Teaching Thankfulness

Elijah and Savannah's birthday was a few weeks ago and they had a great time celebrating and thoroughly enjoyed all their new gifts they received. Phil and I feel very strongly in teaching our kids to always have an attitude of thankfulness. At the earliest age we teach them to say please and thank you, but thankfulness goes way beyond that. We thought that this birthday was a great opportunity to take it a step further with Elijah. He's starting to write so I wrote thank you cards to everyone who gave him and Savannah a gift and had him write his name on it after the thank you. I read him what I wrote on each card and we took a moment to remember and talk about the gift. I felt that was an important step so that he wasn't just practicing writing his name but he was able to recognize that he was actually sending each person a thank you. This seems so common sense but I really feel that in this day-and-age, thankfulness is becoming a lost art and a lost characteristic in each of us and especially our children.


There is a quote (I'm not sure who wrote it) that says, "If you want to find gratitude in this generation, you’ll have to look for it in the dictionary." I'm determined for this to not be true with our own children.