Read an Excerpt
Making Grateful Kids
The Science of Building Character
By Jeffrey J. Froh, Giacomo Bono Templeton Press
Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey J. Froh and Giacomo Bono
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59947-480-9
CHAPTER 1
Orienting Your Family toward Gratitude
GRATITUDE should spring from the first supportive relationships in a child's life, such as with parents and caregivers and, eventually, from other close relationships. Indeed, our research shows that youth with supportive and satisfying family and peer relationships are more grateful. Yet even in homes that actively encourage gratitude, a young person's ability to reason and accept challenging situations varies with maturity. One day, Giacomo's seven-year-old son Dario noticed his little brother Alex had been given a new toy. It quickly dawned on Dario that he didn't have the same good fortune, and he swiftly made his displeasure known to his mother. He then cried, but not without saying that it just wasn't fair—a sentiment he repeated many times. Many of you may chuckle at this scenario because you've experienced it with your kids. And there's good reason. Children argue about who has more, or better, toys. But why? Why is it so easy for kids—and adults—to focus on things to complain about?
Encourage Your Kids to Tune into Positive Emotions
Emotions give us important information about our environment. If we feel anxious, it may be because we sense a looming threat. If we feel angry, it may be because someone frustrated us or hurt us. But when we're happy, we don't always think about why. When it comes to positive emotions, we usually just enjoy the feeling because positive emotions signal to us that the current circumstances are going well, so we should just continue doing what we're doing to reap more of the same. As a result, we automatically tend to be less analytical during positive states and fail to focus on the reasons why they came to happen. During negative events, on the other hand, we tend to analyze things more. Our nature compels us to figure out why negative events transpire so that we might, in the future, avoid or prevent them entirely. While this state of affairs generally helps us survive, it doesn't necessarily help us thrive. So let's revisit Dario and Alex with this in mind.
Let's say Dario came home to discover new toys for both he and his brother. It would be easy to imagine him ripping open his gift in record time then delving eagerly into playing with it without considering why he even got the toy. This natural tendency becomes especially ingrained in adults. Like Dario, we tend to not think about why good things come our way. But if his mom first asked Dario to explain why Alex and he received toys that day, he would likely make the connection between the reward—the toys—and the boys' good behavior—cleaning up after playtime all week.
The more we understand why positive events happen for us, the easier it is to tune into possible sources of gratitude (at least when people are responsible for those events). In this example, mom helps her kids feel good for being responsible, they appreciate getting toys from her, and everybody is content with this good state of affairs. This leads us to the first strategy: capitalize on positive emotions. It can be useful with kids as young as three years old.
Strategy 1: Focus children on why good things happen to them and on the people responsible for making the good things happen.
This basic strategy helps initiate discussions with children that can help them notice and understand how others were purposefully involved in helping them. To employ this strategy, an adult and child should talk about the good things that happened during the day (or a week) and, why, in the child's opinion, those good things happened. This guides the child to notice a friend or teacher for his kindness. For example, a child might say that she learned a fun new game in school from a friend who showed her how to play. The parent can take this opportunity to suggest the child appreciate her friend for including her in the fun.
Gratitude aids humans' survival because it helps people identify the relationships that are personally more important to them than others. This strategy is useful in many settings. For instance, being thankful and appreciative of people who have been helpful and kind can easily be encouraged in school. This practice could also complement other exercises to help stoke a more cooperative classroom environment.
At home, children could think about the blessings of the day or week to come up with more thoughtful prayers. This could be done at mealtime, and our longitudinal data show that children who say grace during meals have also developed more gratitude than their peers. You could encourage children to give thanks to all the people responsible for the food on the table, which could include farmers, fishermen, truck drivers, supermarket employees, and God. You could also encourage your children during prayer at bedtime to be thankful for the people who have recently helped them or been good to them and to thank God for having such special people in their lives.
To test this strategy, Jeff and his colleagues Robert Emmons and William Sefick asked sixth and seventh graders to keep a daily journal for two weeks. The students were divided into three groups. The first group was instructed to write about five things they were grateful for; the second group was asked to focus on hassles. The third group functioned as a control, and the students in it simply completed the questionnaire administered to all three groups.
Students writing in gratitude journals made entries such as:
* "My coach helped me out at baseball practice."
* "My grandma is in good health, my family is still together, my family still loves each other, my brothers are healthy, and we have fun every day."
* "I am grateful that my mom didn't go crazy when I accidentally broke a patio table."
Students writing about hassles made entries such as:
* "I hate when people act like idiots and make fun of others."
* "I had to get up early for soccer, and we lost the game because I missed a penalty shot."
* "I feel like I'm trying so hard in school to do well but it's not enough."
Our research found that students who counted their blessings became more grateful, optimistic, satisfied with their lives and experienced fewer negative emotions. Three weeks after keeping their gratitude journals, students who counted blessings said that they were grateful for school and their education and reported feelings of greater satisfaction with their school. They also reported they were learning more and were eager to go to school.
The benefits of this change in perspective are very real. Students who are satisfied with school get better grades and have stronger social relationships; and encouraging students to count their blessings may help them think more positively about school in general and academics more specifically. Teachers know this. We've heard numerous testimonies of teachers putting this strategy into practice. For instance, teachers sometimes install gratitude boards or walls in their classrooms. Students add notes or pictures of things or people they appreciate, of their achievements, or of significant places or experiences. Smart coaches also apply the strategy by using cooperative skill building drills and then encouraging kids to thank any team mates for helping them improve their skills.
Learning to Appraise Beneficial Social Exchanges
Let's dig deeper to understand why this first strategy is an effective starting point for making grateful kids. When we direct our gratitude to others, we become more tuned into the relationships in our lives that are supportive, fulfilling, and mutually reinforcing—the kind of relationships that create a special environment for beneficial circumstances to occur. This knowledge helps us improve our ability to gain assistance or cooperation from others. Promoting gratitude as a basic social skill for your kids teaches them in turn to pay the same kind of attention to positive elements and people in their lives, creating good feelings and enhancing their learning experiences. The earlier and more often in life we employ this strategy with children, the more open they'll be to becoming grateful, and, as we'll learn in later chapters, the better their chances of achieving success, well-being, and coherence about their particular life story and all the people involved.
Help Kids Deal with Negative Emotions
Between the preschool years and middle childhood (ages 3–12), children tend to think in black-and-white terms, and they have unrealistic perspectives based mostly on their own needs at any given time. For example, when Jeff and his wife set limits on how long their son, James, can play his Wii game system by saying, "We'll let you play for more time than usual today, but then you can't play tomorrow," James fires back with, "You always take away the Wii from me," throwing his hands up in despair. In James's mind, a Saturday without playing Wii clearly indicates his parents are ruthless dictators with no concern for his interests (ignoring the fact that they allowed more playtime Friday night and promised a little more on Sunday). You may be wondering what can be done to manage such perceptions of unfairness, given how frequently they occur in most households. This leads us to the second strategy, which is the other side of the emotional coin as compared to the first strategy: how to help kids deal with negative emotions.
Strategy 2: Help children regulate negative emotions by being a calm problem solver, by labeling and validating their emotions, and by replacing their negative thoughts with positive ones.
As you might expect, this second strategy is much more difficult than the first one to employ. Life can be filled with disappointments. This is true for adults, but it's especially true for children. Growing up is hard work. Every day is packed with novelty and challenges as they move forward faster than their limited knowledge base and cognitive skills can handle. Helping children learn to manage their emotions is critical and may be one of the greatest challenges of parenting. So for instance, even though Jeff and his wife are both school psychologists and try their hardest not to foster perfectionism, their six-year-old son James is very hard on himself when he makes mistakes. When Jeff beats him in chess, James gets extremely upset, sometimes to the point of crying and saying things like "What was I thinking? I didn't even have a game plan!" Jeff will try to lighten things up with a hug and a reminder that no one is perfect and that making mistakes is part of life. Sometimes this calms James down, but sometimes it doesn't. The truth is there are no quick, one-size-fits-all solutions to handling negative emotions. Plenty of patience, creativity, and effort are required; and you can count on second-guessing, self-doubt, and occasional instances of guilt and shame happening to you along the way.
Modeling Good Problem Solving
Remaining calm is the first part of this strategy, as adults model healthy emotion regulation for children with their own behavior. Taking a deep breath and figuring out how to get by or finding a sufficient solution to the problem in the moment is an essential tool. When you feel pressured to get your child to soccer practice or a music lesson, it can be quite frustrating when he has a meltdown because he didn't get a chance to add another Lego to his supersonic airplane-submarine or color in one more giraffe on his animal safari masterpiece. A calm response from you shows him that you can help him through and that the problem isn't too hard to solve. Conversely, angrily tearing a child away from a project at the last minute demonstrates a loss of control on your part, and it also tells him that you didn't care about his project.
Though often unintentional, such adult behavior can cause harm nonetheless. And everybody is guilty of it. Take Giacomo, who did just this when his son Dario needed to get ready for baseball practice. After reminding his son to put on his shoes, each reminder louder than the last, Giacomo finds Dario, to his disbelief, playing blissfully on his Nintendo DS. When Giacomo tells him to, "Shut that thing off right now," Dario replies, "But wait, look, I'm about to beat the invisible Mario in the cart race, and I've never done that before!" Snatching the DS from him, Giacomo thunders, "I don't care about Mario—you were supposed to get your shoes on for practice!" If, instead of shouting reminders, Giacomo had anticipated better and checked on Dario sooner, he would have realized that none of the reminders actually registered and things could have been smoother that afternoon.
Even so, sometimes the chaos of life gets in the way. For instance, Jeff was once alone with both his kids, and he was running late to get his son on the bus. Of course it was at that moment that his three-year-old daughter, Julianne, insisted on buttoning her jacket herself. Anxious and frazzled that they were going to miss the bus, Jeff hastily buttoned Julianne's jacket while she cried, "I wanted to do it!" He picked her up as they left the house, and she proceeded to deliver several sharp kicks to his ribs while she threw a tantrum in his arms. Had he been able to remain calm, he might have instead told her that she could button her jacket when they got outside. But the morning rush got the best of him that time.
Even with our best intentions, we don't always keep our cool, and that's okay. Although consistently failing to be a calm problem solver can be counterproductive and harmful to kids in the long run, we believe that if you maintain a calm demeanor most of the time you will help instill gratitude in your kids. We have yet to confirm with research how this tool might be related to making children grateful, but we suspect it's helpful because it shows that you care about them and the things that they care about. Calm problem solving teaches persistence and demonstrates that working together leads to the best solutions. Believing that other people care about your welfare is an important source of gratitude. This will serve your children well when they establish friendships, social ties, or working relationships in the future. As calm problem solvers, your kids will be more in tune with others' needs and how to help them through their problems, strengthening the bonds that lead to continued success in the world.
We Understand Your Pain: Helping Kids Understand Negative Emotions
Labeling and validating children's emotions are crucial. When children are distressed or experiencing negative emotions, they may not understand why things didn't work out the way they wanted. They may be too frustrated by something happening unexpectedly, or they may be completely consumed by the fact or perception that they've been treated unfairly. During such moments it's important for parents to get to the bottom of why their child is sad, frustrated, or angry and help her understand what she's going through by helping her label negative emotions. In other words, you enrich your child's emotional vocabulary so that she can better communicate her feelings next time.
Negative emotions can be overwhelming for children because emotional competence is complex and only develops gradually as kids experience and adapt to different social contexts. Thus, it's also critical that adults validate, or show that they understand, the turmoil their kids are going through. This teaches children that disappointment is a normal part of life and that it's okay to feel the way they do. It also lets them know that they're not alone in their suffering. By giving children the verbal skills to express their negative emotions and by being affirming and supportive of them through their turmoil, adults help children develop healthy emotion regulation. These two skills transform negative emotional events into valuable learning experiences.
For example, a child may be drawing or coloring something and all of a sudden throw a tantrum that it's "completely ruined" because she went outside the lines or used the wrong color. This is a good occasion for adults to show they understand why she's frustrated and help her accomplish her goal. It's easy for an adult to step in and want to quickly deal with the matter by saying, "Don't worry about it, sweetie, it's just a picture. We have more paper you can use to do another." But in this instance, you might instead say something like, "I know you worked hard on this picture, I'd be upset too. Let's see what we can do to fix it." This latter approach validates the child's frustration, labels the emotional experience, and shows her that you support her in correcting the problem. It just takes a little empathy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making Grateful Kids by Jeffrey J. Froh, Giacomo Bono. Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey J. Froh and Giacomo Bono. Excerpted by permission of Templeton Press.
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