5 Ways to Help Your Kids Take Gratitude Beyond Thanksgiving Week
Thanksgiving week is a great time to talk about gratitude as a family. But the effects of gratitude go way beyond one week of the year! Consistent gratitude makes kids and adults more energized, less stressed, happier, and more confident. Here are 5 helpful tips to take your family gratitude rhythms beyond Thanksgiving week:
Dinner or Bedtime Thankfulness Ritual
Just like washing your hands or brushing your teeth, make thankfulness part of your daily routines. At the end of the day, it can be helpful to reflect back on something you’re grateful for or someone you appreciate in your life. Big Life Journal has a great family resource to make building this habit easy! Check it out here >>
Send Out Thank You Notes
If your child expresses gratitude for a gift or something someone else did for them, send out a thank you note! This can be old-fashioned snail mail or a text/email, but the fact is that expressing gratitude to others can help build it in our own lives, too.
Weekly Gratitude Letter
In a similar vein, set a reminder once a week to tell someone how much you appreciate them. This is a great activity to do together so you can model what this looks like for your kids! Have them draw or color a picture, write a note, send a selfie, or do some other expression of appreciation to someone in their life each week to help them start thinking about how blessed they are!
Start a Family Gratitude Journal or Jar
You can fill a jar with popsicle sticks or pieces of paper, or fill the pages in a journal with the things you are grateful for as a family. To make it more fun, you could have some event or prize when the jar or journal is filled up!
Practice Turning Complaints into Positives
Reframing the things that happen each day into positives goes a LONG way to helping kids (and adults!) be more grateful and optimistic. This is a hard habit to learn, but practicing reframing your situations into learning experiences and looking for the silver lining can build this skill in your kids more naturally.
Does Your Kid Struggle to See the Positive or Express Themselves?
Poor word recall and problem-solving skills can make it really hard for kids to express themselves, whether in gratitude practices or otherwise. Helping your child build these skills at home is important, but if you feel like something isn’t clicking it could be because weak cognitive skills are at play!
Click here to learn more about cognitive skills and how they impact learning (and life!)
