When All Things Are Relative

Put away those favorite toys. Get out those sleeping bags. Stock up on junk food and videos.

The cousins are coming and that spells excitement. It probably also spells fighting, as all around America families host and visit siblings, siblings-in-law and their children for the holidays. The noise level will be deafening, but hopefully everyone will be having too good a time to notice. These visits offer a first-rate opportunity for cousins who live far apart to get to know one another, to continue long-held family traditions and to start new ones.

“My cousin and I would excuse ourselves from the table and sneak back underneath on our knees. Then we’d tie everyone’s shoelaces together,” said 11-year-old Rosa Crowe-Allison, who lives in Connecticut and spends Thanksgiving at her grandmother’s house in Springfield, Mass. Now that Rosa and her teen-age cousin think they’re too old for such antics, they are teaching their trick to the younger kids. “I’m sure it will keep on going,” Rosa said.

Her advice for kids forced into family togetherness: Find out what you’ve got in common with your relatives, such as playing a sport or an instrument. That will give everyone something to talk about.

Her mother, Caltha Crowe, thinks it’s an even better idea to get the kids moving, preferably outside. “Bring plenty of play clothes,” said Crowe, an elementary schoolteacher who understands all too well the correlation between exercise and children’s moods. Projects the kids can do together are a good bet. Coaxing them into providing after-dinner entertainment could be fun for them. (Any budding musicians in the group?) Or take out some old photo albums so the children can laugh at how people--namely their parents and aunts and uncles--looked when they were young. Let the older children take the video camera and interview relatives about past family holidays. Encourage the kids to help in the kitchen.

“Even young kids like to feel they’re contributing something,” said Margot Hammond, director of the Family Center at New York’s Bank Street College of Education.

Perhaps more importantly, a few planned activities can spell the difference between chaos and a good time. My cousin gets everyone out raking leaves. Another friend stages a soccer match.

As the adults linger over the dinner table, the kids will be in the playroom or out in the back yard, getting an intensive dose of their cousins. They may be seeing each other for the first time in a year. In some families, they may be meeting for the first time ever.

Not only might they come from different towns and be different ages; they may be different religions or even different races, said Alan Kazdin, a Yale University psychology professor. Certainly their parents will have far different notions of the most appropriate ways to discipline them. His advice: Relax and suspend some of the rules.

A little preparation can help, said Dr. Norman Sherry, a spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Show the kids some pictures of their cousins before they see them, he said. Tell them stories about when their cousins’ parents and you were their age. Talk about how much fun everyone will have.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, of course, the kids will fight. “You just have to deal with it,” said Maya Boreen, who has weathered many such holiday evenings with her extended family in Florida. If a situation gets out of hand, you can always separate the troublemakers from the rest of the group. You can leave for a while too.

But the kids will also spend hours together, happily playing. All the while, they’ll be forging new connections with the family and maybe even getting a glimpse into the family’s mysterious grown-up world, learning some family history in the process.

Just ask Rosa Crowe-Allison. The adults in her family, she’s discovered at family dinners, actually have some interesting things to say.

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Taking the Kids appears weekly.