Setting the Table for Gratitude!

Due to a comedy of errors, we ended up hosting Thanksgiving this year with only a few days notice.  After I had rushed around like a crazy woman trying to assemble all the fixings, I realized that we were still missing one crucial item:  Place mats.  Now before you think that we are completely uncivilized, we do in fact own a handful of place mats.  The issue at hand was volume.  And, due to a slight case of OCD on my own part, there was the minor snafu that what we do own do not even remotely match.

With one day of lead time, and my older son in tow, I decided to take my oversight as an opportunity to continue to teach my preschooler about the importance of gratitude.  This time, the focus was on expressing gratitude toward other people.

This topic, Dear Readers, is well traversed territory in the Positive Psychology circles. In a 2005 study conducted by Seligman, Steen, and Peterson, participants were instructed to identify a person who had been beneficial to their lives but had never been properly thanked. They were then given a week to write a letter expressing their gratitude for that person and were instructed to deliver the letter in person. During the delivery of the letter, the participants were told to talk with the person about what they had written. While the recipient of the letter undoubtedly appreciated the gesture, the results of the study showed that the people DELIVERING the letter received a month long increase in their levels of happiness as well!  It ends up gratitude gives a happiness boost to both the giver and receiver.

Now clearly my young children can not be expected to compose and read full letters documenting their appreciation of the people in their lives.  However, my take is that any time they are given the opportunity to think in a grateful way it sets the stage for them to continue this practice more automatically in the future.  So to kill two birds with one stone, I created the following table mat-producing, preschooler-appropriate gratitude exercise:

What you Need:

• Ironing Board - (AKA "The Skateboard" as Liam once pointed to ours and asked me why we had a skateboard in our closet.  It goes without saying that we are not big "ironers" in my household!)
• Iron
• Waxed Paper
• Yard Stick
• Construction Paper
• Scissors
• Markers
• Any thin, found items, (confetti, cut up paper, leaves, pine needles, flowers, and Liam's very favorite:  Dirt)

Instructions:

1.  The first step is to interview your child about what they appreciate about each person who will be joining you for dinner.  This is obviously the crucial, positive psychology part of this process.  There are no right or wrong answers and it's fun to hear what your child appreciates about others.  Write their responses on the construction paper and use the scissors to cut each of the answers out.  A selection of Liam's answers are as follows...

2.  Next, gather or create the items you would like to put as decorations in each place mat.  We went outside and found items to include and Liam also got some practice using his scissors to cut out pieces of paper.  

3.  Measure and cut two 24-inch pieces of wax paper for each place mat that you are creating.

4.  Heat up the iron on the warm or low setting.

5.  Putting one sheet of paper on the "skate board", place the gratitude message in the center and allow your child to arrange the decorative items where ever they would like, steering clear of the edges of the paper.

6.  Place the second piece of wax paper on top of the first so that the edges are even and use the iron to melt the wax between the two, paying particular attention to the edges.

7. Trim edges if necessary and you are done!

Liam and I decided to surprise everyone at Thanksgiving with our special creations, which doubled as place cards at our table.  Each person took home their place mat as a keepsake of our time together.  The end result was a tradition that was both amusing and heart warming for the participants, and educational for my child.  As an added bonus, his neurotic mother was happy because we had matching place mats to boot!

Giving Thanks!

Today marks the one week countdown to Thanksgiving, one of my very favorite holidays!  I love everything about Thanksgiving...  The food!  The social gathering!  The pie! The traditions!  And did I mention, the food?!  Any holiday that is centered around a meal is all right by me!

But in all seriousness, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because it prompts us to focus on gratitude.  The benefits to gratitude are well documented.  If you want better health, relationships,and increased satisfaction with life then gratitude practices are the way to go!  I'm not going to spell out all the benefits and research here, but if you'd like to learn a bit more about the benefits of gratitude you can check out a prior blog posting of mine here!

Given the power of having an "attitude of gratitude," it comes as no surprise that fostering gratitude in our children can powerfully impact their mental well being.  And what better time to focus on helping them to learn this way of looking at the world than at Thanksgiving!

But before I describe various gratitude-based activities and exercises you can engage in with your child, let me first launch into a tangent about the brain.  Because you are not my client, dear reader, you shall be spared from my attempts to draw a diagram and instead I will link you to something that is actually recognizable.  You're welcome!  ;-)

Our brain is hardwired for dangerous times.  Times when threats to our very existence lurked around every corner.  When food and water were sometimes in scarce supply for months at a time.  When Tyrannosaurus Rex stalked us as a possibility for its next meal...  Ok...  I know...  I know...  There was never a time that human beings lived among dinosaurs and I grew up watching too many episodes of The Flintstones...  But you get the drift!  Times were dangerous!  We had  predators who threatened our physical safety and our very lives were at risk on an ongoing basis!

Fast forward to today, and we find that sometimes what's in our best interest in today's world is not what our brain is primed for.  Our brain is hard wired to pick up on any potential threat, problem, and deficit we might have. But our brain can't really distinguish between real, life threatening issues, and luxury problems. Simultaneously, our brain is so incredibly adaptive that the things that are beneficial to us, and what we do have and enjoy, is quickly ferried to the background so that more resources are available to focus on what is wrong.  Therefore, you can rest assured that you will not miss out on anything that might be going wrong with your life....  be that a toothache or your lack of ability to own your dream car.  (Phew!  Right?!)  However, unless you work to bring it into your consciousness, you are quite likely to overlook the things that are good.  Not exactly the prescription for optimal happiness and life satisfaction!

Yes, our brain defaults to the negative, but the good news is that we can learn to override this system.  Our brain is made up of neural networks that we actually create with the thoughts that we choose.  (That brain image I referred to before is here!)  I'm going to avoid going all Biology on you all, and simplify this concept by stating that more or less we create physical pathways in our brain that link together thoughts.  The thoughts we go to frequently become bigger, faster and more automatic.  So the attitudes and thought patterns that are habitual?  Think superhighway!  And the absolute easiest time to create powerful habits of thought, and happiness promoting superhighways, is when our children are young.  It's  much easier to create a brand new neural network that promotes mental wellness than it is to change a habit of thought that is negative.

(And, as an aside, if you are now thinking to yourself: "Oh Crap!  My parents never helped me to create gratitude inspired neural networks when I was young.  I'm doomed to a life of sadness because my habitual thoughts created super highways of fear and sadness."  Be rest assured that any change in your thought patterns creates deterioration in existing neural networks.  So that neural network of negativity can be turned into an overgrown, rarely traveled, dirt path that's been replaced by a superhighway of gratitude with a little bit of work on your part!)

So given the many benefits to focusing on gratitude, it is time well spent as a parent to encourage our children to create habits of thought that are focused on being thankful and appreciating what they have that makes them happy.  Which brings me back to Thanksgiving...

There are so many cool rituals, projects and exercises that focus on gratitude that it's hard to pick which ones to highlight!  At their core, however, is the idea of prompting your child to identify the things that make them happy and encouraging them to take a moment to feel appreciative for these things.  A simple exercise, and one that I've been doing with my own kiddos every day for the month of November, is to simply ask them what they are grateful for. Some of my favorite responses are as follows:

Liam (3.5 years old):  Giraffes, Bats, Kangaroos, Dragonflies, Grandma, and Pets

Gracie (22 months old):  Giraffes, You, Puffies, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and Poop

You can make this into a daily ritual, (far beyond the month of November if you so choose), that is done at the dinner table, right before bed, or whenever might be convenient for your family.  The fun part is what you do with your children's answers.  I've taken the lazy mom's route and am simply posting them to Facebook along with my own daily contributions.  But the options and creative possibilities are endless!

Some people document their children's responses and read them at Thanksgiving Dinner.  Some people pull out previous years as well.  (Imagine me reading that Gracie was grateful for "poop" the year she decides to bring a romantic partner home for Thanksgiving...)  Books can be created by your children documenting their favorite things through any medium imaginable and can be reviewed long after thanksgiving to continue to solidify the neural networks.  Some families keep a jar where people can add the things that they are grateful for on slips of paper which then get shared at a predetermined time.  Others have or create beautiful wall hangings with pockets for each day of the month where children's "gratitudes" are placed each day.   And families with older children can cut out a tree from construction paper and add leaves of gratitude for each of the things identified.  The possibilities are endless!

No matter what you choose for your family, the crucial component is that you are teaching your children to have a habit of thought that brings to consciousness the things they have to be grateful for.  And you can then know, as Thanksgiving passes and we embark on the season of giving, that you have provided your children with one of the most powerful gifts you can give.  Fewer things brighten up a person's life more than gratitude.  Happy Thanksgiving!