Gratitude Attitude

 One of the problems with having people around the house all the time is that you can get on each others' nerves because you never get a break from each other.  In the Bible, one third of the verses on why God gets angry are about ingratitude. We get angry at ingratitude, too, don't we? Having a family culture of gratitude can lift your whole family.

How do you that? The easy thing is to start by teaching your children to say "thank you". We are accustomed to telling our children, "Say, 'thank you!'" We need to start by saying "thank you" ourselves! Every habit we want to instill in our children starts with us. That means we have to be a good example. Saying "thank you" never gets old. Everyone appreciates it.

Another way to grow an attitude of gratitude in your family is to have "thank yous". As part of our family's prayer time we go around the room and give a public "thank you". It is a "thank you" to God. 

We also do "loves" which are when each person shares some loving thing that they have observed someone else doing. It is another kind of "thank you". 

You can come up with your own methods to train a gratitude attitude, but that one thing lifts everyone's spirits and helps them get used to appreciating one another and everything around them.