All three family rooms I remember growing up in had a stone or brick fireplace. While burning fires for warmth were rare, the hearth did have its well-used purpose as the finish line for daily bulldozing tournaments.
Usually as a mechanism for quickly gathering kids for family prayer, my dad would get down on all fours and announce, "Bulldozer!"
He started at the opposite side of the room and our goal as kids was to pile on his back to prevent him from reaching the hearth. The stronger we got, the longer it took.
To this day, I don't know why we didn't have more cracked heads from hitting the brick. I also don't know how Dad transitioned the wrestling match into a reverent family prayer, but he succeeded on both accounts.
So I shouldn't have been surprised on my last visit to Utah when I watched an 8-year-old flag football team coached by my dad and oldest brother — their team name was the Bulldozers.
"During our first practice we were having a hard time teaching them to block," my brother confessed, "until I had the idea to play bulldozer, and then they got it and we got our mascot."
In my own home, no evening is complete without a rousing round of wrestling between my husband and my son. Heaven forbid my husband is out-of-town without a designated wrestling substitute, because then our toddler gets rattled around by her brother and laughs until she cries.
On my last visit to my sister's house, I spent time getting to know my 6-year-old nephew. He taught me to play his hand-held electronic game. We played a cordial board game at the kitchen table. But the bonding wasn't complete until I wrestled him into a pretzel. The next morning when I left for home, he actually cried. I don't think he would have missed his old aunt unless I had challenged him physically the night before.
I'm a firm believer that one of the most important uses for a family room is to roughhouse and, in turn, have physical contact that bonds generations. Grappling around with high-energy kids not only helps them sleep better at night — they also end up feeling loved in an unconventional, yet vitally important, way.