How do you teach your children to be Grateful?
Gratitude, it feels. We are not born being grateful, we learn at home by the example of parents and immediate family members.
If parents are grateful, not only for great and material things, but also for small details and express our gratitude to our children, they will learn by example and be grateful when they receive a compliment or gift.
But what happens when we receive a gift that we don't like, we thank and when whoever gave us the gift leaves, we make negative comments about it and in front of our children? In this case we would be teaching them to be hypocrites.
Gratitude has a lot to do with positivism, if we are positive and take things right, it is reflected in our actions and the children will learn from them.
In the case of children for example, at birthday parties or at Christmas, if we are telling them that you will receive many gifts or very good, the child that is what you will expect, as we want to receive some small detail, thank you?
We should not focus your attention on gifts, rather you have to tell him that he is going to have fun, that everyone will go to his party because they want it, etc.
Still, if children receive many gifts at these upcoming parties, we should teach them to enjoy each one, to value them, not to open them all and to lose interest soon, also to thank each person.
The first time I received a thank you note, it was a few months after arriving in this country, in Mexico, or at least in my family, we do not have that habit; so a few months after arriving in this country, I sent a gift to the wife of a partner of my husband, who had just had a baby, days later I received a note thanking me for the gift, it was a simple note, but I loved the detail; a good habit to adopt and pass it on to our children.
May we not have a hard time thanking us, there is so much to be thankful, from the new day every morning, to the slightest help we receive from a neighbor or friend and better than to teach our children to feel grateful and not just to say "from the teeth out". Believe me that I like to help people selflessly, but it's very different when one of them seems to ignore the help, to when another one says, "Thank you." Listening to this magic word, it feels good and makes you want to keep helping…
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