How shared family songs build connection: what I learned when my kids sang me their dad’s songs
I was curled up on the couch last month with a throbbing migraine, lights dimmed, heating pad pressed to my neck, after canceling our planned taco takeout because even the thought of the delivery person knocking made my head hurt. My husband had herded the 5- and 7-year-old down the hall to get pajamas on 20 minutes earlier, so I was surprised to hear the soft scuff of socked feet on the hardwood coming toward me. Before I could open my eyes, two small bodies climbed onto the couch, one at my feet and one curled next to my shoulder, no bouncing, no yelling—they knew to be quiet.
Then they started singing. It was the silly made-up rubber duck song my husband sings every single bath time, the one with the verse about ducks sneaking out of the tub to steal socks from the laundry hamper. I’d heard snippets of it through the bathroom door a hundred times, but I’d never heard the whole thing all the way through. When they finished the first song, they paused, then started into the second: his off-key version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, where he changed all the references to dogs, after our old rescue ran away two years ago. By the middle of the second verse, I was crying.
It wasn’t the migraine pain. It was just this sudden, unexpected thing that caught me off guard. For three months, I’d been working a new four-day work schedule, full days Tuesday through Friday, so Matt (my husband) handles after-school snacks, homework, and bedtime the whole second half of every week. I’m usually home by 8, just in time for a quick goodnight kiss, but I’ve missed almost all of the daily routine those days. I’d had a lot of quiet, silly, tired little moments of insecurity lately: I’m the one who remembers the gluten-free snack requirements for school, who schedules the dentist appointments, who sits through the homework meltdowns on Mondays and Wednesdays, but I don’t have any of those little, exclusive rituals they have with Matt. I don’t know the secret handshake they made up on a camping trip, I can’t do the paper airplane fold he taught them, I don’t have their special songs. I’d started to think I was missing the soft, small stuff that sticks in kids’ memories forever.
Then they finished singing, and my 7-year-old patted my arm and said, “Dad sings this when his head hurts, so we thought it would help yours.” That’s when the crying got a little heavier, and for a second they looked worried, like they’d done something wrong. By then Matt had come back from taking the trash out, and he leaned in the doorway confused, laughing a little when we explained. We ended up ordering popsicles from the corner store, ate them right there on the couch in the dim light, my migraine finally starting to fade.
I talked about it with my sister, who’s a third-grade teacher, that weekend, and she said she sees this all the time. Kids don’t tuck special rituals away just for the person who made them. They carry them around, and pull them out when someone needs them. It’s how they practice caring for other people, she said—they take something that made them feel safe, and give it to someone else who needs safety right then. I’d never thought of it that way before. I’d always bought into the idea that special parent-kid connection has to be exclusive, that every good memory has to be just between me and them, that if someone else started the ritual, it doesn’t count for me. That’s a thought I hear a lot from other parents, too—working parents worrying they’re missing out, stepparents worrying they’ll never replace the rituals the other parent has, even foster parents worrying they can’t live up to what the kid already knows.
The practical part of this is way simpler than I thought it would be, though. You don’t have to create new exclusive rituals to build connection, even if you’re not the one doing the daily routine most days. The first thing I started doing is, instead of asking “what did you do today” after work (which always gets me a one-word “nothing” answer), I ask them to teach me one thing Dad did with them this week. Last week it was the paper airplane fold, the week before that it was the full rubber duck song, and we spent 20 minutes on the floor learning it, no prep, no extra money, just me following their lead. For teachers, my sister does this too: when a kid mentions a special calm-down trick from home, she asks them to teach it to the whole class. Her current go-to transition trick is a silly wiggle song one of her students taught her from his dad’s morning car ride routine, and it works better than any store-bought calm-down video she’s ever tried.
The other thing I stopped doing is trying to be better than the existing ritual, or change it to make it mine. I mess up the words to the doggy rainbow song every time, but the kids don’t care. They just correct me and keep singing. If they ask for the song when I’m putting them to bed, I don’t switch it to my lullaby to claim it as mine. I just let them lead.
Last week I went out of town for a two-day work conference, and when I walked in the door when I got back, the kids ran to me and started singing the rubber duck song before they even hugged me. Matt was leaning against the hall grinning, and said they’d practiced it all afternoon waiting for me. I still have days where I worry I’m missing too much, where the insecurity creeps back in about my work schedule taking me away from the small stuff. But now I know the small stuff doesn’t stick to just one person. It gets passed around, shared, and remade, and you don’t have to be the one who started it to get to keep it. Some nights we sing my lullabies, some nights we sing his, most nights we mix up the words and add new verses about our cat. It’s still messy, I still forget half the words, but it’s ours now, too.
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