Family values . . . now that's a term we've certainly heard a lot about lately.

In the midst of all the rhetoric, have you ever wondered how values become established and communicated within the family?

Values communicated over time

One of the key ingredients to establishing values within a family is time ... time spent simply being together and experiencing life together.

If this is true, here's an interesting and frightening statistic: The average American family spends only l4l/2 minutes together each day. To make matters worse, 12i/£ of those minutes are spent correcting, disciplining, etc. This leaves a bare 2 minutes for communicating values in our families.

Remember, this is only an average. Perhaps you spend more — or less — time together.

The point is simply this: Time together is the key ingredient in communicating what is important and what is not.

Rituals and traditions strengthen the family

One of the simplest and most enjoyable ways to communicate what's important is through family traditions or rituals.

A family tradition or ritual is simply something that a family does together, with some kind of regularity, that provides each member with a sense of belonging to the family.

I'm not talking about being in a rut and never changing. A wise person once said that the only difference between a rut and a grave is the dimensions.

When I was growing up, we had a Friday-night ritual. I call it my "Friday-night dinner out and paper towel story."

Every Friday night, my family would have dinner out. I was about 8 or 9 when I heard a friend's parents talking about going out to dinner on a Tuesday night. I remember being surprised to learn that restaurants were open any night besides Friday!

Friday night after Friday night, we would go to the same restaurant. And then we would change restaurants and go to that same restaurant Friday night after Friday night.

I'm not really sure how we decided to change restaurants. The places probably closed down.

After dinner we would take my mom to the grocery store to do the shopping for the week. On the way, we would stop at whatever store that my father had identified as having the best sale on paper towels. Back then they were typically four for a dollar.

Once we got there the following ritual would take place: My dad would give each of us (my mom, my sister and me) a dollar. We would each go get four paper-towel rolls and head to separate registers (so they wouldn't know we were together). Then we would meet back at the car with our 16 paper-towel rolls.

This is an example of a family ritual that became a rut.

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