Can Gratitude Help You Be a Better Parent?

Sometimes, gratitude is easy. Perhaps it’s November, a month that seems to espouse thankfulness at every turn. Or a birthday or anniversary pops up, and you just can’t help but enter into an air of celebration and thanksgiving.

But what about all the other days, weeks and months of the year? How are we to respond with gratitude when it comes to the daily grind of parenting? 

Perhaps like anything else, gratitude is a muscle we sometimes have to learn how to flex – even when our child kicks a ball in the house, when yet another email comes in from a teacher, or when the bad news just doesn’t seem to let up. Gratitude isn’t always our first response, and rightly so.  

But gratitude can still be cultivated, and as it turns out, gratitude can help you be a better parent. 

“Feeling grateful does not always happen naturally,” writes author and theologian Tish Harrison Warren. “Thankfulness is something like a muscle we can exercise. Just as we can cultivate ingratitude, entitlement, bitterness or cynicism, we can foster gratitude, appreciative humility, delight and joy.” 

Harrison Warren encourages her readers to keep gratitude lists, write notes of thanks, or take gratitude walks, to name a few. 

In our family, we’ve kept a “Thanks Jar” on the kitchen counter (with pieces of scrap paper and pens nearby); when the jar fills up, we dump out its content and read them aloud at the dinner table. We’ve also asked (and answered) the question, “What are you thankful for?” at the dinner table, and not just on Thanksgiving Day. I dream of someday painting one kitchen wall with black chalkboard paint, to create a perpetual wall of thanks, all our own. 

The possibilities are endless, but when you intentionally practice gratitude with your children, you can’t help but be transformed yourself.  

Additionally, one study associated gratitude with improved sleep and less fatigue, as well as “improved mental, and ultimately physical, health in patients with asymptomatic heart failure.” In other words, the practice of thankfulness seems to lead to a healthier heart! 

Although gratitude is a muscle many of us have to exercise, at least at first, once the habit sets in, it can be a rather hard one to break. Practicing gratitude with intention and frequency soon becomes a part of our ethos – a beautiful by-product of our personality so deeply ingrained within us that it not only changes the way we see and interact with the world, but it holds a power to change those around us. 

And I don’t know about you, but when I spend time with someone who exudes oodles of gratitude, it naturally rubs off on me. 

It makes me want the same, not only as a parent, but for my family as well. 

Could it be the same for you?