Book Title: Can I Tell You About Gratitude?: A Helpful Introduction for Everyone
By: Liz Gulliford
This book is part of the Can I Tell You About book series for older children and adolescents (7-13 years)
In my last post, 4 Things Gratefulness is Not, I talk about where we can go wrong in the practice of gratitude. One of those mishaps is trying to impose gratefulness on someone else. The moment giving thanks is required, it has morphed into something else. True gratefulness comes from the heart and is given freely.
How, then do we train our kids to be grateful? If we don’t want entitled, demanding kids, how do we teach them this important character quality? Our go-to of demanding or ordering our kids to “be thankful” often brings compliance, but can actually push them away from an authentic expression of it and cause resentment.
I would first say that it is important to teach saying “thank you” as a manner. (My mom, who taught an etiquette course when I was a young adolescent, used to say manners are guidelines for loving others well.) But, like anything that has to do with matters of the heart, it is most important to demonstrate it in your own life. Model for your kids what it looks like to thank and be thanked. Let them witness you growing in gratefulness and tell them why it’s important to you.
I think it’s also worthwhile, at an appropriate age, to have deeper conversations about it. This is one reason I really appreciate this book for parents and educators, Can I tell you about gratitude? For one, it tells the story in narrative form of a girl named Maya who goes through a bunch of scenarios that make her think about gratitude. She pays attention to her own thoughts and feelings when she: receives something she wants; doesn’t get something she had hoped for; receives something well-intentioned, but not what she wants; and receives something she wants, but it is used to manipulate her. The scenarios show that gratitude is more complicated than we think and it’s important to consider how we practice it. The book even grapples with how Maya’s grandma, who believes in God, practices gratitude differently than Maya’s family who doesn’t.
Gratitude is more complicated than we think and it’s important to consider how we practice it.
There are discussion questions at the back of the book that help kids engage with it, such as “Explain the difference between saying thank you out of habit and saying thank you when you really mean it,” or “Can you think of creative ways to show gratitude to others?” The main points are also set out clearly for the parent or educator to guide the discussion. I think this would be a fantastic conversation around a dinner table (paired with practicing thanks for our meal) or in a small group/classroom discussion.
I’m encouraged by this hopeful resource that helps us have conversations with our kids and challenges us in our own thinking about gratefulness.
Find it here.
In Everything 