Learning

The Greatest Gift You Can Give Your Children
Karen Schacter, contributing editor (dishingwithyourdaughters.com and healthybodieshappyminds.com)

“Gratitude can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” —Melody Beattie

For several weeks before Thanksgiving, when my children were in preschool, they would come home singing, “thanks for the bread and thanks for the flowers, thanks for the water and the cranberries.” And each year, still to this day, our family changes the words to offer thanks for the specific foods that are on our plates. I am reminded how simple, yet profound, the feeling and expression of gratitude can be.

Offering thanks before a meal is a practice of many religions. However, expressing gratitude — for our food or otherwise — is something that, for many of us, has fallen out of fashion in our day to day lives. Perhaps it is because we are living our lives so quickly (it’s hard to feel grateful when you're shoveling your child’s leftover waffle in your mouth as you rush out the door). Or maybe it’s because we live in a materialistic culture, where often the focus is on what we “need” more of, rather than what we already have. I think most of us know, on some level, that when we stop and smell the roses, food tastes better, life tastes better, and our inner selves feel a greater sense of contentment.

Instilling a sense of gratitude in ourselves and in our children for the food we are eating is different than the “you better finish what’s on your plate because there are children starving in Africa” — type of “comparison-gratitude” that you may have experienced as a child. It does no good to “force” gratitude by comparing oneself with others — that just creates guilt (not a feeling you want to associate with food), disconnection, overeating, or power struggles.

Instead, you can help your children become aware (and become more aware yourself) that their food is a gift that helps support their bodies — whether it is a gift from the earth, from the farmers, or from the animals. You can help your children (and yourself) experience greater connection with their foods and their bodies when you cultivate an attitude of thankfulness at your meals. It is much harder to overeat or to choose “junk” when you experience appreciation for your body and for the incredible array of foods that are available to you.

And the benefits of gratitude go beyond the table. Consider this: “Grateful people take better care of themselves and engage in more protective health behaviors like regular exercise, a healthy diet, regular physical examinations,” according to Robert Emmons, psychology professor, gratitude researcher, and author of the book Thanks.

In addition to promoting more health-enhancing behaviors, gratitude is a key to happiness, and happiness is good for you...physically, socially and emotionally. Gratitude can help you manage stress better, may help improve depression, self-esteem, and relationships, and may even enhance your physical health and ability to recover more quickly from illness. By teaching your children to notice “what’s good” and to take a moment to appreciate that, you are helping them develop a tool that will enhance their wellbeing throughout their entire lives.

It’s pretty amazing that a simple tool can so profoundly impact our physical, mental and emotional wellness! Let’s get gratitude-ing!

Here are a few ideas to take the concept of “gratitude” and make it a reality in your family’s life:

  1. Use Thanksgiving as a jumping-off point for your family to think about, and talk about, “giving thanks.” Consider taking a moment to express thanks for your food at one meal a day.
  2. Make a list of all the people who have done something nice for you that day (Emmons describes a mother who helped her child do this before bed each night, which helped the child fall asleep — and stay asleep — more easily: something we can all be thankful for!).
  3. Express gratitude for your children and what they are doing RIGHT. Focus less on what they are not eating, or not doing, and more on the things you appreciate about them.
  4. Try this at the dinner table: “What are you most grateful for today?” Have each person take a turn. When we do this, my children fight over who gets to go first (which sure beats fighting over a toy or whatever else might provoke their sibling rivalry!).
  5. Do things that express your gratitude to others: write a thank you note or say, thank you, to someone or for something that you might otherwise overlook.
  6. Give to others who are less fortunate than you and invite your children to do the same. Not only does this help the people who you are serving, but it makes the giver aware of how truly lucky he or she is. We are all made richer through reaching out to others.

When we truly feast on our food and on our lives, by waking up and noticing the bounty before us at Thanksgiving and always, we bring a sense of joy and happiness to our lives and to the lives of our family and friends. As the holidays approach, think of this as the greatest gift you can give your children.