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Thanksgiving: The top 5 tips for fostering gratitude in kids

Culture may be pushing kids to want, want, want, but a growing body of research shows that gratitude for what one already has is a huge component for kids of not just happiness, but of physical health, life satisfaction, and even grade point average. So what’s a parent to do? How does one foster gratitude in children, not just for the holidays but for the whole year? Never fear – we’ve read a bunch of the research and have come up with our top five tips for fostering gratitude in kids.

5. Let teens take the lead

Dean Rohrer
Two stick figures, Thanks and Giving, are joined by a heart, illustrating the importance of training children to be grateful for what they have.

Christine Carter, a sociologist and happiness expert at the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, points out in her writing a challenge in teaching teens about gratitude: Developmentally, teens need to break away from their parents. Every time they take your advice or instruction about how to foster gratitude they are, in some ways, remaining dependent on you. (They want you to recognize their wisdom.) So how do you both encourage gratitude and promote independence? 

Carter recommends letting teens lead family gratitude exercises.  Tell your son, for instance, that you’d like to find ways of promoting gratitude – for yourself as much as anyone – and ask him for some suggestions on how to do that. Essentially, let him design the family gratitude project, whether that is journaling, dinner conversations, or anything else. She also suggests bringing gratitude into conversations about challenges. Ask your teen whether anything good came out of a bad experience at school, for instance, or whether there was anything he learned from a fight with his best friend. Don’t be preachy here; the point is to engage with respect, but to also subtly introduce the notion that despite negative experiences, there is still much for which to be grateful. And remember, resistance is your teen's developmental job. Try to be grateful for it. Really.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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