Baby Talk | Families should practice being 'thankful' all year long
Recently one of the mothers that comes to my Mommy Support Group on Tuesdays asked how she could teach her child to be thankful. What a wonderful, thoughtful, complicated question to ask as we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving.
This being Thanksgiving week, many families will continue with traditions repeated every year. Our family, like many families, says what they are thankful for. Thanksgiving traditions are as important as the food on the table.
A tradition of writing a "turkey note" is believed to have originated in Davenport, Iowa. A turkey note is short, three- or four-line poem, using the word Turkey as the first word of the first two lines.
An example would be: "Turkey Red, Turkey Blue, Turkey says, I love you." The poem is then left unsigned, rolled into a tube and wrapped in colored paper. It is then put beside each person's plate at Thanksgiving dinner or passed out to friends. What a lovely tradition.
The tradition of a family being grateful, thankful and polite is not just for this week. We teach our children thankfulness with our words and our actions. When our children hear us saying "thank you" and "please," they learn it as well. They may need reminding frequently, and that is OK. Time and repetition are needed to develop a habit.
Eventually, saying please and thank you will become a habit. The habit is reinforced because when we do say "please" and "thank you," the recipient of the words reacts with gratitude that their actions were recognized. What a wonderful cycle of thankfulness.
Thankful people tend to be happier people. William Butler Yeats' poem "The Fiddler of Dooney" has a line: "The good are always the merry, saved by an evil chance, and the merry love the fiddle and the merry love to dance." He is talking about the gift of seeing the glass half full instead of half empty. When depression and sadness are overwhelming being thankful is challenging. Can we change that? Practicing thankfulness has proved to help people change their attitude. I have a friend who recently suffered the loss of her husband. She took a job as a cashier at a local grocery store just to get out of the house. As part of her job she was told that every time a customer asked her how she was, she was to say: "Wonderful." She said it was really hard the first week, but not so hard the second week.
By the third week she was actually starting to feel wonderful. She realized the frequent repetition of the word wonderful, and thanking her customers, was changing her life and she was once again feeling some happiness.
Our children learn thankfulness by imitating our behavior. When we strive to keep negative words out of our language, show respect for others, strive to be grateful, develop habits that promote kindness, our children will learn thankfulness.
On that note, I am thankful to you for reading my column, and now I think I will go dance.
Katie Powers, R.N., is a board-certified lactation consultant and perinatal educator at Manatee Memorial Hospital's Family BirthPlace. Her column appears every other week in Healthy Living. Contact her at katie.powers@mmhhs.com.
This story was originally published November 25, 2014 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Baby Talk | Families should practice being 'thankful' all year long."