“Piglet noticed that even though he had a very small heart, it could hold a rather large amount of gratitude” -A.A. Milne
Teaching children about gratitude can be difficult, because it’s a fairly abstract concept. It requires sustained attention, self regulation/body awareness, verbal and nonverbal working memory (NVWM), stopping, shifting, self awareness, comparing, time sense, and many other skills depending on the situation. It’s not something tangible you can show them like an apple or a skateboard, and often gratitude involves other people, events, or moments in time, all of which have to be recorded and stored in a child’s imagination, also know as their nonverbal working memory.
It is has been shown repeately that what we pay attention to effects our memories, so we if aren’t looking for ways to be grateful, we won’t store the memories needed to retrieve that feeling later on. While we can tell children to ‘say thank you’ that doesn’t actually teach them to be grateful. It gives them a script, but it doesn’t imbue them with a feeling. And that feeling, that bursting warmth in your heart you feel when you are grateful, that is what makes gratitude such a good practice. Saying thank you and feeling thankful require very different levels of understanding and awareness.
Neuroscientists and psychologists have been studying the effects of a regular gratitude practice for years. Studies have repeatedly found being grateful and expressing gratitude can have a plethora of positive effects on your mental health including boosting you mood, making you more optimistic, improving relationships with others, making you more compassionate and making you feel more positive emotions overall. It can even help with conditions like depression and anxiety. In a 2016 study they found
“…even brief expressions of gratitude may have profound and lasting effects on neural activity” (Kini et al., 2016).
To teach gratitude, I believe we have to approach it as we approach many abstract concepts. We have to break it down and make it concrete. UNC Chapel Hill has created a project called ‘raising grateful children’ and has broken down teaching gratitude into four parts: Notice, Think, Feel, Do. I have listed some ideas below on how I might work on these skills with students, using thees four concepts as a guide. I don’t follow quite how they do it in the project, but I hope the information below helps give y’all some ideas of how you could incorporate your own version into your practice if your an SLP or eduator. Ot if you are parent, there are plenty of ideas to use at home. Or take the UNC course! It's free and only takes 30 minutes to complete.
Teaching Gratitude
Notice
Often when I’m introducing something, I first will ask my students what they know, because the answers help me gauge their understanding or background knowledge. If I ask what they think when they hear ‘grateful’ and they respond, "my mom says I’m ungrateful so I think grateful is stupid", that helps me know what their previous experience is with the word.
With some students, I might write the word on the board and just make a word cloud of all the different things they tell me about gratitude. Do they know what it means? What images do they see in their imagination when they hear the word? Can they use it in a sentence? Do they think it’s something you can learn how to do? Is there someone they would describe as grateful? Can they think of a time they were grateful?
I might also use a book, video or recent news story to introduce this to a group.
Sesame Street has an several great resources on gratitude for younger kids and honestly has some great ideas for all ages!
Y'all could watch kid president! He says thankful, but you can explain thankful and grateful are synonyms. At the end, he asks the viewers to add to his list and some kids might have an easier time after seeing a bunch of examples.
Think
Think and notice will likely have some overlap. For 'thinking' I might ask students about a time someone did something special for them. Give examples, such as your grandparents helped you make the best chocolate chip cookies, or your friend found your backpack when you thought you lost it, or your mom knew you had a big basketball game after school and packed you a huge lunch with lots of extra snacks. Depending on your students, you could even talk about something such as noticing how cozy a blanket feels or that it didn’t rain during your soccer game, or you went to the beach and met some friends who helped you build an enormous sandcastle. This is where I would try to pinpoint specific examples of times they were grateful, trying to make sure I didn’t simply focus on times they were given something physical. Talk about why, ‘why do you think someone helped you or did that or why did you think that happened?’ I might also have them think about when they did something nice for someone else, why did they do that?
Feel
Next, I would talk to them about what gratitude might feel like in their bodies. When someone did something for them, where did they feel it? In their heart? In their head? In their belly? What about when you notice a beautiful sunset, where do you feel it? Contrast it with another emotion they understand like anger or excitement. Talk about what felt different in their bodies between the two. Use a body-shaped outline, and have them draw where they felt it when someone did something kind for them.
Once I thought they really understood where they felt it in their bodies, we would talk about how being grateful is a feeling. But being grateful is tricky because it can be an emotion we have to practice. We don't have to practice being annoyed, usually our bodies and brains do that for us. But being grateful is something that not everyone knows how to be because it takes a lot of skills. We have to think about what someone else did for us. We have to use our imagination to picture something in the past. We have to notice the emotions in our body. We have to be present in the moment. We have to practice being grateful, which can be hard if we are having a lot of other feelings like worry or sadness or excitement.
Do
Practicing gratitude is something you could absolutely weave into to your speech therapy and/or executive function lessons:
Have a grateful wall in your speech room (or classroom): have the sentence, ‘I am grateful today because’ and let students write sentences and pin them to the wall. Or have them draw a picture of what they are grateful for, let them practice describing what they see in their NVWM. Parents you could have a jar that everyone in the family fills with a daily gratitude sentence and at the end of the week y'all review them together.
Practice writing skills and have students write letters to someone they are grateful for. You could start big, maybe have the students pick an artist they like (writer, singer, actor) and they write a letter to them. Why are they grateful for this artist? Has the artist inspired them? Helped them? Or start smaller, write a letter to a family member or friend. Have your students make a plan/outline for writing a letter.
Have an ongoing game of ‘thank you detective’. Tell your students to start noticing when people say thank you. Who says it and when? Tell them to take a picture in their imagination of when someone says it to them. Talk about what happened and why that person said thank you. This also works on perspective taking and emotional awareness. How do you think they felt when they said thank you? How did you feel? Maybe someone says thank you but doesn’t seem to mean it, what happened? See if your students notice when they say thank you and how it feels in their body when they do.
Younger students might need something more concrete. The Sesame Street link above has a scavenger hunt that’s very cute. Have students draw a picture for someone who does a big job at the school but doesn’t often get recognition like the custodial staff or the people who work in the cafeteria. Talk about what they do, “Who takes out the trash? Isn’t that helpful? What would happen if no one took at the trash, it would be so stinky!”
Model using the word ‘grateful’, instead of simply saying ‘thank you’ when a kid does something helpful or kind, saying, “Thanks, I am so grateful you did that.” They might not be able to understand the complexity of the word, but building their exposure is how our younger and early developing kids learn so much of their language. If it’s a nice day, you can say, ‘It stopped raining and it’s sunny! I’m so grateful for this sunny day!”.
Incorporate core words for our AAC students and kids with limited expressive language, words like ‘thank you, happy, hug, grateful’. Grateful won’t be on core boards and/or most main AAC pages, but usually ‘feelings’ pages/screens of AACs have options to add emotion buttons. Add grateful and model the use of it during lessons, books, activities, etc.
Play gratitude tennis! I saw this idea on twitter actually, it comes from renowned psychologist, Dr. John Gottman, who has done incredible work on creating healthy romantic relationships. Dr. Gottman says that contempt is the most predictive pattern that kills relationships over time and the antidote is gratitude. Here are the rules according to this thread:
1. Player one serves up something they are grateful for.
2. Player 2 must “return” the gratitude with something they are grateful for.
3. Repeat “serving” gratitudes back to all the players until the 3-min timer goes off.
They explain it's likely people will be skeptical or think it’s cheesy or awkward. But in the end, usually everyone is laughing and it can't help but lift your mood. This might work best for older kids, or having students play on teams or play with your family or friends. Check out the twitter thread for more info.
The most important part of teaching gratitude is not making it some special event, like once a year let’s all gather round the fire and tell the tale of the one time we were grateful. It’s showing kids that the more we look for something, the more we notice it. And the more we notice it, the more we pay attention to something, the more those memories get stored in our imagination.
This is not to suggest that anyone should be toxically positive or that if you don’t feel grateful every moment of your day you are wasting your life, you ungrateful ninny! Forcing gratitude isn’t helpful, not for adults or children. We must always acknowledge the complexity of the human experience and that there are times and places and phases of life where gratitude can be hard to feel and that being grateful often requires some basic emotional regulation that we don’t always have access to depending on the day.
I do think it’s important to explain to kids that gratitude is not the same as some other emotions that we often experience, e.g., many emotions don’t require much practice. Emotions may require acknowledgement, understanding and patience, but children don’t often have to stop, breath and work themselves up to anger or excitement. We can teach kids that gratitude is not an innate skill some have and some don’t. That being grateful is more like a muscle or habit we strengthen with time and practice. In fact sometimes the gratitude we practice in the small moments ends up being what keeps us happiest throughout our lives.
Comment below about what images come up when you picture gratitude. Let me know if you work on teaching gratitude to your students/clients/kids. How you do it? What has worked in the past? What materials do you use? Do you think it’s something that’s important to teach? To practice?
Please visit our homepage to inquire about speech, language and executive function services for kids and teens in North Carolina. Consultation and parent coaching services also available!
References:
Prathik Kini, Joel Wong, Sydney McInnis, Nicole Gabana, Joshua W. Brown, The effects of gratitude expression on neural activity, NeuroImage, Volume 128, 2016, Pages 1-10, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.12.040
Emmons, R. (2010, November 16). Why Gratitude is Good. Berkeley. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_gratitude_is_good
Comments