Raising Grateful Children One Day at a Time

Beyond table manners: Children's gratitude for food and the role of parental socialization

This investigation explores children's food gratitude and parents' socialization of this gratitude within the United States. Study 1 examined children's spontaneous expressions of gratitude (N = 1,441), focusing on the concepts of food environmental sustainability, properties, origins, scripts, and well-being. Study 2 surveyed parents (N = 110) regarding their engagement in socialization practices that promote children's food gratitude: conversations; modeling; niche selection; and, scaffolding. The results unveil nuances in younger and older children's gratitude for food concepts as well as parents' differential use of food gratitude socialization practices and emphasis on specific concepts. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that parents' food gratitude socialization practices predict parents' reports of their children's food gratitude. These studies elucidate variability in children's gratitude for food and parents' contribution to its development within this domain. These findings have implications for food gratitude socialization. (137 words).

Gratitude, affect balance, and stress buffering: A growth curve examination of cardiovascular responses to a laboratory stress task

Previous research has indicated that gratitude and affect-balance play key stress-buffering roles. However, to date there is limited research on the impact of gratitude and affect balance on cardiovascular recovery from acute psychological stress, and whether affect balance moderates the relationship between gratitude and cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress. In this study, 68 adults completed measures of state gratitude, positive and negative affect, and completed a laboratory-based cardiovascular stress-testing protocol. This incorporated a 20-minute acclimatization period, a 10-minute baseline, a 6-minute arithmetic stress task, and an 8-minute recovery period. Mixed-effects growth curve models were fit and the results indicated that state gratitude predicted lower systolic blood pressure responses throughout the stress-testing period. Affect balance was found to moderate the association between state gratitude and diastolic blood pressure responses to stress, amplifying the effects of state gratitude. These findings suggest that state gratitude has a unique stress-buffering effect on both reactions to and recovery from acute psychological stress.

What Parents and Children Say When Talking about Children's Gratitude: A Thematic Analysis

Parent-child conversations are a widely recognized socializing mechanism, linked to children's developing moral agency, empathy, and emotional competence. Similarly, parent-child conversations about gratitude have been linked to growth in children's gratitude. However, the messages that parents and children exchange in conversations about children's gratitude have yet to be investigated in depth. In the current study, we investigate the types of events that parents discuss with their children during times when they saw displays of children's gratitude and events when the children missed the opportunity to display gratitude, along with the messages that parents and children share during these conversations. The study involved a thematic analysis of the gratitude conversations of 43 parent-child dyads (88% mothers, 77% European American, 51% boys, child M_age=10.62, SD=1.15) living in the United States. Gratitude and missed opportunity events primarily involved situations in which the child had the opportunity to attend an event or to receive a material gift, food, or assistance. Three themes characterized parent and child messages. First, parents suggested that being happy was a sign of being grateful, a way to make others happy, and the goal of benefactors' behavior. Second, parents suggested that children should focus on what they receive rather than on what they did not receive. Finally, children conveyed that they could not always be grateful, but that in several cases they were able to both feel and display their excitement and gratitude. In particular, children reported feeling grateful when they received something they thought was special or enjoyable, unique or unexpected, that they knew would make their parent happy or that they felt lucky to have since others did not have it. Together these findings suggest the importance of future research investigating how children and parents coordinate and prioritize the various elements of gratitude moments in deciding how to be grateful and to socialize children's gratitude.

The Apple Doesn't "Feel" Far From the Tree: Mother-Child Socialization of Intergroup Empathy

Like adults, children experience less empathy toward some groups compared with others. In this investigation, we propose that mothers differ in how much empathy they want their children to feel toward specific outgroups, depending on their political ideology. We suggest that how mothers want their children to feel (i.e., the motivation for their child's empathy), in turn, is correlated with children's actual experience of empathy toward the outgroup. Across four studies in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (N_Total = 734), the degree of empathy mothers wanted their children to experience in the intergroup context varied as a function of their political ideology. Mothers' motivation for their child's empathy toward the outgroup (but not in general) was further associated with how they chose to communicate messages to their children in a real-life context and how children actually felt toward the outgroup. We discuss implications for the socialization of intergroup empathy.

Childhood Family Connection and Adult Flourishing: Associations Across Levels of Childhood Adversity

OBJECTIVE

To investigate whether higher levels of childhood family connection were associated with greater adult flourishing and if this association was present across levels of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and childhood socioeconomic disadvantage (SED).

METHODS

We pooled cross-sectional data from telephone and mailed surveys in the Midlife in the United States study that were collected from 2 nationally representative cohorts (2004-06 and 2011-14) of English-speaking, US adults, aged 25 to 74 years. Adult flourishing z score, standardized to the study population, was created from Ryff's 42-item Psychological Well-being Scale and quartiles of childhood family connection from a 7-item scale assessing parental attention, affection, and communication during childhood.

RESULTS

Data were analyzed for the 4199 (72.0% of 5834) participants with complete data. The mean age of participants was 53.9 years and 85.4% were White. After adjusting for covariates, including adult chronic disease, ACEs, and childhood and current SED, mean (95% CI) flourishing z scores increased from the lowest to highest quartiles of family connection: -0.41 (-0.49, -0.33), -0.18 (-0.25, -0.12), -0.01 (-0.07, 0.06), and 0.25 (0.18, 0.32), respectively. For each 1 SD increase in the family connection score, there was a 0.25 (95% CI, 0.20, 0.29) unit increase in the adjusted flourishing z score. This positive association was also present across levels of ACEs and childhood SED.

CONCLUSIONS

Greater childhood family connection was associated with greater flourishing in US adults across levels of childhood adversity. Supporting family connection in childhood may influence flourishing decades later, even with early adversity.

Parental Warmth, Gratitude, and Prosocial Behavior among Chinese Adolescents: The Moderating Effect of School Climate

Parental warmth plays an important role in the development of adolescents’ physical and mental health. There are numerous empirical studies indicating a relationship between parental warmth and prosocial behavior among adolescents, although the underlying mechanisms of this association remain unclear. Adopting a longitudinal design across two time points, the present study proposes a moderated mediation model to explore the mediating role of gratitude and the moderating role of the school climate between parental warmth and prosocial behavior. The sample consisted of 934 participants (483 boys and 451 girls) who participated in the second assessment and completed questionnaires assessing gratitude, school climate, and prosocial behavior in April 2019. Their parents participated in the first assessment and completed a questionnaire pertaining to parental warmth in October 2018. After controlling for the gender and age of the adolescents, the results showed that the positive association between parental warmth and prosocial behavior is mediated by gratitude, and school climate does play a moderating role in the second half of the mediating path. Specifically, the school climate can play a protective role in adolescents with low levels of gratitude. For adolescents with less gratitude, a strong school climate can promote more prosocial behaviors and can effectively alleviate the negative prediction of low levels of gratitude. This study provides a theoretical explanation for the generation of adolescents’ prosocial behavior and provides theoretical guidance for the interventions of schools and parents.

Gratitude and Social Media: A Pilot Experiment on the Benefits of Exposure to Others' Grateful Interactions on Facebook

Facebook and other social networking sites allow observation of others’ interactions that in normal, offline life would simply be undetectable (e.g., a two-voice conversation viewable on the Facebook wall, from the perspective of a real, silent witness). Drawing on this specific property, the theory of social learning, and the most direct implications of emotional contagion, our pilot experiment (N = 49) aimed to test whether the exposure to others’ grateful interactions on Facebook enhances (a) users’ felt gratitude, (b) expressed gratitude, and (c) their subjective well-being. For the threefold purpose, we created ad hoc Facebook groups in which the exposure to some accomplices’ exchange of grateful messages for 2 weeks was experimentally manipulated and users’ felt/expressed gratitude and well-being were consequently assessed. Results partially supported both hypotheses. Observing others’ exchange of grateful posts/comments on Facebook appeared to enhance participants’ in-person expression of gratitude (i.e., self-reported gratitude expression within face-to-face interactions), but not their direct and subjective experiences of gratitude. Similarly, exposure to others’ grateful messages improved some components of subjective well-being, such as satisfaction with life, but not negative and positive affect. Taken together, however, our preliminary findings suggest for the first time that social networking sites may actually amplify the spreading of gratitude and its benefits. Implications of our results for professionals and future research in the field of health, education, and social media communication are discussed.

What Is Gratitude? Ingratitude Provides the Answer

Current scholarship on “gratitude” has largely ignored its opposite – ingratitude. As a result, gratitude is no longer distinguishable from constructs such as appreciation and happiness. This was not the case over previous centuries – ingratitude was viewed as something monstrous, a failure to reciprocate would loosen the bonds holding society together. The opposite, gratitude, was seen as a virtue. Reciprocity has come under attack because “obligation” has been understood in only one of two possible senses. The first relates to contracts and justice – one has a heteronomous obligation to pay off a debt or fulfill a contract. The second is a sense of obligation that comes from within, autonomously – the desire to help those that have helped us. Here, we argue, is where gratitude and ingratitude are situated. This view has two important consequences; one relates to the measurement of gratitude and the other to raising youth to be grateful people.

Gratitude Conversations: An Experimental Trial of an Online Parenting Tool

Gratitude is associated with a host of positive outcomes; yet, little is understood about the ways in which parents may foster gratitude in their children. The current study allows for the examination of one possible mechanism, namely parent-child conversations, that may be used to encourage gratitude in children. Using a rigorous experimental design, we tested whether an online program that was designed to enrich parents' skills in having conversations about gratitude with their children was effective in changing parents' socialization behaviors and children's gratitude. Results demonstrated that parents can successfully utilize an online program to enhance their gratitude-related communication. This training permeates other aspects of how parents socialize gratitude in children and positively impacts children's gratitude moments. Implications for program development and understanding the role of parents in the development of children's gratitude are discussed.