Any life coach in Boca Raton or Delray Beach will tell you about the importance of gratitude. But do you know why gratitude is such a powerful force? If you want to effectively communicate the importance of gratitude to your children, you need to understand that saying “thank you” is just the beginning.
The Benefits of Gratitude
- Enhance physical as well as emotional health
- Reduce aggression and antisocial behavior
- Improve sleep
- Boost self-esteem
- Increase mental strength
Harnessing the Power of Gratitude
It may seem counterintuitive, but gratitude has the most potential to positively impact your life on those days when you are not feeling particularly grateful about the hand that life has dealt you. And, whether you are taking care of elderly parents or trying to connect with your kids, chances are you have had more than a few of those days.
Fortunately, you can train yourself to make gratitude a part of your everyday life. Think of it like a muscle that can be strengthened or a healthy habit that can be learned.
LifeHack offers a list of 40 simple ways to practice gratitude – ranging from keeping a gratitude journal to taking the time to appreciate the natural beauty in your world – that can help you get started.
As the University of California-Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine reports, the Raising Grateful Children project at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as done a lot of research on how gratitude develops in children. “Based on the scientific literature and our conversations with parents, we’ve come to think about gratitude as an experience that has four parts,” Andrea Hussong, director of the Center for Developmental Science and a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes.
The four components of gratitude they have identified are:
- What we NOTICE in our lives for which we can be grateful
- How we THINK about why we have been given those things
- How we FEEL about the things we have been given
- What we DO to express appreciation in turn
Hussong, who studies how interactions between parents and kids can foster gratitude, says, “This model emphasizes that gratitude is about how we receive things in the world as well as how we give to others. Indeed, when it comes to children, our team expects that helping them learn to deeply receive things in their lives will help engender genuine experiences of gratitude. These experiences, in turn, may motivate the appreciative behaviors that parents want to see in their children.”
If you are looking for a parenting coach who can help you make gratitude a bigger part of your family’s life, contact Delray Beach life coach Rochelle Strauss.