Raising Grateful Kids
Grateful for my amazing sons Zach and Matt
Thankful to spend time with Matt Damon and learn his view of appreciative kids
Happy to discover why teens aren’t always grateful—and what parents can do
Since bringing a dose of gratitude and a new perspective was starting to make a huge difference in my marriage, I decided to give it a whirl with the rest of my family. First on the agenda were my two sons.
Scientists studying the human genome haven’t yet located a gratitude gene, but that’s possibly because they haven’t been looking. Parents who are happy and optimistic seem to pass those traits along to their children, who then adopt similar habits when they become parents. Whether it’s learned or inherited, a sense of gratitude clearly runs in families. I thought I was okay in the gratitude-for-kids category—but I was ready to improve.
I got the chance to practice sooner than I thought because my younger son, Matt, called to say that he was coming home for a few days of school vacation. I was delighted, since nothing makes me happier than having one of my boys around. But I also realized that parents can get so busy giving advice and suggestions to our kids that we forget to just enjoy them. So when Matt walked in the door, I offered my usual big hug and held him an extra-long time. Then I stepped back and told him how great he looked. He’s well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a winning smile, and I always melt at the constant twinkle in his eye.
He studied me closely, then gave that endearing smile and said, “You think my hair’s too long, right?”
“I didn’t say a word!” I protested.
“I saw your eyes drifting up and that expression on your face,” he said.
“You got me,” I said, laughing, and Matt joined in. He’s empathetic and aware and must have an emotional intelligence score that’s off the charts. And since that gives him an ability to read my every expression, any emotion I shared with him had to be genuine.
“Can’t you look great and still need a haircut?” I asked. And, of course, that was the point. Appreciating my son didn’t mean fake flattery or agreeing with his every choice. It did mean recognizing that he had a right to make those choices (and, hopefully, get a haircut).
My natural tendency as a mom has always been to jump in with a thousand ideas for what my children might want and how I can improve their lives.
Do you need new socks?
I can edit that essay for you.
Did you call the guy you worked with last summer?
Let me put more milk in your cereal.
It’s all well-meaning and loving, but it turns out to be exhausting—for both me and them. So I decided this time would be different. For the next couple of days, I sat back and just appreciated the charming, funny, smart (and did I mention great-looking?) young man who was now hanging around my house. I counted my lucky stars rather than the dishes he piled up in front of the TV. Often the comments parents consider helpful are heard by kids (maybe not wrongly) as critical, so I tried hard to give up on that mode. As I did, Matt relaxed around me more and more. He’s whip smart and we’ve always had a close relationship, but one day he shared a story about a former girlfriend and stopped in the middle to grin. “Am I supposed to be telling my mom all this?” he asked.
“I’m grateful that you do,” I said. “I’m not going to give any advice, but I’m always on your side.”
Matt finished his story, then leaned across the table. “Thanks for always being there for me, Mom. I’m pretty lucky to have you and Dad.”
“We’re the lucky ones,” I said.
Appreciating your child for who he is should be both natural and obvious—but I’m surprised at how bad many of us are at doing it. Kids of every age want their parents’ approval, and it’s a great gift to let them have it. After Matt headed back to school, I had lunch with my friend Jess, a mom in her midforties who likes to describe herself as a “reformed lawyer.” She had quit a big firm to raise her children and did more volunteer work than almost anyone I knew. I told her what a great visit I’d had with Matt, and she immediately launched into worries about her own daughter, a sophomore in college. Jess didn’t like that she was majoring in art history (“hard to get a job”) or involved with a guy from Spain (“what if she moves there?”). Jess was always trying to get her daughter to share information about her life, but the nineteen-year-old had turned sullen and rarely called anymore.
“I wouldn’t call you either, if I knew you were going to criticize me,” I said with a shrug.
“It’s constructive criticism,” Jess said defensively.
“You think you’re constructing, but she thinks you’re tearing down. Try being only positive.”
Jess looked at me blankly for a moment and then seemed to get it. She’d been on board earlier when I’d told her about my year of living gratefully and had even started her own gratitude journal. But it hadn’t occurred to her that the same technique could have an effect on her relationship with her daughter.
“What do you suggest?” she asked.
“Something cheerful, upbeat, and short,” I said. “A text message that just lets her know you appreciate her.”
“You do that with your sons?” Jess asked warily.
“I do,” I admitted.
I told Jess that when she didn’t hear from her daughter, she missed her and wanted to know what was happening in her life. But what started as love ended up sounding like anger. As I’d learned earlier, the real issue wasn’t the event (the daughter not calling) but Jess’s response to it. The real message Jess wanted to send was You’re the best gift ever! I’m so grateful to have you in my life!
Jess handed me her iPhone. “You’re the writer. What should I write?”
“This isn’t ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’” I said. “You don’t have to be John Keats to let your kid know you’re grateful for her. Just be honest.”
I quickly typed, “Hope you’re having a great week. No headlines from here, I’m just thinking of you with hugs.”
I gave the phone back to Jess.
“Not bad,” she said, reading it.
“Adapt however you like. But that’s the idea.”
Jess hit Send and then sat back and stared at the screen.
“Gratitude doesn’t need an immediate reply,” I said. “You do it for yourself as much as for her.”
The next day, Jess told me her daughter had a job interview that afternoon and she was thinking about sending some advice on what to wear. I vetoed the sartorial suggestions—which seemed to me like just an excuse for getting in touch.
“The real point is that you want to let her know you’re cheering for her,” I said. Then dictating a possibility, I offered, “Good luck with the summer job interview. I think you’re the best—and I’m betting they will, too.”
Within five minutes, Jess delightedly reported that she’d gotten a reply. “Thanks, Mom! I’ll call you later and tell you how it goes.”
It was a small victory, but it seemed to prove the point. We instinctively want to be with someone who appreciates us and accepts us unconditionally.
“She even said thanks!” Jess added cheerfully.
Getting a thank-you from children of a certain age is a rare and wonderful thing, and most parents are right to savor it—and not expect it too often. In the gratitude survey I had done, young people ages eighteen to twenty-four (the youngest millennials) proved less grateful than anyone else. Barely one-third said they expressed gratitude on any regular basis (for those over thirty-five, it was more than half), and they were also more likely to think in terms of the personal benefits of expressing gratitude—saying thanks in the hope that it would encourage other people to be nicer to them.
Gratitude is an issue for slightly younger teens, too, as I discovered when I went to a party and met an energetic group of working moms. Most of them had teenage children, and when they heard about my yearlong quest for gratitude, they offered a lot of eye rolling and teeth gnashing.
“I can’t wait to read your book, because I have the most ungrateful kid in the world!” one of them said. The other moms were eager to compete with her for title of parent of “most ungrateful child.” One reported that when she sent her fifteen-year-old to an expensive computer camp the previous summer, she suggested he show his thanks by calling home a few times a week. He seemed puzzled by the suggestion. “What am I thanking you for, Mom? Isn’t sending kids to camp what parents are supposed to do?”
The question elicited knowing groans. Another mom who regularly drove her hockey-playing daughter to tournaments in distant towns said she didn’t mind the long trips, but she wanted her daughter to appreciate the effort. Prodded for thanks, the young goalie turned defensive. “I’m a kid. Since I can’t drive, you have to take me,” she said, pouting.
Part of the problem could be attributed to the chemistry of the brain. If it often seems that kids don’t know how lucky they are, it’s because—they don’t. How would they know? That’s not where their brains are focused. Neuroscientists have shown that different regions in the brain develop at different rates. The prefrontal cortex, which controls reasoning and executive control, is on the slow track. Children and teens, like all of us, are partly products of their neural circuits. Parents need to use our (supposedly) better-developed prefrontal cortices to provide some perspective.
For advice on how to do that, I called Christine Carter, a sociologist from Berkeley, California, who coaches families on how to be happier. (Yes, California has happiness coaches.) When families come in for consultations, she often helps them set gratitude rituals. For example, at dinner each night, everyone discusses what made them grateful. Or before bed, they share three good things about the day. “Finding silver linings gives kids at any age more resilience and helps them short-circuit anxiety,” she told me.
Carter’s family had recently expanded, and with four children and stepchildren ages eleven to fourteen, she had adapted the rituals that she herself had been using for years. “You don’t want gratitude to feel like a grind,” she said. If Christine had to travel or the children were away, she might have them text her three good things that had happened to them. A neighbor who had a very shy son decided it was too difficult to share grateful thoughts out loud, so everyone got slips of paper before dinner and wrote “gratitude fortunes,” which they dropped in a box.
I asked Christine if her kids ever objected to her approach. “They’ve grown up with gratitude as part of their lives, so they don’t have that entitled attitude I hear parents describe,” she said. I immediately thought of the moms at the party, and Christine wasn’t surprised to hear their complaints.
“Teens don’t want to feel like they’re pawns in someone else’s game,” she said. “The more controlling parents are and the more they structure the kids’ lives around enrichment, achievement, and college, then the more kids lose touch with who they are and what they want.”
Which brings us back to those ungrateful millennials from my survey. When I conducted focus groups about gratitude as part of that John Templeton Foundation study, most of the participants—including professionals, working parents, and stay-at-home moms—got excited by the subject. Some admitted that they hadn’t thought much about gratitude before but just having the session made them want to add more to their lives. “This afternoon was a life-changing big deal!” one woman e-mailed me afterward.
The sessions with millennials were completely different. College-age kids (and those in their early twenties, just starting careers) were struggling so hard to define themselves that they couldn’t look beyond their own shadows. Many seemed almost offended by the whole concept of gratitude.
“I hate that feeling of I owe you something,” said Greg, a twenty-two-year-old living in Boulder, Colorado, who took part in one of the discussions. “I don’t like receiving gifts or acts of kindness, because they just make me feel awkward.”
The other millennials in Greg’s group quickly agreed. And they made it very clear that the people they really didn’t want to feel obligated to were their parents. One young woman literally wrinkled her nose when asked about being grateful to her family. “I can be grateful to the counter guy at the deli, maybe. But my parents are just doing what nature intended. Even chimps take care of their children.”
Ah, yes. Parents as chimps. If we’re just fulfilling our biological imperative, why would our children say thanks? Part of the kids’ biological imperative was to develop independence, and gratitude somehow felt antithetical to that. The kids in the focus groups were still at an age where they needed parental help, but they wanted to pretend they didn’t. Greg said that when he couldn’t afford an apartment, his dad offered to pay the security deposit.
“I didn’t like it because the whole point was to live on my own. I took the money, but only with spite,” he said.
A young woman named Emma understood. She had just graduated from a college in western Massachusetts and her parents were helping pay the rent while she started a film internship. “How I feel is all twisted around. Any gratitude gets smothered with guilt and annoyance that I have to be reliant on them. I feel the guilt a lot more than the gratitude,” she said.
From the stories, it seemed like they had model parents—generous and eager to give their grown kids a positive start. But instead of flooding their parents with thank-yous, they took what was offered while holding their noses. It struck me that they were secretly grateful for the help, but even more chagrined that they couldn’t yet handle the world completely by themselves. Guilt over gratitude, as Emma said.
“It’s about control. You want to achieve on your own and not think someone else helped,” Greg said.
The conflict and confusion registered most clearly in the story that a slim, dark-haired eighteen-year-old named Akil told. He had been given a full scholarship to a small urban college, and in addition to tuition, “they gave me a place to live, they gave me a laptop, they gave me stipends and stuff like that.”
Surely, a $50,000-a-year gift should hit the list of reasons to be grateful for even the most muddled millennial. But Akil didn’t see it that way. He softly explained that his real dream had been to go to Duke, where he could have cool friends and watch big-deal basketball games. Though he had accepted the generous scholarship and knew he’d learn a lot at the small college, he spent every day second-guessing himself.
“I’m grateful that I was given the scholarship and all, but I also resent it because I wanted something else,” he said sadly.
What can you say about a kid who resents having no college debt? A lot of giving and goodwill had been doled out to each of these young adults and they didn’t seem to appreciate it. Were they a bunch of ingrates? I didn’t think so. They seemed to be typical college-age kids who knew in their heart of hearts that they were lucky to have support—whether a security deposit, a scholarship, or a safety net—but were still having the toddler-like tantrums of I want to do it myself!
Expressing gratitude outright to their parents wasn’t in the cards, but they clearly had the nagging sense that something was necessary to balance the deck. Emma announced that her way of showing gratitude to her parents was by being the best person she could be.
“My mother told me she was in labor with me for twenty-four hours and my parents paid for my college, so I will be a good child and do equally unpleasant things for them in return,” she said airily.
What kind of things?
She thought about it for a moment.
“Oh, I know,” she said triumphantly. “Sometimes I’ve sat and listened to my mother nattering for forty minutes about the animals chewing up her vegetable garden. I know that’s small-scale, but trust me, it’s not something I enjoy!”
So there it was. Emma thought chatting about chipmunks was a fair exchange—and a perfect way to show gratitude—for all her parents had done. It brought to mind the lovely poem by Billy Collins, the former US poet laureate, reflecting on the lanyard he made for his mother as a child at summer camp. “She gave me life and milk from her breasts, / and I gave her a lanyard . . .” he wrote, going on to marvel at his childish belief that the “worthless thing I wove out of boredom / would be enough to make us even.”
The poem makes everyone smile, not because it’s so far-fetched but because it’s so understandably real. Yale president Peter Salovey quoted the full poem once when he gave a speech to graduating seniors and pointed out that “the need to express gratitude reminds us that we are not entirely in control; that we might be indebted or dependent; that our destiny is not entirely in our hands; indeed, that on occasion we are vulnerable.”
Indebted, vulnerable, and out of control are not emotions that any young adult wants to feel. Yet President Salovey went on to say that true happiness in life “may not be possible without the capacity to reject the myth of total self-reliance. The good life may be out of reach unless we are able to cultivate an openness to accepting help from others and expressing gratitude for that help.”
—
So what’s the best way to cultivate that willingness to be grateful? How do we give kids a bigger view and get them to understand that attending computer camp or getting money for college isn’t their essential right? That maybe (just maybe!) we are all interconnected and they are luckier than they know?
I thought about conversations I had on the subject with actor Matt Damon when we did a couple of magazine articles together. Handsome and charming in person, Damon also came across as smart and thoughtful and very sincere. The first time we met, he told me that when he was growing up, his mom, an educator in the Boston area, had a magnet on the refrigerator with a quote from Gandhi that said, “No matter how insignificant what you do may seem, it is important that you do it.”
“I was raised to believe in sharing what you have, and I want my children to understand that too,” he said. When he was a kid, he got an allowance of five dollars a week, and after a while, he started sending most of it to various causes that his mom supported.
“Be careful how you say that or I’ll sound like too much of a goody-goody,” he joked.
One afternoon, we sat in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a place where people usually talk about movie deals, back-end points, and their latest and greatest screenplay. But Matt sipped a cappuccino and told me about his travels around the world to try to understand global poverty.
“I spent my twenties really focused on my career, which is okay,” he said. “But now my career is in a solid place and I have a family and I want my kids to see that their dad has a bigger world than just photo shoots.”
Making that world bigger—for himself and his children—was a challenge. He knew that a guy who pals around with George Clooney and has made a fortune in Hollywood blockbusters like The Bourne Identity (and its sequels) wasn’t always taken seriously. After visiting Africa once to raise awareness on the refugee problem, he was interviewed on the BBC, and the somewhat condescending reporter asked if a celebrity like him could really make a difference.
“We’d just spent fifteen minutes on the air talking about Zimbabwe,” he told me with a laugh. “I said, ‘Would you have discussed this topic at all if you weren’t talking to me?’”
A few years earlier, Damon was in South Africa, shooting the Clint Eastwood–directed movie Invictus. Damon played a white rugby star who became a key player in Nelson Mandela’s efforts to heal the wounds of postapartheid South Africa. His family had come on location, and Damon thought about taking his oldest daughter, Alexia, then only ten, to tour the impoverished townships of Johannesburg with him. He asked his costar Morgan Freeman (who was playing Mandela in the movie) what he should say to her to explain the misery and poverty. What reason could he give for why her life was so different from theirs?
“Morgan said to me, ‘You don’t have to tell her anything. Just let her see. That’s all the education anyone needs.’ And it was the best advice I could have gotten. She just looked and looked and took it in. Those kinds of experiences can be life changing.”
His approach was just right. It turns out that empathy is fundamental to gratitude—and to what psychologists now describe as “emotional intelligence.” Various studies in brain and behavior suggest that IQ accounts for only about 20 percent of a child’s success in later life. A full 80 percent is determined by other factors that revolve around emotional style. When kids can step outside of themselves for a moment and imagine what it is to be someone else, they are better able to respond to other people’s emotions—and to recognize their own. They also start to appreciate both what they have and what others have done for them.
You don’t have to be a big star or travel to South Africa to encourage empathy. When my own son Matt was in high school, he volunteered at the South Street Seaport Museum, helping renovate the 1885 Wavertree, one of the last big ships made of wrought iron. Matt’s job one day was to scrape rust off the hull, and after several hours of hard labor, he was sweaty, exhausted, and filthy, his hands covered with black iron, which had also streaked across his face. As he sunk into his seat on the train home, he noticed people looking at him dubiously and moving away.
At dinner that night, he turned reflective—and as appreciative of his life as a fifteen-year-old could be.
“When I was dirty and in work boots, people treated me like a different person,” he told us. “I realized how lucky I am that I was working at the Wavertree for fun and not because I had to.”
That perspective stuck with him. It made an impression that I couldn’t have achieved by telling him a thousand times how lucky he was. Instead, like Matt Damon, I didn’t need to say a word.
—
Teaching values like gratitude on a wider basis is one of the missions of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues in England. I exchanged some e-mails with James Arthur, the director of the center, and though he’s based at the University of Birmingham, he agreed to meet with me on his next trip to London.
With an excuse to fly to one of my favorite cities, I grabbed the cheapest possible overnight flight and arrived in London early in the morning, much too exhilarated to have any jet lag. I walked around Hyde Park, dipped into the British Museum, and lunched at Fortnum & Mason. (Gratitude, thy name is scones with clotted cream.) Early the next morning, I took a taxi from my hotel near Kensington Gardens to the eminent Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall, founded in 1824 as a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. James Arthur, a distinguished man with silver hair and a firm handshake, met me in the huge lobby and led me up the impressive grand staircase. We took a quick tour through several massive and elegant rooms, including a library with floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases (and not a Kindle in sight). Then we sat down on the leather sofas of the morning room, where we had tea and discussed his interest in bringing gratitude and other moral values into the school system.
“Virtue education has the potential to transform the lives of young people,” he said.
His team had looked at how moral character was encouraged in seven different schools, from Eton (founded by King Henry VI in 1440) to a local primary school in Birmingham that included many children with special needs. He hoped to take the best practices and expand them. “We are seeking new ways to teach character and give young people a view beyond themselves,” he said.
As one way to encourage gratitude, the Jubilee Centre sponsored the Thank You Film Awards for kids under sixteen (divided by age). Entries came in from all over the country, and the center held premieres at real theaters so kids could see their shorts on a big screen. The range of people thanked was impressive—from leaders in civil and women’s rights to doctors in the National Health Service. Videos from some of the youngest kids expressed gratitude to daddies, “lollipop ladies” (the local name for crossing guards), and bumblebees.
Really, something was going right when five-year-olds wanted to thank bumblebees.
James Arthur was optimistic that encouraging gratitude could have an effect on creating a more generous and welcoming world. As we moved on to our second cup of tea, I realized that he was a deeply religious man, but he pointed out that the center stuck to what he called “post-religious language.” He felt strongly that in an increasingly secular society, character and virtue couldn’t be abandoned. We just needed a new way to approach them. Gratitude wasn’t just a religious notion, it was a human one. Education has always been about preparing the young for the future—and won’t it be a more hopeful future if it is imbued with the kindness and compassion that gratitude can inspire?
I nodded and swallowed hard. For James Arthur and his colleagues, research into gratitude wasn’t just cold social psychology. Understanding how to spread gratitude to the next generation became his way of creating a better world.
Back in New York, it struck me that my personal quest to live gratefully had a much bigger dimension. Gratitude wouldn’t replace math and science in the schools (though some might like that), but it had started to gain traction. More schools now intervened in social arenas—like trying to stop bullying or helping to mainstream students with disabilities—and James Arthur was right that all of those efforts fell under the bigger rubric of teaching values. I read about a private elementary school in Colorado that tried to incorporate gratitude into the classroom. Younger students talked about what made them grateful, and fourth and fifth graders kept gratitude journals. The head of school said simply, “If you raise kids to be grateful, they will find success.”
What schools aren’t doing yet, parents can try. If we want kids to know how blessed they are, they need a basis for comparison—and that requires the gift of a wider worldview. Some of those moms who worried about their ungrateful teens could think about taking them to a soup kitchen on a Saturday morning instead of a mall. Not as much fun, maybe, but a better deal in the long run. Or they could try one of my favorites: collecting all the charitable appeals that come in the mail into a big basket and finding a night when the whole family can sit down together to go through them. Parents set the budget for giving and the kids decide how it’s distributed. Or parents could simply set the model of gratitude in daily life. I don’t usually hang out on Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest, but heck, go where the kids are. Why not have everyone in the family post or text (or whatever you do) a picture each week of something that inspired appreciation—whether a friend, a snowflake, or a sunset. If kids live on social media, the shared experience might as well help everyone see the world differently.
—
Doing research on gratitude and kids, I came across some brand-new studies by a guy named Yarrow Dunham, who seemed to be at Princeton. But when I called him, I found he was now a full-time professor at Yale.
“My wife studies medieval music, French and Italian fourteenth century, and I’m a psychologist—and we both managed to get appointments at Yale. Talk about gratitude!” he said exuberantly.
I didn’t know enough about his wife’s field to ask a single question, but his studies definitely had wide appeal. He had done important research on how people divide into social groups—whether Yankee fans or Hindu castes—and headed something called the Social Cognitive Development Lab, which looked at how children naturally adhere to groups. (Randomly assign some children red T-shirts and others blue T-shirts, and they will immediately become fiercely loyal to the group that two minutes earlier didn’t exist.) Now he was starting a side project analyzing the ingredients that encouraged gratitude in children. Like James Arthur, he was interested in how gratitude could lead to a bigger circle of virtue.
“Adults make a distinction between gratitude and obligation,” he told me. “Obligation is a debt that you have to pay back. Gratitude is that feeling when something good happens and you are happy with the world. Instead of a sense of debt, there’s a bigger feeling of wanting to pay it forward. Children don’t necessarily go through the mental gymnastics necessary for those distinctions.”
In one study done with his colleague Peter Blake at Boston University, he brought little kids (ages four to eight) into his lab and gave them a gift, like a sticker book or temporary tattoo. Some were told the gift was a thank-you for coming to the lab—what Dunham called “a straight exchange relationship.” The others were told that another child had given them the gift and was sharing his favorite toy.
Next, the children played a game where they were given ten Starburst candies, and they could take all of them or share some with another child.
And bingo. The kids who felt they’d received a gift from another child—as opposed to payment for coming to the lab—were more likely to share. Dunham was excited to see that even with very young children, a bit of gratitude made them want to do something for someone else.
Evolutionary biologists have studied reciprocity, which is what happens when you do something nice for me and I now do the same for you. Voilà, we become a cooperative species. Reciprocity is the simplest form of gratitude. Many studies have found it in animals—who are more likely to groom or share food with others who have helped them. I recently saw a touching video of animal gratitude in action. Primatologist Jane Goodall and a colleague had rescued a chimp named Wounda from near death, and after nursing her back to health, they were releasing her to freedom on a leafy island sanctuary. The gangly chimp lumbered out to head into the woods. But then she stopped, came back, and shimmied up to wrap her arms around Goodall. She held Goodall for a long time in the kind of loving embrace we’d all like. Thanks given, she climbed back down and headed off. You couldn’t watch that without thinking—there goes one grateful chimp.
Dunham was pleased to point out that feelings of gratitude in children (real-life human ones, that is) inspire even greater sharing than simple reciprocity. The children who were grateful for their little gift shared their Starbursts with other children. It wasn’t just payback or obligation. Maybe that bumps us up a little higher than chimps on that evolutionary chain?
“Gratitude goes beyond the you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours dyad and creates a broad network of possibility,” he said. Dropping his academic veneer, he added enthusiastically, “That’s very cool!”
Dunham hoped to look next at how gratitude might create in kids and adults “a self-perpetuating cycle of virtuous deeds.” A child who’s grateful does something for the next kid, who does something for the next, who does something for the next . . . And eventually (theoretically, at least) it comes back to the first child. So-called pro-social behavior seems to be contagious.
On the less positive side, I was interested in Dunham’s discovery that the children who thought they deserved the gift (they had earned it by coming to the lab) didn’t feel gratitude at all. I asked if that attitude might explain some teenage behavior.
“Great question!” he said, flattering me with his spirited reply. “Teenagers have a sense of entitlement that fights gratitude. If they code it that parents or the community or the world is obligated to provision them with the things they want, then the parent is just living up to their obligations. That’s not a mind-set that creates a grateful disposition.”
I liked his work and promised to stay in touch. And when I hung up, it occurred to me that maybe the problem I’d seen with the “ungrateful” kids and teens and millennials was really a question of obligation versus gratitude. None of us wants to think that we send our kids to camp or buy them cashmere sweaters out of obligation. But if kids see it as an “exchange relationship,” maybe the moms I’d met who wanted their teens to be grateful for rides to hockey games or summers at computer camp needed to take a step back. Growing up, did any of us really recognize how much our own parents did for us? My dad came from a very poor family and struggled to put himself through Boston University. He was proud to get an education but poignantly couldn’t afford to attend his senior prom, so he got a job working the front desk that night, selling tickets to his wealthier classmates. Watching them glide past him to go to the dance was a misery he never forgot. Thirty years later, he still felt the sting. I was in college (and a week from my own prom) when my dad told me that story, and only then did it occur to me how grateful my siblings and I should feel that he had fully covered our college costs. Moved by what he had sacrificed, I nobly asked if we could work out a plan so I could return the tuition to him as soon as I could afford it.
“You can pay me back but not with money,” said my gentle dad. “The best return would be to do the same thing for your own children.”
I didn’t really understand it at the time, but now I would ask the same thank-you of my boys. Don’t pay it back—pay it forward. That’s the greatest gratitude. And it goes far to meeting the virtuous goals of people like James Arthur and Yarrow Dunham, who see gratitude as a step to a kinder world.
—
Probably the best thing parents can do is to set an example of gratitude, finding a balance between planning for the future and savoring the present. But we’re often lousy at that. My older son, Zachary, was always so competent growing up that sometimes the best parenting trick was just to step back and admire what he did. But when he was a junior in high school, Zach noticed that every adult he encountered asked where he would be applying for college.
“It’s as if what I’m doing now doesn’t matter,” he complained at the time.
He got good at deflecting the queries—he’s always been clever—but once he landed in college, the same people wanted to know about his career plans. Hey, what about classes, professors, and the really cool experiments he did in the physics lab? Somehow, Zach instinctively knew to be grateful for the moments along the way. His freshman year at Yale, he and three other guys shared a suite so small he had to climb over the bunk beds to get to his desk. But the room was in a dorm on the Old Campus, a classic quadrangle built in the late 1800s on the model of Oxford and Cambridge. When I visited one day, we stood outside his entryway as the chapel bells pealed and the sun glinted off the century-old buildings. I wondered to myself if an eighteen-year-old could appreciate the scene, but before I could say a word, Zach gestured to his surroundings and asked me to stand still for a moment.
“Every morning when I step outside, I make myself stop and look around and appreciate that I’m here. I’ll never get to live in a place like this again. I don’t want to take it for granted,” he told me.
That he could overlook the cramped quarters and simply feel the magic of the place amazed me. As parents, we can be grateful and teach gratitude too. Helping kids reframe their experiences and exposing them to the greater world is a gift, and a little later, understanding the mind-set that keeps teens from expressing gratitude can help everyone get through bumpy times. I’d like to take credit for Zach’s grateful perspective and report all I did to instill it in him. But the truth is that he figured it out himself. When I think about my children, I am endlessly grateful to have them. And grateful that I can learn from them, too. The bottom line might simply be this: To raise grateful kids, be grateful for your kids.