The Intentional Family
Brief Summary The Intentional Family is a book about strengthening family connections and relationships through everyday rituals, holiday celebrations, special occasions and community involvement. The book serves as a guide to help families transform simple family routines into family rituals. It discusses the importance of being consistent with good family rituals and compromising to change rituals that do not work. Doherty states that family rituals provide four important things, predictability, connections, identity, and a way to enact values. He gives many examples and suggestions on how families can best create rituals from activities they may already be doing. Many families have rituals that they feel “stuck” with. Doherty also offers suggestions on how to recreate those rituals so they are more enjoyable. Family rituals involve more than one family member, but not necessarily all members of the family. Doherty breaks rituals into three categories. Connection rituals involve everyday activities such as family meals, morning and bedtime routines and family outings. Love rituals focus on making individual family members feel special. Love rituals can be divided into couple rituals, such as “date nights” and anniversaries, and special-person rituals like birthdays, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Community rituals include major family events like weddings and funerals. They also include any activity involving a wider social network than just family, giving the family a chance to both gain and give support to friends, neighbors and the community. Doherty recommends families meals as the best way to start developing family rituals. He is very flexible with his suggestions, recognizing that one way will not work for all families. Doherty encourages families to start taking small steps toward creating family rituals at meal time by being more intentional about what time you eat, where family members sit, and how the meal is served. Because