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create a calm, steady zone inside a hectic life, kids are able to share all sorts of unexpected things. As they mature, they bring new things to the table—both literally and figuratively.

    Mealtimes
    Let’s start with the ritual of daily meals. In some cultures, the simple ceremony of sharing a meal with someone makes you part of the tribe, and it’s impossible to overstate the importance of regular meals together as a family.
    Obviously, conflicting work and school schedules can make this difficult, but do whatever you can to sit down and eat together as often as possible—even if that means that your “together meal” is a snack before bedtime.
    To be effective as ritual, family meals need to focus on quality as well as quantity. Michael Lewis, a psychologist who has spent years researching American family dinners, discovered most families spend between fifteen and twenty minutes at the table, and a good amount of that time is spent nagging and whining. When people don’t have a mouth too full of food to speak, many of the comments run along the lines of: “Please pass the butter,” and “Stop kicking your sister under the table.”
    So, getting everyone to sit around the table together is just the first step. As I said in the previous section on the parts of a ritual, it helps set the mood if you do something to signal the start of a ritual and the transition from ordinary time.
    There is a good reason the stretch of time before dinner in households with children is known as “arsenic hour”: Early evening is the time when tired, hungry kids (and often grown-ups) can become button-pushing cranky. Even if sibling battles aren’t escalating at this time, every family member has his or her head somewhere else entirely: on the easy hit missed at baseball practice, the train wreck of a meeting at work, the daunting homework ahead, or that text message that just has to be sent to a BFF (best friends forever) right this second, or the world will come to an end.
    Creating a dinner-is-starting signal is a great way to get everyone to change gears and refocus on the home team. This can be something incredibly simple such as ringing a bell or chime, turning the lights down, lighting a candle, putting on the local jazz radio station. You can say grace, hold hands, or say a one-sentence phrase in unison (even better if it’s a silly nonsense phrase that only means something to your brood).
    Once the actual ritual of the meal begins, you’ll want some strategies to liven up the event, get the conversational juice flowing, and make sure the meal doesn’t devolve into a nag-fest on table manners. But first, some helpful ideas about getting started, for families that begin the meal with a blessing of some sort.

    Grace
    Even for families that aren’t religious, saying grace before a meal can be a wonderful ritual of transition. It functions like a call to reconnection after a day of separation.
    Simple and Good
    Some of the most profound graces are the simplest, such as the lovely Quaker grace “Us and this: God bless.” I also like: “Now my plate is full, but soon it will be gone. Thank you for my food, and please help those with none.”
    Simplest of All: A Collective Pause
    Amanda Soule, a mother of five who homeschools in Maine and writes the hugely popular SouleMama blog, says her family’s mealtime blessing is extremely important. “Once everyone gets to the table, we just pause and hold hands and take a breath together. It’s a really simple tiny thing that feels huge. This pause before the chaos resumes makes us all fully present and aware in the moment we are sharing together.”
    Sing for Your Supper
    The Hodge family sings together often, including for grace. A favorite is the Johnny Appleseed song that goes: “The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord / For giving me the things I need / like the sun and the rain and the appleseed / The Lord is good to me. Amen.”
    Holding Hands
    The Michaels of