Stories Series: Teach Your Kids to Show Gratitude

As moms, we do so much for our families and our children. I mean, we sacrifice our bodies just to bring these children into existence. Oftentimes we give up careers, we cook and clean constantly, but doesn't it just all feel worth it when our kids come up to us and just give us a great big hug and say, mom, I want toast. Anyone relate to this? Just me?

Let me tell you a story about gratitude. Welcome to motherhood, the best job in the world. I'm your host, Kelsey Redd, a stay at home mom just like you, sharing relatable stories and practical parenting tips so you can find ultimate joy in mothering. So I got into making sourdough, I don't know, a couple years ago, and I have fully committed now to the sourdough lifestyle. If you know, you know, because it is a whole lifestyle.

So I make sourdough bread exclusively now at this point for my family. We don't buy bread from the store anymore. So the other day I had my newest loaf out of the oven getting ready to slice it up to make some toast for my family and my son, five years old at the time says, mom, why do you always make sourdough? It's so disgusting. And I thought, oh, really?

Oh my goodness. And I told him, Honey, someday you are going to be in college on your own, living on your own for the first time in your life, and you're gonna be buying store bought bread, and you're gonna be saying, I cannot believe I was so lucky when I was a kid that my mom made me sourdough bread my whole life. I can't believe I have to shop for my own food now, take care of myself. I just miss my mom's homemade cooking. And I just laughed.

I thought it was just too funny to even take seriously, but it does illustrate the point that oftentimes our kids are very egocentric, that's a developmental stage that children go through, and they only think about what they want and what benefits themselves. And if we don't proactively teach kids how to be grateful and how to show appreciation, we might end up going off the rails in our own frustration and resentment over all the things we do for our family that seems to be unappreciated. So here are a couple tips for you for teaching your kids to be a little more grateful. First of all, we know that children learn more by observing than anything else. So we have to model the gratitude.

This is so easy to do and it just requires us to put a conscious effort into speaking the thank yous and I really appreciate that to all the people around us, to our partners, if they do anything kind for expressing that appreciation in front of our kids, to the grocery clerks, to our waiters and waitresses that serve us, anyone who you would typically thank, make sure that your kids are seeing that. A lot of times we're telling our kids, hey, say thank you. Hey, grandma just gave you a gift, you need to say thank you. And of course in private, we need to teach them when are the appropriate times to say thank you. But I really like to take the approach of just modeling.

I'll typically give my kid a quick nudge or a little, you know, whisper to them, Okay, say thank you. But I don't force it. If they don't want to, because maybe they're not sure how this social interaction is supposed to go, I just model it for them. I say the words that I'm hoping that they'll say. Thanks grandma for this birthday gift, that was so kind of you.

Or thanks dad for making dinner. It's so delicious. When it comes to modeling, I love when I see parents thanking their children. This is such a high form of respect and it is so beautiful to teach your kids how to be respectful by showing them the respect that you want to see. So we can say thank you to our kids for the things that they do around the house.

We can model what it's like to appreciate them so they feel the reciprocal appreciation for us. In this particular instance, modeling gratitude by saying, thank you for helping me with this chore. Thank you for putting your shoes on when I asked you to. Thank you for helping your sister. Thank you for being such a good helper in our family.

Anytime we can find something to thank our children for, it just gets them in the routine of hearing that this is just something we say in our family. This is a common occurrence. So we don't have to constantly be telling them, don't forget to say thank you, don't forget to say thank you. They're gonna know that they say thank you because they'll be so used to it. My second tip is similar in that it's creating a culture of gratitude within the family.

This means you maybe just have a gratitude moment in your day where the whole family goes around and shares things they're grateful for. Or even in a spiritual or worship type situation, you express gratitude to the universe, to God, to your higher power, for the blessings that you have in your life. Anytime you're making an emphasis to show appreciation, awe and gratitude for what you have, you're developing this skill in your children. And remember, it is a skill that they have to be taught. It's not something that's going to come naturally to them.

Again, kids can be very egocentric. So if we're not teaching them the skill of expressing gratitude, they won't just learn it on their own. So there you go, two tips that I hope you can take away and start implementing today to create a little bit more gratitude in your family culture. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to follow the show, leave a review and share it with a mom friend. I'll see you next time on Motherhood, the best job in the world.