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As a parent, you want to encourage behavior in your child that will set them up for future happiness. We all know that gratitude is important to mentally and physically healthy living. But there’s a huge gulf between wanting to practice gratitude and actually making it part of daily life that must be filled with practical routines and rituals.
These gratitude-teaching tips are real, tangible solutions to filling that gap. They involve making some changes to your daily routine at times, but nothing good ever happens without change! If you practice these activities with your family at home, you’ll likely notice changes in your own perspective as well as your kids’. Everyone benefits from taking a little time to be grateful.
How Can Kids Benefit from Learning Gratitude?
Gratitude is more than just a virtue we try to instill in kids. There’s a reason it’s so important: It’s been proven to improve overall quality of life, meaning health and wellness, mood, and more!
Practicing gratitude has physical benefits such as motivating you to exercise and providing better sleep. It can even lower blood pressure! Being grateful for your body means taking better care of it, plain and simple.
A grateful lifestyle also reduces stress which, left unchecked, can lead to physical and mental illness. Gratitude teaches us serenity, the ability to accept what we can’t control, because we focus more on the positive things in our life.
Gratitude prepares your child for a life of success through positive thinking. It assists in the management of career and work stress, which can even make people more efficient and successful!
To set your child up for good health, well-managed moods, and higher achievement in the future, practice gratitude with them today!
How NOT to Teach Your Child Gratitude
In the past, parents would often try to instill gratitude in their kids by simply reminding them to “be grateful” and reminding them of “those less fortunate”. While verbal reminders are certainly one way to teach kids gratitude, they’re not very effective. It only presents them with abstract concepts they have no real-life experience with. We now know that practicing gratitude takes a combination of mindfulness and daily effort.
6 Ways to Actually Practice Gratitude with Kids
Create a Gratitude Journal
Gratitude requires mindfulness. The first step in practicing gratitude is noticing all the things around you worth being grateful for. Journaling is a wonderful mindfulness aid for kids that also improves their literacy skills, hitting two birds with one stone. Try creating a personalized journal for your child by crafting one together! That way, your child will have a special connection with the journal and will be more likely to keep and use it. Then, have your child write down, every day, at the same time every day, at least three things they are grateful for. Soon their gratitude journal will be full of things they can contemplate when they’re feeling down.
Random Acts of Kindness
Trying to insert one act of random kindness into each day. Whether it’s helping out with a chore or task, paying someone an unsolicited compliment, or making a small donation to a worthy cause when given the opportunity. This enhances your daily gratitude practice because you focus more on opportunities for kindness, which also brings to your attention to occasions when others are kind to you! Have your child write down their daily good deed in their gratitude journal if you like!
Make a Gratitude Board or Jar
This is a fun activity the whole family can participate in, and it’s a super easy way to keep gratitude on your family’s minds always. In the kitchen, living room, or some other high-traffic area of the house, keep a bulletin board or jar, and some paper slips or post-it notes nearby. That way, any member of the family can write down something they’re grateful for and stick it on the board or in the jar. If you choose the board, the gratitude notes will always be visible for everyone to see. If you choose the jar, you can empty it and read the notes together as a family once a week!
Create a Daily Gratitude Ritual
This means taking time out of your family’s busy day to talk about things you’re grateful for. Conducting these discussions at mealtimes is optimal because it doesn’t cut into the rest of your packed schedule, but you can also take advantage of any other time when your family is most free. Include everyone in these discussions and make sure everyone participates, because everyone stands to benefit!
Teach by Example
Of course, one of the most important things you do as a parent is being a role model for your child. You are their first and chief source of information about the world from birth, so if you want them to pick up certain behaviors, your best bet is to practice them yourself. That’s why so many items on this list are activities for the whole family. It takes a little effort from everyone to ensure kids grow up to have a gratitude-centered mindset.
Write Thank You Notes
Christmas, Hannukah, and Kwanzaa are coming! These gift-giving holidays make winter the season of giving. In your household, it can also be the season of gratitude! Take these and any other opportunities you can find to encourage your child to write and send thank you notes to people who’ve given them gifts. Thank you notes aren’t just for the holiday season though! Teachers, doctors, librarians, firefighters, and other community heroes also deserve notes of gratitude. When it comes to using thank you notes as an activity to boost your child’s sense of gratitude AND their fine motor and literacy skills, the opportunities are endless!
We hope we’ve helped you on your way to living a more grateful and fulfilled life with your child. Looking for more of the best parenting tips on the web? Keep following Passionate Parenting on the Wondrfly blog.
Looking for kids’ activities in the Hoboken/Jersey City area? Then you’ll be really grateful for Wondrfly! Search our directory of kids’ activity provider near you!
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