The Good Thing Bad Thing…..

A friend and I were talking the other day about how grateful we are for our education and how we don’t take things for granted, but that it is a challenge to make sure our children don’t take things for granted. We shared a couple of memories related to how poor we had grown up. I told her I had recently read something in an old diary of mine I wrote my first night in the college dorm. I wrote, “I only have one dress, but I’m here!” She shared she was one of ten and that her parents basically put her in foster care as a way of feeding her. I told her in college I had met several very wealthy friends and that I noticed some were nice and some were not and that I came to the conclusion that the difference was the nice ones were grateful for what they had.
I have taken this lesson with me and to this day, I believe being grateful is the key to happiness. Her question to me was, “How do you teach gratefulness?” I don’t know if there is a curriculum for teaching gratefulness, but I can tell you what I have done with my boys.
First of all, I have to say that teaching them to be grateful is something I have consciously done from day one. From the time they could almost talk, whenever I gave them something I would follow it with “what do we say?” and they would say “thank you”. We as parents also need to say “thank you”. Sometimes we don’t say thank you to our children for bringing us something we asked them to bring, for example. My question to you is, “if it was a friend who brought you that same item, would you feel the need to say thank you?” I know, sometimes, it feels like overkill, but I would rather err on the side of saying more thank yous, than not enough.
Secondly, I also taught my boys to be grateful for things like having five fingers on each hand, for the ability to feed themselves, for the ability to walk or run, or for the ability to see! These are things we don’t always think about, but boy would your life be different if you were not able to do any one of those things.
Finally, the other thing I taught them to play was “the good thing, bad thing” game. Yes, I made this up! I explained there is a good side and a bad side to everything. If we were stuck in traffic, I would say, “the bad thing is we’re stuck in traffic, what’s the good thing?” I was always amazed with all the different responses we would come up with ranging from: the good thing is we’re all together, to the good thing is we have a car, the good thing is we have air conditioning, and on, and on! If while driving home, I reminded them we needed to get the cleaning done, I would say “the bad thing is we have to clean, what’s the good thing?” Again, we would come up with all kinds of things like, the good thing is we can relax and watch a movie afterwards to we don’t have to scramble if someone comes over to it feels great when everything is clean! One time I remember picking them up from school and saying how tired I was. They then said, “the good thing is you have a job and because you have a job you can buy us what we need and want”. We got so involved in thinking about the good things, I forgot I was tired!
Another time, I remember we went camping and my nephew’s bike was left behind. When we got there, everyone but my nephew had their bike. He was not a happy camper (no pun intended) and he was making sure we all knew how unhappy he was. While walking to the pond, I overheard Andrew, my youngest son, saying “Jacob, you gotta think about the good things. The good thing is we are here! Look at this place! And we get to hang out the whole weekend…it’s easier to think about the bad things, but you can’t forget to think about the good things.” I was sooo…. proud of Andrew.