Powerful Connections: Celebrate Visit Your Relatives Day May 18

How To Stay Connected To Family And Friends

I find it very hard and often stressful to stay connected to family and friends. Our lives are busy. Sometimes our visits with family are relegated to Christmas and maybe a few other major holidays throughout the year. Setting up time to connect with friends seems like a major exercise in the calendar shuffle.

It is not that I don’t want to visit with them, it’s just that there never seems to be enough time to do it all.

Visiting Family Can Create Memories To Uphold You Through The Tough Times

I loved visiting my grandma, especially when we would just sit and play cards for a while. I can still remember the family reunions at the local community center with everyone sitting out on the grass, playing baseball and eating all that amazing food that was set out on the picnic tables, or our Christmases where Santa would come to surprise everyone with a gift or two. Those are just some of the reasons why it’s good to stay connected to family and friends

Today is Visit Your Relatives Day! It is also my wedding anniversary…a special time that brings back lots of memories of our connections to our family and friends.

Visit Your Relatives Day

Visit Your Relatives Day is intended to give us the opportunity to get closer to our relatives, stay connected to family and friends, and to strengthen family ties and relationships, or at least it is a good day to look at the months coming up and start to plan how you are going to ensure that you keep that special connection strong.

Families can provide the support system needed to get us through the hardest of times and they are there to celebrate and create memories during important life milestones.

Research suggests that visiting or even just viewing photos of family members prompts brain activity that can positively affect how you feel about them and even yourself. Beverly Beuermann-King Click to tweet

Difference Between Seeing Strangers vs. Seeing Your Friends

The study was the first to compare brain activity associated with seeing relatives with that linked to seeing friends and strangers. It suggests our feelings about biological relatives are at least somewhat primal. The findings may help explain everything from why our family can get on our nerves to why people who look like us can spark immediate feelings of trust.

Beverly’s Hot Tips To Building Resiliency Through Connecting With Your Relatives:

Stay connected to family and friends that you don’t get to see that often
Send them a Hallmark card (or a free e-card), if it has been a while since you have seen them
Call them and take a few minutes to catch up and let them know that you are thinking of them
Host a family reunion! The older generations of your family will be so proud of you for bringing everyone together. There are a lot of great reunion sites out there to help in ensuring a successful family gathering. However, keep generational differences in mind. Older relatives may prefer to have dinner earlier. Relatives with young children may want to get up and out early. The more you consider meals, quiet time and entertainment before hand, the more pleasant the day will be for everyone.

Some interesting facts:

34% of U.S. adults have traveled to at least one family reunion in the past three years.
More than half of reunions are held in someone’s home (52%).
Family reunions occur at least once a year for half of family reunion travelers.
Most (91%) trips with children are for leisure, nearly half of which are taken to visit friends or relatives.
The average number of reunion attendees is 79 guests.
More Canadians travel for the purpose of visiting family than for any other reason (Statistics Canada).