An example of a ritual might be a family dinner or family vacation. When families don't nurture their rituals, and change them when they get stale, their rituals decline into routines. In your writings about the American family in modern society, you contrast the intentional family one that creates and maintains a sense of connection, meaning, and community with the entropic family one that loses a sense of cohesion over the years through lack of conscious attention to its inner life and community ties. Rituals are crucial for busy modern family members to connect with one another. Without regular times to be together as a family, interacting with conversation, play, or other activities, families drift apart.
Families float south on the river unless they paddle.
It's easy to see the importance of these things for young children. Adolescents need strong family bonds, as lots of research has shown, and family rituals are an important source of family bonding. In fact, with their schedules, family ritual time is even more important because otherwise they would be living parallel lives to the rest of the family. In two parent families, it's got to be both parent-child rituals and couple rituals. If you lose your marriage over time, that is not going to help your children.