What do you do to teach gratitude?
Gratitude is a rockin' quality. Being grateful when folks do things for you is one thing - it's polite, good manners, whatnot. Being grateful for how much good there is in our lives, even when there's bad, I think is important to one's sense of well-being, and to one's health, and is catching - it makes the lives better of those around us.
I went to talk by Fred Luskin on Forgiveness once, and he discussed how many (most?) negative emotions are entirely in our head, they're not happening right now, but happened in the past (regrets, grudges) or we worry over things that may happen in the future.
I was reminded of this today when I read Adrienne's blogpost on Baby Toolkit: A Pessimist reads Raising Happiness. Adrienne reviews Christine Carter's book Raising Happiness. She writes: "Because I believe some of his poor reactions are learned from my example, it isn't hard to believe that (with mindful parenting) better reactions can be taught. But how can I, a pessimist, teach my children skills I never really acquired?" [italics mine]
I'm not always good about being grateful, other than in the polite/manners kind of way. It's hard not to dwell on the negatives. I'd like to be better at it, partly because I think it would make me a better and happier person, and partly because I think modeling it for my kids is probably the best way to help them discover and practice it.
But that said... do you have any tips or routines for learning or practicing or teaching gratitude? (religious practices welcome as they may help some, but we're not religious)
3 Answers
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Every night at dinner, we go around the table and have each person say 3 things they are grateful for. We're trying to model that sometimes it can be "I found a penny" or "someone said they liked my shirt" and that it doesn't have to be "I won the lottery" or "I cured cancer." It actually isn't going very well (maybe their ages?). We've talked about getting each a journal to keep in their rooms and each night write down 3 things for them. I got the idea from:
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/raising_happiness/post/teaching_gratitude_in_a_culture_of_entitlement
I also stumbled across:
http://www.familycares.org/involve/attitude.cfm
It isn't going very well because they egg each other on being goofy, e.g. "I'm grateful I had a big lunch today because this dinner is yucky." Which is why we were thinking of separating them and doing a journal so they don't do this. But based on your response and Jason's response, maybe the thing to do is to drop the number of things down to one and for me and my husband to shoot for making a few comments at dinner about simple things that made us happy, like, "I was having a bad day and someone smiled at me and it made me feel so much happier."
- kristie, May 26, 2010
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I like Kristie's response. Having regular conversations around gratitude allows sharing of the experience.
And parents who regularly practice gratitude themselves will more likely have kids who do it too.
Thanks for sharing! I really like the idea, or even just sharing one thing, and I'm wondering about your note that "it actually isn't going very well". Why? What's happening? What's the actual question you pose? (I'm wondering if young kids can grok the work "grateful"?)
- andrea, May 25, 2010