Thanksgiving – How to Teach Kids About Being Thankful

Family & Parenting, Home Schooling, Montessori, Parenting

With Thanksgiving coming up, I’ve been looking at ways to teach my 2 year old what the holiday means. Being thankful isn’t an easy concept to understand or put into words for some adults, much less a toddler. This is how I’ve decided to teach it in our household.

Thankful… a word that encompasses so much that it can be hard to explain. It’s feelings, thoughts, and actions all in one. Teaching such a thing to toddlers may seem like an impossibility but when you start at an early age using language they understand, you can raise kids that not only understand being thankful but also live it.

Why are Thankfulness and Gratitude so important?

When you are thankful and practice gratitude, the benefits extend past just good manners. Research has shown that when you routinely express gratitude and thankfulness, you improve your mental health and guard against issues such as stress, anxiety, and depression.

It also results in better physical health as well with studies showing people who consider themselves to be grateful to have fewer headaches, respiratory infections, gastrointestinal problems, and better heart health.

Defining Thankfulness for Toddlers

Thankfulness isn’t easy to define as a whole so I like to break it down into parts the same way I break other complex things down for my son to learn.

First, it’s a feeling when something goes right or someone does something nice for you.

Second, it’s a showing or expressing that you recognize that it happened.

Third, it’s understanding that you should be appreciative even when something exciting isn’t happening. This is the hardest part.

Teach Please and Thank You!

Babies as early as 6 months are able to learn and understand basic sign language. The first sign we taught our son was please followed by thank you. Even before that, we used please and thank you constantly with each other and when speaking with him.

The more they hear something and see it being used, the more they will learn and internalize the behavior. Babies and toddlers are sponges so we used that to our advantage.

Identify and Label Emotions

Once they know how to say it, they need to know when to use it. Everyone who has dealt with a toddler knows they have big emotions but many times they don’t understand how to identify or label those emotions.

Happy, sad, angry, frustrated, excited… They will feel all these and more. As they learn to connect these emotions with their labels and behavior, they can begin to connect some with being thankful and grateful.

A study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology showed a connection between children understanding emotions by 3 years and their ability to understand gratitude by the age of 5.

We can help them by asking questions such as “Did you feel good, happy when Daddy helped you get some milk?” “How did it make you feel when Grandma gave you a cookie?” We can then go on to explain that that happy feeling connects to being thankful in that situation. They may not understand it all right then but the more you do it, the better they will absorb it.

It will take time for them to understand their emotions and label them but the earlier we start working with them on it, the better.

Model Thankfulness

While kids will learn a lot from what you tell them, they will learn much more from what they see and experience so you and others they interact with need to model thankfulness and being grateful.

Modeling thankfulness means saying please and thank you but also talking about how you feel thankful and why. It may seem like they aren’t listening or they aren’t taking it in but believe me, they are.

Another way to model thankfulness for your child is to give something to someone or repay someone with something to benefit them. An example of this would be to give their teacher something on Teacher Appreciation Day or at the end of the year for all the things they’ve done for them. Even better, let your child give them the gift after talking about it and explaining why you’re doing it.

Thank you notes are also a great way to model thankfulness. Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to use any of my birthday or Christmas money until I had written a personalized thank you note to everyone who sent me a card. That has carried over into adulthood.

To this day, I take the time to write those notes (no email!) and mail them out for anyone I can’t thank in person for something. When I do, I talk to my son about what I’m doing and why. For his thank you notes, he signs his name and does a drawing on the blank side. Before that, we discuss the person we’re thanking and why.

Talk About It!

Modeling thankfulness is great but to truly help our kids understand the full concept, we need to discuss it with them to raise their awareness. This helps them make that final connection between what they are getting or experiencing, how they feel about it, and the follow through of actually being thankful.

A study on raising grateful children showed that the more often parents participated in acts of gratitude socialization, the more frequently their children displayed gratitude.

Acts of gratitude include things like pointing out when they receive something that makes them feel good and discussing their feelings about that moment.

Be sure to take every opportunity to talk with your child about their feelings when something good happens. You also need to note when your child expresses gratitude and let them know they are doing the right thing.

Conclusion:

Being thankful and grateful are skills that not only help us fit into society better but also have positive benefits to our own health. By starting working on these skills at such a young age, we can raise kids who practice thankfulness throughout their lives but we have to do it in such a way that they can understand it. Teach them please and thank you, teach them about emotions and how to label them, model the behavior you want to see, and finally, be sure to talk about it.

How do you teach your children thankfulness? What age did you start? Please share your stories, tips, and suggestions below in the comments.