Change Your Life and Travel The World While Getting Cash Deposited Into Your Bank Account Every Single Day

You Will Get Immediate Download Access to Free Report and Become a Free Priority Access Member to Our 100k a Month Coaching Program

CYNTHIA ARMSTRONG

Teaching Children Gratitude

By Cynthia Armstrong

Hi, today I want to talk about how to teach our children gratitude, because that can be tricky in this world. It can be a challenge sometimes to teach children how to be grateful for the things they have and what they're capable of.

Hi, I'm Cynthia Armstrong. I'm a general and a special education teacher. I homeschooled my own children for five years, and the things that I talk about are those things that I've researched, studied, applied, both kind of in the academic world and also in the alternative world, finding things that actually work. I am going to talk a little bit today about teaching our children gratitude. One of the ways to teach children is gratitude.We, as parents, should be an example of having gratitude ourselves. It is a way of thinking, a way of processing. These are experiences and connections that aren't necessarily taught by.

I'm going to give you a lesson. This is how you're going to be grateful. It is a mindset. It is a process when we can progress our thinking in that way. It is a way of life that we just demonstrated, it's just part of who we are that will have the biggest influence on our children. It's having gratitude.

Coming from someone who felt very stuck, I felt stuck like I couldn't get what I wanted out of life. I couldn't improve to something I want to become. I was depressed and anxious. I had been to varying degrees for years and it even came to a point where one Sunday I stayed home from church and seriously contemplated suicide. That's how ungrateful I was. And there's a lot that's mixed up into that but that gratitude is huge, and there's so much research.

Out there, from where I was and where perhaps you might know someone you love might also be in that kind of situation or feeling that way. We don't know how to be grateful. I'd never learned that. I've just heard that from somebody else saying “be grateful”. Have a great gratitude journal. It’s been rewarding. It gets a neurochemical reward for any of the feelings we have, whether they're the ones we want to hang out in or not. My brain was getting a reward for that pattern that it picked up as a child and I didn't get a choice and so it wasn't learning specifically about gratitude, that made the difference. For me. It was about learning to disconnect patterns that I had and then attach them in a way that I wanted. It allowed me to begin to experience gratitude. If we don't have gratitude, then it's really hard.

I don't know of anybody who doesn't have gratitude and can feel joy. And when we have that and when we feel that our children. Begin to pick up that pattern and that's where we want, right? Don't we want joy for our children? Don’t we want that gratitude for our kids? And it's not an expectation. I did this for you before. “You must be grateful to me or must be grateful for what I gave you”. When we come with expectations of how my children have to respond, this is how they're supposed to respond. I can't feel joy unless my children respond this way. Then that's trying to control, trying to manipulate that idea of gratitude with them. Because there's no. Forcing gratitude. But demonstrate. Demonstrate it. Can we demonstrate our gratitude for them? Can we demonstrate our gratitude for the situation we're in? And guess what? It doesn't matter how difficult your situation is. If you're homeless, if you're recently divorced, if you didn't get to spend a holiday with your kids, if it doesn't matter. If you know the fire took out your home, or the floods or the earthquakes. It doesn't matter.

Gratitude can be in any situation when you learn to disconnect or reconnect. Or maybe you've had that opportunity to have that connection already in your life. But when we learn to look for those, then we can find them anywhere. And yes, I did see the movie Pollyanna as a child and I still enjoy that one. So if. If that's a movie that you have watched, and it is very much that way, she asks a question pretty much. Questions can be really genuine and honest where we seek an answer and not just using a question to complain. It really helps switch our brain from old patterns of being ungrateful and just seeing things that are wrong in our lives too.

Begin and then strengthen the gratitude that you have as a mindset. What is there to be grateful for? It can be a complaint, you know what is there to be grateful for, or it can be. What has come into my life because of this challenge, or because of this beautiful child, or because of this situation that I had no idea it was going to come to me. If we ask ourselves questions, then we find those. Answers and if you are a Christian or believe in the Bible right, think about things that have become calm because of situations. I mean one of the things that pops into my mind is Joseph, right? If you got sold into slavery in Egypt after being put in a well, he got things that are going great, then he gets put in prison. What if he did not experience those things? How many people would have died in the famine that came later? We don't know where the things that we're experiencing right now in our life are leading to that we benefit from.

Even if we can't think of something right in this exact moment, still find a reason to be grateful for. I have the opportunity to help other families that struggle with this same one or because of some scenarios. I'm going to meet new people and get to share the joy that I had with my child even if I am in the pain of loss, but still being grateful for anything good that is happening.

What would it mean if I didn't have the pain of loss? That I didn't really care about my child? That she didn't really have a way in my life? We can answer questions we don't really have answers to, but that leads us to think the way we want so that we can feel what we prefer to feel. Gratitude is so important and when it comes naturally from us, our children. We will begin to pick it up and ask the questions we ask ourselves to help us lead to that gratitude or question that we can ask our children in a natural way. That is the best way we can help develop gratitude in our children that I have found. And if you find more out there, please feel free to share them because I love to share and I love to learn. So remember, children are great by their very natures. And we have that privilege and that responsibility to raise them.