With Thanksgiving approaching in a few days, I wanted to revisit a post I wrote on kids and thankfulness a while back.
With Thanksgiving approaching in a few days, I wanted to revisit a post I wrote on kids and thankfulness a while back.
“My kids just don’t appreciate a thing I do for them,” a mother in my office lamented a few weeks ago. Every mother knows her frustration. We work tirelessly for our children—especially at the holidays—and when they are over, we feel, well, empty.
Was all of our work worth it? Many times we assuage our sadness with the rationalization that our kids are just kids. We tell ourselves that no child appreciates his mother or father because he is self-centered and psychologically immature. Both of these are true, but I think that we miss something very important when we give our kids an easy pass. The truth is, most of our kids have more stuff than they need—luxuries that we work hard to give them. Many of our kids feel that our job is to provide, and their job is to enjoy.
The truth is, kids are egocentric and cognitively they do have difficulty identifying with the amount of work we do for them. They can only partly empathize because doing so takes a hefty dose of abstract thinking, and many kids don’t have much until they are well into their teens. But that is only half of an excuse. Still, we owe it to our kids to teach them to try to empathize and consider the feelings of others, especially ours. Believe it or not, we can be successful at this.
The best time to start teaching kids to think beyond their own feelings is right from the start. We tell two-year-olds not to bite because it hurts. We tell kindergartners that when they are mad they can’t hit because hurting another is socially unacceptable. So even if a child can’t put himself in another’s shoes, we still teach him common courtesy.
As they mature, we teach them not to bully friends and to say “thank you” when they receive a birthday gift. When Grandma makes them a scarf at Christmas, even though they may think it is hideous, we coach them how to spare Grandma’s feelings. After all, the point of the gift isn’t what the gift is; rather the meaning stems from the fact that the giver wanted to extend love and kindness.