The Roman philosopher Cicero once said that gratitude is the parent of all virtues. It’s not difficult to see how this would be true. Gratitude is a virtue which contains many other virtues. In order to be truly grateful to someone, or for something, you must also be humble, prudent and kind. Gratitude is the sister of generosity — the latter in the giving, the former in the receiving. If one is present in an interaction but not the other, there is a risk that soon both will be lost. Anyone who has ever tried to be consistently generous to a habitually ungrateful person knows how quickly generosity can morph into resentment if you aren’t careful.
This is why, as parents, we spend so much time teaching gratitude to our kids. After you take your child out for ice cream, or to the zoo, or put dinner on the table, there is that common refrain: “What do you say?” The child, prompted, shouts: “Thank you!” One day, hopefully, he will not need to be prompted anymore. In the meantime, you solicit the “thank you” not merely to teach good manners — though that is part of it — but on a deeper level, to inculcate a sense of gratitude in a child who, left to his own devises, will naturally take most things for granted. We teach gratitude not for our sake, but for theirs. Raise your child to be grateful and you will have raised him to be happy, well adjusted, and successful.
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