Gratitude is about more than learning to say thank you for a birthday gift, it’s a whole attitude and outlook that allows you to embrace positivity and gives you an important tool to help weather any storm. Teaching gratitude is something that should be started at an early age to help build resiliency in your kids. You can do this by encouraging acts of gratitude, modeling gratitude, and many other ways. I’ve gathered together a few tips that have been useful in our home to encourage our kids to embrace an attitude of gratitude that will hopefully set them up for a life of happiness and positivity.
How To Teach Kids To Be Grateful
Modeling gratitude
One of the best ways parents teach gratitude is by modeling the behavior themselves. Remember, more is caught than taught; this means kids do what they see you doing, not what you tell them to do. You can start small by thanking the people in your life for any kindness, especially if you see one of your kids doing something you appreciate. You may be surprised at how modeling gratitude for your kids can bring more positivity into your own life!
Make gratitude a daily practice
Set aside time for gratitude — I find that before bed is a good time for this. Ask your kids to think back on their day and come up with 3 things that they’re grateful for. Then you can tell them three things you’re grateful for — remember that modeling behavior — to bring an increased awareness of all the amazing things that your family has in their lives. Practicing gratitude is particularly important on tough days because it helps boost their resiliency and see past the things that went wrong to the positive things that are going well.
Create a gratitude journal
This is a great tool to get started with younger kids. For older children who know how to write fluently, you can gift them a special journal, which can be a simple notebook or something more guiding, like this journal, where they can write down all the things they’re grateful for. Gratitude comes more easily with practice — like most things — so the more your kids practice identifying things to be grateful for, the more of a habit it’ll become.
One thing that worked well for us is having a gratitude section on their “My Day” schedule (available for free download on my resources page). The answers sometimes made me laugh, but always made me smile, and served as a good habit builder for focusing in on something to be grateful for each day.
Bring gratitude to the table
Another great time to show gratitude is around the dinner table. The meal in front of you is a great jumping point for a family gratitude practice where everyone is there to take part. One by one, each family member can go around the table and say what they feel grateful for that day. This is a great time to teach young children gratitude because they’ll see the practice modeled with each family member. It’s one of my favorite dinner conversation games for young kids!
Encourage random acts of kindness
When teaching gratitude, it can be helpful to show your kids what the reverse side of gratitude feels like. Encourage them to perform one random act of kindness a day so they can feel how positive and happy it makes them when the other person expresses gratitude, but also how happy and positive it makes the other person feel.
Create a gratitude jar
This is such a sweet idea. Every time something positive happens throughout the year, it goes in a gratitude jar. Then, at the end of the year, you all sit around as a family and read out all the good events and people who made us happy. It leaves everyone feeling warm and fuzzy and incredibly grateful. You can switch up the frequency that you open the jar if a year feels like too long to wait.
Tell people thank you
Once your kids are starting to pay more attention to times, people, and things they’re grateful for, they’re ready to move on to the next step. Teach your child to express their appreciation in the moment. Expressing gratitude makes everyone happy and it doesn’t take much. You can follow this simple formula.
Thank you for (what the person did). I appreciated it/it meant a lot to me because (insert the reason why it made them greatful).
Not only will this help build an attitude of gratitude, but it’ll also help your children develop emotional intelligence skills because they become aware of how certain things make them feel, and why they make them feel that way.
Volunteer
This is a great one for both you and older kids. If you volunteer somewhere, and model this behavior your kids will see the positivity volunteers like you can bring to this world. If you have older children, encourage them to volunteer as well. Like practicing random acts of kindness, seeing gratitude from the other side can work wonders for building an attitude of gratitude.
Teaching gratitude doesn’t have to involve any major changes, but it’s important to find a way to work it into our daily lives. Practicing gratitude daily creates a habit that will help our kids develop resiliency, positivity, and distress tolerance skills, as well as help them build the foundation for a happy life. And teaching it will help ensure we keep up the practice ourselves 🙂
