The journey into parenthood used to be imbued with sacred rites of passage, birth ceremonies and ritualistic postpartum practices. These traditions helped parents-to-be feel at ease with the unknown world ahead, bonded them to their community and protected their wellbeing. So why have many of these ancient rituals disappeared within a few generations?
Michael Feigelson, CEO of the Van Leer Foundation, sits down with renowned anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas to explore why ritual is part of who we are as a species and why making early moments of parenthood sacred – from bedtime routines to parental leave – can help reduce stress, find meaning and deepen vital connections to create a sense of belonging.[1]
Xygalatas, D. (2022) Ritual: How seemingly senseless acts make life worth living. London: Profile Books.
Last time we spoke you told me how your son did not want to leave the house until you had your coffee. You used this to make the point that little children observe rituals very closely and don’t like to deviate from them. Can you elaborate on why?
There’s a classic study that compared human children to young chimpanzees.[2] The experimenters showed both groups a box, and performed a sequence of actions on the box – you poke a stick inside it, then you tap on it, and so on – and in the end you open a drawer and get a treat of gummy bears. In one experimental condition, the box is opaque. You can’t see what the actions do, you just assume they’re doing something important. Both the chimps and the kids follow the action sequence and get the gummy bears.
Horner, V. and Whiten, A. (2005) Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Animal Cognition 8(3): 164–81. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-004-0239-6
But in another condition the box is transparent. And this reveals that the first few steps are redundant. They do nothing – you could just go straight to opening the drawer with the gummy bears. The chimps do that, they cut to the chase. But the children follow the whole action sequence, they stick to the ritual. We say that we “ape” someone else when we copy them, but in fact we humans “ape” others more than actual apes do.
Now, why do we do that? It’s because there’s been an evolutionary selection process. If you see other people not eating certain berries, for example, do you copy them and avoid the berries, or find out for yourself if they’re poisonous? Those who ate the berries didn’t survive, those who copied others did. We evolved into a hyper-social species. Most of what we know about the world comes from other people. Today it’s through books and classrooms and the internet; historically it was by imitating other members of a tight-knit community. Rituals both reflect and reinforce these imitative tendencies.
You’ve written that people perform more rituals in times of uncertainty, something that could also explain why young children are so into ritual. But what about new parents? I remember the time around my daughter’s birth and feeling like I had no idea what was coming next. Are new parents a group you see more inclined towards ritual?
This goes back to [Polish anthropologist] Bronisław Malinowski’s famous work a century ago in what is today Papua New Guinea. He realised that the local fishermen had tons of rituals before going out to fish in the open sea, which was dangerous, but no rituals when they were fishing in the lagoon, which was pretty safe. So he proposed that ritual is a way of coping with stress and uncertainty.
My research team was the first to provide hard evidence for what’s going on here. We found that when people engage in cultural rituals, that reduces stress responses in the body – which we have measured in multiple biomarkers like cortisol, electrodermal activity, heart rate variability. The rituals make them feel less stressed. So, it’s no surprise that we see a lot of rituals in contexts of uncertainty, from gambling to sports to war zones. And childbirth, too – it’s easy to forget how dangerous and uncertain it was before contemporary healthcare.
Being a new parent can get so stressful, a condition called postpartum OCD has been documented not just in mothers but also in fathers. A lot of research sees OCD as linked to rituals – and while the condition can be debilitating, OCD rituals can also sometimes be functional. For example, parents might have obsessive thoughts about harming their baby. That can actually be adaptive as it makes you think: what if? So you structure your life to prevent harm to your baby.
That’s interesting and reminds me of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s observation that intrusive thoughts might actually be an adaptive pattern, but how do you distinguish between the helpful kind of ritual and the less helpful kind in the postpartum period?
The problem with OCD in its clinical forms seems to be that you don’t get the feedback that the ritual action has been performed and now you can relax. So instead of soothing your anxiety, you need to perform the ritual again and again, without getting any relief. In helpful rituals, typically you perform the ritual and then you have anxiety reduction, as we documented in our studies.
Can routines we perform as parents – such as bedtime stories – have a beneficial effect even if we don’t think of them as rituals?
In one of our studies, we had people engage in repetitive actions without labelling them as rituals, and they did get the anxiety reduction effect. But we also see that the effect is amplified when you have an extra aspect of belief and meaning.
It’s not always easy, because some things you do routinely as a parent will always be mundane. But if you can “sacralise” a routine like the bedtime story – if you can embed it into a meaning system, from a religious myth to a story about the origins of the universe – then I think it becomes much more effective.
What advice would you give to someone who’s about to have their first child in terms of how to think about the role of ritual?
When we’re young we often don’t see the value of the traditions we grew up in. When I had my son I began to reflect on the childhood memories those traditional rituals created for me, and how it’s important for my son to have those memories. Rituals don’t have to be traditional – we can find new rituals that work for us – but it’s worth reflecting on how traditions have shown their value over time.
What about ritual as a tool to build community – can rituals be invoked to involve more people in a child’s life so there’s more support?
Absolutely. I live in Connecticut, where the culture is individualised – but whenever I visit Greece, where I’m from, I’m struck by a stark contrast. In Greece, many rituals and norms enforce participation in the community, for better or worse. That can create pressure on young couples, for example to have an expensive wedding. But you can also clearly see the benefits that it brings in terms of social connection.
Another example is baptism, which in Greece is a very important right of passage. Asking someone to become a godparent for your children creates a strong bond between your entire family and theirs, who are now considered, for social purposes, just like biological relatives. And there’s an understanding that if something were to happen to the parents, the godparents would take responsibility for raising their godchildren. It shows how sometimes we can play with language to engineer relationships that have no basis in biology, and ritual plays a crucial role in that.
One last question. What advice would you give to a policymaker about using ritual to support parents? Is there a way to integrate ritual into public policy, for example?
I would say: look at what the local traditions are, and try to figure out which seem to be helpful, or could be updated to a more modern version. For example, in Greece there was an old tradition that when a woman gives birth, she’s supposed to stay at home for 40 days. I wouldn’t advocate for this in today’s world, but I can see it might have been useful in a time when women might have been put back to working in the field too quickly after childbirth. By making the 40 days at home into a sacred norm, you protected these women from society.
A modern equivalent might be policies around parental leave. Policy is an amazing tool that we should pursue to the full extent that we can, but often we also need sacred norms to get people to care. Can we make the idea of using your parental leave entitlement sacred? There is a role for governments in thinking about how to promote and engineer this sense of sacralisation.
