What's Your Family Culture?

How to play the parenting long game with Gabrielle and Ben Blair

Even though I’m currently in the thick of raising small kids I think a lot about what I want our future as a family to look like. I think about the not-so-far years of having three kids who can dress themselves, feed themselves, wipe their own butts and maybe keep themselves occupied in a car or on a plane for longer than an hour.

I think about what it will be like to have three teenagers and I recoil in fear, but also vibrate with excitement about getting to know these three creatures as sentient humans in the world.

And then, real late at night when I can’t sleep, I wonder what it will be like to build a relationship with my adult children.

All of these futures are hazy and uncertain and I don’t know how much I can do right now to even have the smallest of impacts on them, but they still crawl around in my brain.

My recent Under the Influence conversation with Gabrielle and Ben Blair gave me some useful inspiration for the ways I can shape our family’s future right now by truly thinking about our family culture.

Let me start off by telling you that the Blair’s new book The Kids Are All Right has become my new favorite parenting advice book.

There’s no shortage of parenting advice out there. Eight years ago when I started doing this breeding thing I took it all in by osmosis, the good, the bad, the completely fucking ridiculous. I let it all into my terrified brain where it curdled into an advice stew.

And because a lot of it came from the Internet, some of it was good, but most of it was not.

These days I lean towards insights from those who have truly been in the trenches. I want to hear from people like Gabrielle and Ben, who’ve tested parenting strategies a thousand times over their 28 year parenting journey of moving six kids around the world. (You probably know Gabrielle from her blog and accounts

Design Mom

and from her book, Ejaculate Responsibly.

One of the gems from my conversation with Gabrielle and Ben is this idea of building a family culture.

What does it mean? It’s about fostering shared memories, traditions, and values that glue the family unit together, and ultimately, shape children into adults you’ll truly enjoy spending time with (and vice versa).

“It doesn’t make sense to imagine that in the future things will be drastically different when everyone is an adult,” Ben told me. “Think about the things you want to do together when your kids are older and start paving those paths now. So if you think you want to go on adventurous hikes in the future then maybe start little hikes now or even walks around the neighborhood.”

Both Blairs call for a "long view" of parenting, nurturing bonds today that’ll flourish into strong, fulfilling relationships tomorrow.

Your family culture doesn't emerge overnight. It's built through shared experiences over time. Whether it's family game nights, hiking trips, or weekend movie marathons, it's these moments that nurture a sense of belonging and joy and shared memories that we can build on for a shared future.

So this got me to thinking…..what is our family culture? What do Nick and I want to define our family? Here are a few of the things I came up with.