In family, it’s hugely important that you are doing all you can to feel like a real family unit. If you can do that, it’s the kind of thing that is always going to lead to a much better place, and you will find that you are so much more likely to enjoy being in your family and to feel happier together. To that end, it’s a good idea to do all you can to make your family feel closer, and as it happens there are quite a few ways in which you should be able to do just that.

Regardless of where you are right now with your own family, there are a lot of things you can do which will help you to make your family feel a lot closer. These are all going to be hugely important and you should ensure that you are at least focusing on a few of them. Let’s see what they might involve.

Create Some Small Daily Rituals

In order to feel more like a family unit, you don’t need to go on a weekly family retreat. You can start small, and often you can achieve a lot just through cultivating the small. Having a consistent family dinner, a nightly check-in, or even a group text thread can lay the groundwork for stronger bonds, and you will find that this kind of ritual helps to create a sense of predictability as well as furthered connection – without requiring any of you to commit huge amounts of time.

Anything you can do in this vain is going to be effective, whether you make weekend pancakes or have a pizza night once a week. It’s hugely important that you are doing these small things – they often end up being more important than the big things.

Be Really Present

Being in the same room as someone is not necessarily the same thing as being present with them. If you want to feel like a closer family unit, you’ll need to practice being actually present with one another. That means putting down your phone, turning the TV off, and really listening when someone wants to talk – remembering that listening also means maintaining a lot of eye contact. People feel closer together when they feel heard and respected in this present kind of way.

If you want to really improve this even more, you can use some open-ended questions, instead of just asking how their day was. This is going to help build connection considerably, and you’ll find it really helps a lot with feeling closer together.

Limit Screen Time

Many of us are trying to do this at the moment, and with good reason. You can’t really feel that you are in the same space as someone in a genuine way if you are all just looking at screens – even if you are sharing an experience by looking at the same screen. So with that in mind, you’ll need to make sure that you are doing all you can to limit the screen time when you are at home together. This is a simple thing that really does build connections in quite a powerful way, so it’s something that you should really think about for sure.

Of course, you might find this harder than you expect to – partly because of the addictive nature of a lot of these devices. But with patience and self-love, you should be able to curtail such an addiction, and so should your family members, resulting ultimately in a much more present place for all of you.

Learn More About The Family History

Having a good sense of where you have come from can help to bring you all together. If you are not currently too clued up on your family history, you’ll find that learning more about it could be one of the main things you can do to ensure you are going to really feel like a unit. As it happens, there are a few ways that you can approach this and actually get to know quite a bit more about the history of your family.

You might, for instance, want to look into putting together a family tree through genealogy records and the like. This can help you to see literally where you came from, and you might be surprised how far back you can actually go with these records these days. Beyond that, you might want to speak to surviving older members of the family about what they remember. All of this will help to bring the family closer together, and it’s amazing how powerful a glue this can really be.

Work Through Conflict

If you can find a mature way to work through conflict as a group, that is going to lead to a much better way of being with each other – compared to simply bickering or not getting anything resolved. If you don’t resolve something, it will come back at some point to rear its head – even if it’s years later. So you should make sure that you are aware of this, that you accept that families argue and you just need to find a way to deal with it. Working through the conflict together as a mature unit is what matters.

If you are not used to this, you might find that you need to effectively teach each other how to do it. It can take time to figure out what you are going to need to do here, and it’s the kind of thing that is always going to be important to consider. So make sure that you are working on how you can work through conflict as a group, and that should help a lot.

Those are just some of the things that you should think about if you want to make your family feel closer. And you will find that having a closer family can help you to feel so much better about your life.