Teaching Kids to Have Gratitude in Hard Seasons

In every thing give thanks… I Thessalonians 5:18a (KJV)

We’ve all probably heard that most of life’s lessons are more likely caught than taught, which means that as mothers, if we want our children to learn the deep life lesson of giving thanks in e-very-thing, we must live lives of continual thanks.

I remember a stretch of life about a decade ago that I still refer to as “the crisis”. A couple horrible circumstances swept through my life at a time when my marriage was already precarious. I was on staff at church at the time, writing and speaking, and raising two young school-age children. And then horrible circumstance number one walked through the door, and while it was swirling through our lives wreaking havoc, horrible circumstance number two also set up camp.

I was stressed. I was exhausted. I was sad. I was confused. I was almost down for the count for about a year-and-a-half.

I say almost because of all the things I learned during that hard time (and there were many, many lessons) and of all the changes that my faith and heart went through (and there were many, many changes), one lesson kept me buoyed up above all else, and it was, basically, this:

In everything, give thanks.

You see, I had stumbled upon a book by Ben Patterson called He Has Made Me Glad at just the right point in my life to receive its simple message. And this is what Patterson had to say about gratitude in the midst of trials.

When we give thanks no matter what, we act on the premise that the future will turn out perfectly. The next moment may be dreadful, maybe even the next decade or two, but He who holds the last hour has assured us that everything will be glorious in the end. I can live from now on knowing that my life is going to turn out just fine. I can give thanks as an act of hope, acting as though everything God promised about the future is true. Because it is.

Patterson goes on to say:

And this act of hopeful gratitude can be an act of joyful defiance. There are bullies in this life, things huge and terrifying, intimidating and overwhelming. They are bigger and meaner than we are and they try to push around, but we can stand tall and give thanks defiantly, not letting the bullies rob us of our joy or have the last word. So just think how glorious, how defiantly and exquisitely joyous, things might be if we believed now and thanked God now on this side of the outcome? The enemy would be doubly defeated, God doubly glorified and our joy doubly intensified.

It was in my hardest season of life up until that point when I learned what it truly meant to be thankful in everything. I began thanking God for my dark moments, for the pain, for the injustices, for every unknown. And when I did that, things began to shift in my soul. The clouds wafted away. The heaviness lifted. And, even while the hard thing was firmly parked in my life, joy began to return.

And I came away with the gift of truly experiencing for myself that deep joy always follows deep gratitude.

Let’s teach our kids how to be grateful even when it appears there is nothing to be grateful for….
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Listen, we can try to protect our children all we want from hard times, but they will still come rolling into their lives. So why not expend our energies more productively by imparting the discipline of being grateful daily for the good things in our lives, but then take it one step farther: let’s teach our kids how to be grateful even when it appears there is nothing to be grateful for. Because that’s where the joy breaks in.

How can you instill gratitude during hard times into your children’s hearts?