The Cure for Entitlement:  Gratitude

My son has been excitedly asking about our gratitude jar for the past month.   Filling the jar with things we are thankful for is a tradition we do every November.  Every day in November (ideally… we often have to catch up!), we write down things we are thankful for on slips of paper and add them to the jar.  On Thanksgiving Day, we read all of our notes aloud.  It is a humbling and gratifying experience to say the least.  To hear aloud my family members say things that maybe I never think to be thankful for, this fills my heart!  This is what Thanksgiving is all about!

Get Our Hearts Right

It surprises me that he asks and even remembers! Our gratitude jar simply sits on our kitchen table for one month out of the year.  It precedes Christmas, which can become an extremely materialistic time of year if we’re not careful.  I love that it makes an impact on him, and I hope we keep this tradition for many years to come.  More than anything, in our entitled world, I want our kids to know the source of everything.  I want them to know that it comes from God, and not from any work they can do themselves.  Sure, hard work is often rewarded, but this gratitude is what separates the entitled from the humble and thankful.

Simple Jar or Bucket

Don’t fool yourself into thinking your container has to be Pinterest-worthy to use!  A gratitude jar (or gratitude bucket!) can be as crafty as you want, or have time, to make it!  It’s the practice, the habit, of daily writing down things we’re thankful for that we’re after.  If you have time to make it super-cute, then by all means, do!  This year, my usual glass apothecary jar was being used for something else.  So, we are using a galvanized bucket with a ribbon tied at the top!  Times are busy right now, but that doesn’t mean that we are going to miss this opportunity!  Who knows how many more years our kids will want to do this?!  I do hope it sticks with them.  But regardless, it will be a fulfilling memory to store away for future thanksgivings.

Solutions to Raising Grateful Kids

Beyond this simple idea of a gratitude jar, here are other ways to raise grateful kids in this entitled world:

1. Express thankfulness in prayers and blessings.  Thankfulness is a key element of prayer, and in blessings at meals, we bless the food and thank God for providing it.  Creating this habit reminds us daily to focus on God, and not on ourselves.
2. Give gifts and serve in the community.  When you give generously, you think of the receiver and it forces you to look beyond yourself.  Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in our situation, that we fail to look outward.  Giving good gifts to teachers and others in the community helps us to voice our appreciation of their work.
3. Get into nature and experience the awe and beauty around us, given to us by God.  How can you look at a sunrise and not be thankful?!
4. Live intentionally. Instead of trying to keep up with the Joneses, focus on what your purpose is and do that well!
5. Keep Christmas about the cross, and not just wanting more “stuff.”  We can challenge ourselves to give and not just want.  The 3 Gift rule helps our family keep away from all of the “I wants.”

Expressing Gratitude Creates Long Term Impact

Ultimately as parents, when we “teach” our children, we’re really teaching ourselves, right?  This reminder every November is good medicine for me AND it’s great for our kids.  We’re raising up the next generation, and who wants a bunch of spoiled adults running around!  Long term, I believe practicing gratitude creates healthier families.  Think of how much better you sleep when you’re not overspent and overworked?  When you’re able to focus on living intentionally, grateful for each day.  There are even studies pointing to gratitude reducing anxiety and depression in adults.  The results of one study are preliminary, but it suggests practicing gratitude actually rewires the brain!  Knowing that the future ahead for our children is not going to be any easier, I want to give my kids all the tools to have long, productive and meaningful lives.  Gratitude is a simple answer.

For more posts related to family and living intentionally around the holidays, join our newsletter and click to read these posts:

Christmas Giving with Kids

Three Gift Rule

Living Intentionally as a Mom

Family Meals

As we get back to school and life gets busy, it is easy to let meals around the table slip in importance. Study after study shows, however, that on multiple factors, having family meals together is the single most important thing we can do for our kids’ health.

Benefits of Meals around the Table

1. Physical Health– According to the American Association of Pediatrics, families who eat 3 or more family meals together per week, reduce their odds for being overweight by 12% and eating unhealthy foods by 20%.
2. Academia– Family meals and the dinner conversations that accompany them increase children’s vocabulary and ability to produce and understand stories.
3. Psychological– Family meals give children a place to be heard and understood.
4. By the teenage years, teens who eat dinner together report lower teen pregnancy rates, depression, and eating disorders.

On the side of mom, however, it is difficult to get healthy meals on the table every night with overwhelmed schedules when it is much easier to pick up fast food!  One of the priorities of Mom’s Priority is healthy families, so here are some family meal ideas to help you when you get overwhelmed:

Read on…

Mom’s Priority ~ Active Mom

“The less physically active a mother is, the more likely her child will be sedentary early in life”

WOW!! This study from the American Academy of Pediatrics keeps coming back to haunt me, as I am not as active as I would like to be!

Mom’s Priority

“Mom’s Priority” means many things to many moms, and to me, it includes modeling good habits that they can one day call their own. Being an active mom, athletically, is something that I struggle with, but hope to improve upon. With limited hours in the day, exercising often gets cut, and even more so, exercising WITH my kids is a challenge. But, there are so many ways to incorporate physical activity into our daily routine.  Read on…

As testing continues to accelerate in schools, parents and teachers are hoping that their children are well prepared and have acquired the reading skills needed to excel on their tests and be promoted to the next grade.  More than that, though, we want our kids to have a love of reading, so that throughout their lives, they have endless opportunity that is afforded when a person can read, comprehend, and use the information gathered to change their lives.  Good reading skills can certainly be life-changing!  Kids reading for fun is the way to increase comprehension and reading level.