not know about the research demonstrating how family relationships can be improved by sitting down to dinner. I started regular family dinner because I wanted us to be a family, not just three people living under the same roof. I felt sad I did not have too many memories about our family time together. I decided to do something about it. Dinnertime seemed like the perfect solution because everyone has to eat!

I started our family dinner ritual with my parents by establishing “make your own dumpling” Friday. We had a lot of fun by experiencing the whole process of making dumplings (a traditional Chinese food). We were a great team. I was surprised that my father was so good at making dumplings. Dinner became a gift -- a way for my family members to spend happy time together. We still continued our family dinner ritual by using Skype once I left China. Even though there is a 12-hour difference, I have dinner with them while they have breakfast. We still enjoy the time together!

This blog is a way for me to help other emerging adults and their families experience the same feelings I experienced—the wonderful family time, the happiness in family life, the enjoyable time together. As an emerging adult, I want to take more responsibility in caring for all of my family members, making them smile and happy. I can’t believe how important they are and what a great family I have. I am grateful!

 I hope you will enjoy this journey, as you work on enhancing your own parent-child relationships and building family strengths. Please try some of the family rituals I will be recommending in my blog with your own families. Share your thoughts in the comments about your experiences with family rituals. I’d love to know what worked for you and didn’t work for you and how family rituals have strengthened your family relationships. Also, be sure to look at the resources I post in the “Additional Resources” to see if you can learn more that might be helpful to you and your family. And, of course, please pass on the link to this blog to your friends. I look forward to building a community of emerging adults who want to experience happy family times with their parents even as grown ups!

Welcome

Welcome to my blog:)

This is my family picture.