You know how the saying goes: you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family!
National Visit Your Relatives Day is a great chance for you to share your life with those who helped raise you, and to ensure that they’re getting the support they need.
How to Celebrate National Visit Your Relatives Day
Stop By
National Visit Your Relatives Day is as simple as it sounds – go ahead and visit your relatives. If you are lucky enough to live close to your family, then there really is no excuse not to make it happen.
We can often get wrapped up in our own lives and not take the time to do the important things that really benefit ourselves and our families. Some families don’t live near each other with parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins are spread across the country or even the world.
Take a Road Trip
Though it will take a bit more planning, you can incorporate a trip to see relatives with your own road trip or family holiday. Not only will you get to see your family, but you’ll be exploring the world too, making new memories along the way.
Plan a Family Reunion
If your family is separated by a great distance, why not agree to meet up in a different place each year? One person or family could agree to host or you could all agree on a destination and turn it into a fun trip.
Why Celebrate National Visit Your Relatives Day
Luckily, many of us carry fond memories of our family through childhood and growing up. There are family vacations, playing with your siblings and probably fighting with them too. Then there are those times when you got a little too competitive at board games.
No doubt, life is busy. We’re constantly on the go trying to juggle family, career, relationships and all those other commitments that take up our precious time. Often, we put the important things on the backburner, meaning to get round to them later. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.
Yet ironically, it’s never been easier to contact our family. Thanks to the huge advances in digital communications, our family is just a call, text or video call away.
Unlike in times gone by, when we would wait weeks or months for a letter in the post, or even a telegram, now you can pick up your smartphone and be looking at your family at the touch of a button. This is invaluable for keeping up with people and maintaining day to day connections. It has certainly made it easier for families to keep in touch from different cities or countries.
As humans, we thrive on physical interaction and so there really is no substitute for face to face interaction. Staying in physical contact with our relatives both near and far is so important to our health and wellbeing. It is also an opportunity to reconnect with each other and celebrate our memories and shared history.
As time goes on, our families grow and expand and we need to take every chance we can to create memories with the newest members of our families too. You don’t want your nieces, nephews, and cousins to only know you as the voice on the end of a phone or a floating head on a webcam.
Visiting your relatives also allows you to experience one of the truly great benefits of family, unconditional love and support. Plus, there might be some old Monopoly scores to settle.
National Visit Your Relatives Day is the perfect opportunity for you to catch up with your family, maintaining those unique connections and building new ones.
Life is too short to neglect such an important thing. As the writer, Anthony Brandt put it “other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.”
National Visit Your Relatives Day Timeline
Confucius Emphasizes Filial Piety
In early Chinese philosophy, Confucius set out the virtue of xiao, or filial piety, teaching that adult children should regularly visit, care for, and honor parents and elders as the foundation of family and social harmony.
Roman Family Visits During Festivals
In the Roman Empire, major festivals such as Saturnalia became occasions when extended family members traveled to gather, exchange gifts, and strengthen kinship ties, reflecting the social importance of visiting relatives.
Magna Carta Protects Widows’ Right to Remain Near Family
Clause 7 of England’s Magna Carta guaranteed that widows may remain in their husband’s home, close to their kin network, rather than being forcibly remarried or displaced, recognizing the practical and emotional value of family proximity.
Railroads Transform Visiting Distant Relatives
The spread of railways in Europe and North America, capped by the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, drastically cut travel times, making visits to far‑flung relatives more practical and helping extended families maintain in‑person contact over long distances.
Commercial Air Travel Begins to Shrink Family Distances
With the launch of the first scheduled commercial airline service in Florida, air travel gradually became a way for families separated by great distances to visit each other, a trend that accelerated throughout the 20th century.
Bowlby’s Attachment Theory Highlights the Importance of Close Family Contact
Psychiatrist John Bowlby published his report “Child Care and the Growth of Love,” arguing that close, regular contact with caregivers is vital for emotional development, helping shape later understanding of the psychological value of strong family bonds.
Berkeley Grandparent Study Shows Benefits of Intergenerational Visits
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that regular, meaningful contact between grandparents and grandchildren can enhance psychological well‑being in older adults and support social and emotional development in children, underscoring the value of visiting relatives across generations.
History Of National Visit Your Relatives Day
Across the world today, and throughout history, there isn’t a culture or religion that doesn’t have traditions or values surrounding family. Now that it is common for people to build their lives all over the world, staying in touch is a way to maintain those close ties with your history and culture.
In times gone by, huge importance was placed on the family. Your family was instrumental in determining what kind of job you would get, who you would marry and other opportunities available to you. Luckily today, that’s no longer the case the most people succeed on their own merits. But the advantages of the love and support we get from our families remains unchanged.
Digital technology has made it easier than ever to stay in touch with those we love. We can use FaceTime, WhatsApp, email or any number of other ways to share every moment of our lives with them.
While a phone call or an email are great ways to keep in touch, digital communication can’t fully replace that special, face to face time with those that we love.
Close contact with relatives can even help them through illnesses and extend their life spans. Social contact can reduce depression and even strengthen our immune systems. Quality time spent with older relatives, engaging with them and ensuring they are well and happy will help ensure that they are with us for years to come.
As the family grows, it is important that they spend time together, to keep the family bonds strong and giving the next generation some great memories on which to build, too.
Family Visits Can Help Older Adults Live Longer
Spending time with loved ones is more than just meaningful, it can have a real impact on health, with research showing that regular in-person visits are linked to longer life and reduced health risks for older adults.
Family Visits Can Help Older Adults Live Longer
Long-term studies of older adults have found that in-person visits from family and friends are linked with lower mortality.
A 2016 analysis of more than 7,000 adults over age 50 in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing reported that people who saw relatives and friends less than once a month had a significantly higher risk of dying over the next several years compared with those who had more frequent face-to-face social contact, even after accounting for health and socioeconomic factors.
Face-to-Face Contact Protects Against Depression
Research suggests that in-person meetings with loved ones can be more protective against depression than phone calls or emails alone.
A study of over 11,000 U.S. adults aged 50 and older found that those who met family and friends in person at least three times a week had about half the risk of developing depressive symptoms compared with those who primarily relied on remote communication, after adjusting for other influences.
Family Support Influences Recovery From Serious Illness
Clinical research has repeatedly shown that patients with strong family involvement often have better outcomes following major illnesses or surgeries.
For example, cardiac and cancer studies have found that patients who report high levels of emotional and practical support from relatives tend to adhere more closely to treatment plans, show improved immune function, and have higher survival rates than socially isolated patients, even when the medical treatments are similar.
Regular Contact With Relatives Buffers the Health Effects of Loneliness
Loneliness is associated with increased risks of heart disease, stroke, and early death, but family contact can soften these effects.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social connection notes that people with strong, frequent ties to close kin and other trusted relationships have a roughly 29 percent lower risk of heart disease and a 32 percent lower risk of stroke compared with socially isolated individuals, underscoring the health power of maintaining regular contact with relatives.
Extended Families Are Becoming More Geographically Scattered
Demographic data show that it is increasingly common for close relatives to live far apart.
A Pew Research Center analysis of American families has found that a growing share of adults live at least an hour’s drive from any extended family, reflecting trends in higher education, job mobility, and urbanization.
This geographic dispersion makes planned visits and reunions more important for maintaining family bonds across generations.
Digital Contact Helps, but Does Not Fully Replace In-Person Visits
Studies of older adults suggest that while video calls and messaging can reduce feelings of isolation, they usually do not provide the same level of emotional benefit as in-person visits.
Research in journals such as The Gerontologist has found that digital communication is most effective when it supplements, rather than replaces, face-to-face contact, helping relatives maintain continuity between visits and strengthen the sense of ongoing involvement in one another’s lives.
Intergenerational Visits Strengthen Memory and Cultural Identity
Psychologists have found that conversations between younger and older relatives, especially about family history and traditions, can help older adults maintain autobiographical memory and can give younger family members a stronger sense of identity.
Studies on “intergenerational reminiscence” show that when grandparents share stories in person with grandchildren, both generations report higher life satisfaction and greater feelings of belonging to a family lineage.
