Your kids should be grateful. Not to Mom and Dad, of course; you’re just doing your job. You’re legally and biologically obligated. Your kids should be grateful for everything. We all should. It’s amazing that any of us are alive at all. The odds are astronomically small that we are here, that we are us.
So it’s important that you teach your kids about gratitude. Jason Harris, the CEO of Mekanism—an award-winning ad agency—and the author of The Soulful Art of Persuasion, has an interesting practice for persuading your kids to have a more grateful outlook about life. As he writes: Every Sunday night we write down in our book three things for which we are individually grateful. I know this is not an earth- shattering idea. . . . But this practice has made a world of difference for me and my kids. It resets you and gets you prepped for the week ahead. . . . What’s helpful about writing these reflections in a notebook is that you can consult previous entries and jog your memory on truly trying days. . . . Keeping thoughts of gratitude on the surface of your mental life can help you realize that whatever might be going wrong today, on balance we all have a ton to be positive about.
Beautiful. And how much more beautiful would the world be if more of us took up this practice with our own kids?