The Twenty: How to create a grateful attitude in your children

Confession: I’m terrible at saying “thank you” when it is appropriate.

However, I am grateful for a lot of things even if I forget to thank someone for whatever they did. It’s no excuse, I know, but it’s important for me to confess this. I’m even worse at saying “I’m sorry”, so let me cover both of those now: “I’m sorry for not saying thank you when I should.” Now let’s move on.

It might seem a bit weird for a 20-something single guy with no kids to be writing about creating a grateful attitude in your children. However, I have two great parents, younger cousins (Two of them start high school next year! Yikes!), a niece who’s a toddler, and I used to help my mom with the two-year-old Sunday School class at church when I was in high school. So I’ve been around kids. And I’m someone’s child.

I’m an only child (The niece? I have an older half brother who never lived with us.) from an average family with an average income and grew up in an average house with average cars. I got a lot of the things I asked for as a kid, but I didn’t grow up with an abundance of toys at Christmas or on my birthday. And I’m sure I didn’t get a lot of the stuff I did ask for.

I don’t know if I was all that grateful at the time as a kid, but as I got older I appreciated the hard work my parents did five days a week to keep a roof over our head, food in the kitchen, and all that goes along with that.

My parents funded several trips to summer camps, lots of mission trips, and a variety of other trips as I was growing up and even into college. The summer camps were fun, but I’m most grateful that they never said “no” when I asked to go on a mission trip with my church youth group (or the youth group my dad worked with at another church). I learned a lot of practical skills on those trips since most of them were construction projections and I got to help of lot of people. Seeing people worse off than me also made me more grateful for what I did have; and what I do have.

Thanks to my dad, especially, I learned the importance of hard work and the value of a dollar. I helped him mow yards on his real estate listing for several years. Money is worth a lot more when you spend an entire Saturday out in the sun pushing a mower around several yards every Saturday in a row to earn it.

My mom constantly reminded me that I needed to be tithing to our church because the money wasn’t mine to start with. I sucked at tithing up until this year and if there was a way for me to figure out how much I didn’t tithe over the years I’d probably be stunned by the number. Every few Sundays I would see my parents write out a tithe check to our church and drop it in the offering plate. I understood the concept, but the importance of this never really resonated with me until recently. But I can definitely thank my mom for constantly reminding me about this.

I have no doubt my parents raised me on these two Biblical principles.

“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” Proverbs 22:6 (NIV84)

I know my parents raised me by this value because we have a wooden train decoration with this verse written on it in our house that has been there for as long as I can remember.

My parents were also firm and fair in their expectations and punishments. I screwed up several times and many other parents probably would have done a lot of yelling. Instead my parents used those times to teach me what I did wrong and why it was wrong, and to explain why there were consequences.