Yesterday, a friend posted a funny meme on social media. It read, “Brace yourselves, the ‘I’m thankful for’ posts are coming.”
Gratitude is hot in November.
It’s good to pause our busy lives for a moment each day to look at and appreciate who we have, what we have, and where we are. If only we could bottle up that November feeling of thankfulness for December through October.
Maybe we can.
Research has shown a correlation in happiness and gratitude. The more thankful we are, the happier. A 2019 study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies revealed that children’s gratitude predicted their happiness above and beyond a general propensity for gratitude in children by 5 years of age. An abundance of research has shown time and again that, even starting very young, gratitude leads to happiness, optimism, life satisfaction, and overall well-being. Grateful people are even more productive and also tend to live longer.
Thanks to social media trends, we have gotten pretty good at cultivating gratitude those 30 days in November. Then the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season brings back the stress and busyness, and we often don’t think about it again until after Halloween. Yet, clearly there are a lot of reasons to make gratitude a daily habit year-round, and to teach our children to do the same. But how?
What is Gratitude, Truly?
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gratitude as simply “the state of being grateful.” I prefer the definition by Robert Emmon, a leading scientific expert on gratitude. He says that gratitude has a dual meaning: a worldy one and a transcendent one. In its worldly sense, gratitude is a feeling that occurs in interpersonal exchanges when one person acknowledges receiving a valuable benefit from another. In a transcendent sense, we recognize that some sources of the goodness received lies outside the self.
Basically, gratitude is an attitude - one of noticing and appreciating all that is good in life, even during times when it’s hard to see the goodness. If we are open to seeing all of life’s gifts, we will notice they do not simply come in wrapped packages or joyful moments, but that each lesson, each experience offers us some sort of present. Once we achieve this attitude, we will reap the benefits of a happier, more content life.
Beyond “Thank you”
Imagine someone hands a child a gift or a treat. What is the parent’s reaction? Usually, they turn to the child and whisper, “What are you supposed to say?” The child responds with, “Thank you.” The child was just taught gratitude, right? Well, not quite. Gratitude is about feeling appreciation and expressing it. Words are meaningless if there’s no feeling behind them. We can train our children to act thankful by insisting they say thank you, but to cultivate genuine thankfulness, we have to move beyond words and speak to the heart.
Cultivating True Gratitude
Gratitude achieves its most power when it is automatic and habitual. To increase our own feelings of thankfulness year-round, and to help our children develop a true attitude of gratitude, we need to incorporate it into our daily lives. Here are 5 ideas to get you started.
- Create a gratitude board. This is a great family activity to increase everyone’s thankfulness. You can use a white board and have each family member write on it, or you can be more creative and tack photos, notes, and such to it. Each day after dinner, visit the gratitude board and ask each person to add to it.
- Develop daily gratitude habits. Daily practices such as keeping a gratitude journal or verbally listing three good things at bedtime is a great way to start shifting your child’s lens to see the good in each day.
- Speak the language. Dr. Robert Emmons suggests “trafficking the language of thankfulness” by using language such as “gifts,” “givers,” and “receivers,” on a regular basis. Speak out loud the goodness you are noticing each day using this kind of language until it becomes a habit to view the world in this way.
- Give someone else a reason to be thankful for you. Allow your children to experience the other side of thankfulness by doing something good for someone else. Make volunteering and performing random acts of kindness a regular thing in your home.
- Flip the script in challenging times. It’s not too difficult to be grateful when you receive a new iphone for Christmas, but being grateful in hard times is the true mark of having developed authentic gratitude. Help your child look for silver linings on rainy days and ask them what is the one gift they can take away from even the biggest challenges.
“The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” - Mary Davis
Resources
- Nguyen SP, Gordon CL. The Relationship Between Gratitude and Happiness in Young Children. Journal of Happiness Studies. November 2019. doi:10.1007/s10902-019-00188-6