THERAPIST THURSDAY: How To Create Gratitude This Holiday Season

With the holidays fast approaching, parents often express concern that their kids seem ungrateful. These children have acted disappointed when they’ve opened their presents and don’t seem to realize the time and money their parents put into providing gifts for them. Children who are grumpy during the holidays or rude to family. This lack of appreciation is very disappointing to parents and makes them worry that they are raising people who do not understand how the world works and are ungrateful and entitled.

It isn’t surprising that so many parents struggle with this issue with their children. Today’s kids are being raised in a time of instant gratification. They walk around with phones worth over $600; they drink $4 coffee drinks; their parents buy them things like hair highlights, bi-weekly manicures, and designer clothes and accessories. They have no sense of how much money these things cost or what it takes to earn that money. Then the parents get fed up and lecture them about how much these things cost and how hard they work for these things, but the kids have no real-life connection with those words. In their world, these things come without work and without effort. If you want them to GET IT, this lack of connection to how the real world operates has to change.

So, if you want this to change in your family, what can you do this holiday season? Here are a few suggestions that can be implemented immediately:

1. Require your children to save their money and spend it on presents for those they are close to. You can set a budget of what they are required to spend, and then they do the work to shop, choose, purchase, and wrap those presents. When you celebrate your holiday, the kids can present their gifts to those they love. Not only does this help them to understand what it takes to get those gifts under the tree, it also allows them to learn the sense of joy that comes along with giving to other, and teaches valuable life skills like budgeting and bargain shopping. They will also begin to appreciate the value of a dollar more.

2. Find some volunteer opportunities and get involved! Tell your kids you will all be doing some volunteer work this holiday season and ask them what causes matter most to them. Then have them do some research on what organizations address these issues and how they can volunteer for these organizations. The more they are working and getting involved at the ground level, the more they will learn from this experience. They may wrap presents and distribute them for the less fortunate, work at a soup kitchen, pass out lunches to the homeless, read to kids at a children’s hospital, walk dogs at a shelter, or participate in any number of other service opportunities.

3. Have your kids donate to a charity. Again, they can be involved in choosing what they want to donate to. Then they can give some of their own money or develop a fundraising campaign with a goal of how much they want to donate. They can use the money to buy food for a local shelter, donate to a hospital, give supplies to an animal shelter, or anything else that feels good to them.

4. Set a budget of what you want to spend on your kids and then stick to it. Its so easy to get sucked into buying more and more once you start shopping for the holidays. But remember, your kids don’t need everything on their wish list. So, figure out what items are priorities to purchase for them and stop buying stuff on the list once you reach the budget limit for each kid. Do not put yourself into debt to buy them everything they want. This teaches them that the criteria for what to purchase should simply be if they WANT the item, and not if they actually can AFFORD the item.

5. Make the holidays about more than gifts. Develop traditions to do as a family. Focus your time and energy on those traditions and make the gifts a side note instead of the main event. Things like singing carols, looking at lights, sharing stories, reading holiday books, watching holiday specials, and baking can all be a special part of the holiday season. Kids will remember these things much more than whatever present they happened to get that year.

6. Wrap up an experience for your child instead of a thing. One of my relatives was telling me she did not want to spend a lot on her kids this holiday season because they will be taking several trips soon. She plans on getting the kids scuba certified. One of the ideas she came up with was to buy the certification and wrap it up with a scuba mask as one of their presents. If your kids like to ski, wrap up lift passes for them with a note saying when they will be going on a ski trip. If your family goes to Disneyland often, wrap up season passes as one of their gifts. Doing this teaches kids that these trips and experiences they have are not just givens, they are privileges and something they should be grateful to have. It also helps you stay within budget, which teaches kids to live within their means.

Being able to enjoy time with your children and family is what the holidays are all about, and nothing is more discouraging than kids not understanding this and acting ungrateful and entitled. It is my hope that these suggestions will allow you to get back to enjoying your kids and will help to bring out the best in them as humans and future contributors to society.

If you have a topic you would like addressed on Therapist Thursdays, feel free to email Rochelle at meetme4therapy@gmail.com.

Rochelle Whitson is a psychotherapist in private practice in Temecula, CA. For more articles like this, sign up for her blog at www.meetme4therapy.com.