CROSSOVER EPISODE! Are you ready to embark on a journey that redefines gratitude and its importance in our lives? Gratitude isn't merely a verbal expression but an action that can significantly impact our relationships - especially our interactions with our children. Together, we dissect the power of gratitude and share essential tips that can help us as parents inculcate this virtue in our children’s lives, fostering a deeper connection with them.
Stepping into the world of teenagers, we further our understanding of how this age group perceives gratitude. Ever wondered how you could break the ice and have a more open conversation with your teenager about gratitude? Listen in, as we walk you through this, suggesting ways to reframe situations and communicate effectively. We stress on expressing our thankfulness to others for their help and influence, highlighting the importance of this acknowledgment. This isn't just a podcast episode, it's a journey aimed at fostering deeper connections, meaningful conversations, and an overall sense of gratitude in our lives. So, tune in!
www.bethtrammell.com
CROSSOVER EPISODE! Are you ready to embark on a journey that redefines gratitude and its importance in our lives? Gratitude isn't merely a verbal expression but an action that can significantly impact our relationships - especially our interactions with our children. Together, we dissect the power of gratitude and share essential tips that can help us as parents inculcate this virtue in our children’s lives, fostering a deeper connection with them.
Stepping into the world of teenagers, we further our understanding of how this age group perceives gratitude. Ever wondered how you could break the ice and have a more open conversation with your teenager about gratitude? Listen in, as we walk you through this, suggesting ways to reframe situations and communicate effectively. We stress on expressing our thankfulness to others for their help and influence, highlighting the importance of this acknowledgment. This isn't just a podcast episode, it's a journey aimed at fostering deeper connections, meaningful conversations, and an overall sense of gratitude in our lives. So, tune in!
www.bethtrammell.com
Hello listener. I'm your host, dr Beth Cremal, and I am here with my friend, leslie Bolser again for our monthly crossover episode with Core Essential Values. In this month we are talking about gratitude, and it's really the perfect month to be talking about gratitude. I think a lot of folks around the holidays start thinking about gratitude. How do we help our kids be more grateful? I just think you're really going to love this episode with my dear friend Leslie. I hope you enjoy and until next time, ciao.
Speaker 2:Welcome back everybody. It's a new month. We're excited to talk to you about a new word. This one is just such a fantastic word. It's something that I need to do a better job of, but it will make my life so much better when I do. I'm excited to talk to my friend, dr Beth Cremal, about it. Let's introduce ourselves and get started. What do you think? I love it. Let's go All right. Well, my name is Leslie Bolser and I am the Creative Director for Core Essential Values. We are a curriculum company that works mostly with schools, pre-k through high school, to talk to kids about things like this word a different word each month. We talk to kids and families in schools about how to live those out in their lives. Each month, I get the pleasure of sitting for a little while and talking to you. Dr Beth, would you introduce yourself? Yeah?
Speaker 1:I'm always happy to be here. I love this. I love words. I am Dr Beth Cremal and I'm a licensed psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Indiana University East, where I'm also the director of the Master's in Mental Health Counseling program. I focus on making words matter for good. I love everything communication, parent, child, teacher, child interaction. How do we be intentional with our words? It's why I love what we get to do every month.
Speaker 2:I think this one's going to be a really fun one to talk about. Sometimes, when we share what the word is, we get a little bit of a groan, even from ourselves, about how are we going to talk about this? This one's a great one. It fits perfectly with the month of November. This month, we're talking about gratitude and we're talking about letting others know, you see, how they've helped you. I just really love both the word and I love how we're talking about it, because I think it's just so, so important. This is one of those things showing gratitude has the ability to make someone else feel good and like they matter, and it has the ability to make us feel good while we're doing it.
Speaker 1:It's just such a good way to wrap our heads around this word, right, because we know that it is important to let other people know that they mean something to us, and when their actions matter to us, we should tell them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about it in a few different ways. First of all, I think, with younger kids.
Speaker 1:correct me if I'm wrong, but I really think this one is simple as saying thank you, yeah it's interesting because I love how we always give a definition, like quote definition, or how we're sort of talking about the word, because I think we all might think something about this word, right, like if I were to ask you how would a little kid show you they were grateful, how would they show gratitude? I think most of us would be like, well, they just say thank you. And when we think about how are we teaching our littles, our little ones, about gratitude, it's mostly in saying I'm thankful for you, right, thank you for doing this or doing that. But I'm not sure that that is really how I would wrap my head around gratitude. I think it's just we're setting the stage for later in their life, when we're going to talk about what real gratitude is. It's more than just thank you.
Speaker 1:But at this level, when they're really little, it may just be tiny bits of saying thank you for doing this, thank you for doing that. And the reason I'm saying this I'm kind of rambling, I don't know what's happening, but the reason I'm saying this is because I feel like when they're little right, preschoolers we're just correcting so much behavior, we're just correcting so many things that I feel like when we say thank you. It's not really at a gratitude, it's it's almost more like at a relief. We're like, finally, you just did what I told you to do. You know, thank you for doing what I told you to do. So it doesn't really feel like the same kind of thing as real gratitude when they're so little and we're correcting them. So much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I agree, and I was thinking back. You know, my kids are older now I have a 16 and a 19 year old but when they were little, I can recall many, many times when they didn't say thank you, but when they I handed them something or I did something for them and they just came and like hugged my leg, yeah, where they just like laid their head on my lap and that's thank you, right. Like that. They maybe didn't say the words, but I can even picture myself with a little child wrapped around my leg, patting their back and saying you're welcome, even though they didn't say thank you, right? Because I think that it does look like different things and come in many forms. And you're right, just saying the words thank you isn't the deeper form of gratitude that a hug around the leg might be a little more reflective of?
Speaker 1:I love this example and I can totally picture so many preschoolers you know doing this very thing and then us attributing it to like they love me, they miss me, they're happy to be with me, and we can also now add to that list like it may be their form of showing gratitude. And one thing that you brought up earlier, before we kind of started recording I think a brilliant move from parents during this phase of life is really modeling gratitude for other people out loud. When your spouse or partner or you know someone that you have in your life does something, when your preschoolers around I would say like I'm so grateful that you know daddy picked up the leaves in the yard, or aren't you so grateful that grandma invited you over and she makes chicken noodle soup for you? You know, I think we can have an opportunity to show and model gratitude and talk to our preschoolers planting those seeds about other people, in particular, if we are feeling a little like yeah, I'm not always so grateful for my four-year-old, I'm just correcting a lot.
Speaker 2:That makes me think, too, as our kids get a little older elementary, early middle school those times I mean, maybe I'm the only one, but I know at our house there are a lot of discussions that happen, maybe between adults or adults who are visiting or whatever, and sometimes the conversation might be about other people and as much as I try to be empathetic and kind, maybe it's not in the privacy of your own home, right? Maybe some true feelings come out. I'm wondering about using those moments to intentionally talk about people that you are grateful for, out of their presence, like behind their back, so to speak. Right, so saying, mentioning a friend's name just out of the blue and being like you know, I'm really grateful for him, I'm grateful for him because he does this and this for me. I just feel like that's really cool, it's important to me. And then, moving on with the conversation, just to point out recognizing those feelings of gratitude for others. I don't know, do you think something like that would make an impact at an elementary, middle school age?
Speaker 1:Any moments that we can just drop tiny seeds. You know that's all we're doing all the time as parents, is we're just putting tiny seeds, even into adulthood. You know, I have moments with my parents currently where, gosh, they're still planting seeds in me. You know they have tiny moments where they're still planting seeds. So I think these things all the words we talk about always are just little bits over time, are going to eventually work.
Speaker 1:So, whether it's a tiny moment where you're intentionally, one time a day, you're going to say something nice about somebody that you have in your kid's life Maybe it's their teacher, their coach, their grandparent, you know just name some kids in their lives and just be intentional, Set an alarm on your phone, Think about when you're picking them up from school or on the way to school, or if it becomes part of your routine, you're more likely to do it regularly. Maybe it's once a week when you all have the chance to sit down and eat dinner together and maybe you focus on gratitude. Then I think there are a lot of ways that you can infuse it, but to your point, like letting it become just sort of a natural part of the flow of your conversation rather than like hey, today I'm going to teach you about gratitude and you are going to learn about gratitude today, you know, let's smell it first.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's smell it first. Yeah, absolutely, so that's, that's fantastic. As our kids get older, though I said mine are 16 and 19. I think, yeah, I think it really it looks, just looks so different. Help me out with that. What does gratitude even look like with a kid who is a teenager, for example?
Speaker 1:I love this word, and particularly relating to our teenagers, because you know, I worked in private practice for a long time probably 20 years of working with kids and families and lots and lots of teenagers and their parents, and I heard a lot about how parents would feel like their kids were ungrateful. Yeah, and you know, you brought up the word entitlement before we kind of started, and I know that that is, you know, maybe a fear that a lot of parents might have, that they are raising an entitled kid or we're raising an entitled generation. Well, the reality is our teenagers haven't necessarily had a explicit teaching through your lens on what gratitude should look like. The example that I give is think about an interchange that you might have in the living room, where the parent has folded the laundry and the kid grumbles. The teenager comes down grumbling about having to put their laundry away, right, and the parent says you are so ungrateful, I took time out of my day to fold your laundry and all you have to do is bring it upstairs. You're so ungrateful, you could at least say thank you. And so the teenager says thank you and stomps their way up the stairs.
Speaker 1:What does gratitude look like in that moment? Because the truth is now we're going to get really real here, friends. Ok, you ready, just like sit down somewhere. Good, let's do it. Yeah, no one is grateful to have to put their laundry away. I'm not grateful to put my laundry away, are you, do you want? I am not going to show gratitude in that moment. You know what I'm saying? Like no, you're right, you're right. Are not equipped to like show their gratitude in the moments where we expect it.
Speaker 2:Especially when it requires additional work for them, regardless of the outcome of the work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, I just think sometimes we're not actually thinking through in that moment. You know, we're just like you're such an ungrateful jerk I can't believe you would make me fold your laundry, and now you're, you know, like we just kind of get into our feels about it. So I have two things that I want to say about this, particularly around teenagers. One you have to decide as a parent, what does gratitude look like? What does it look like? You know, because I think it's more than just thank you. You have to really sit down and have a little heart to heart with yourself to figure out. If my kid just said they were thank, just just thank you for the things I do for them, would that be enough? And if it's not, you have to identify what those things are and then you have to tell your teenager that I mean, most teenagers are not just inherently jerks. They're really not. They are inherently egocentric.
Speaker 1:That's the part of development they are in. They do not think about you outside of their own life. That's just the reality of how teenagers are. That's the phase of development they're in. They think about themselves a lot and that's that's OK, that's appropriate. Now you can train them to do something else. So just last week I had a conversation with one of my teenagers and was like look, you want me to show up early to pick you up from practice because you don't want to wait, right? So if I show up four minutes late, you're like brah, where are you at? Yeah, right, but you expect me to wait 15 minutes just in case you get out of practice early. I need you to just pause and think about how that doesn't seem quite fair. Yeah, and he was able to be like huh, it literally never like crossed his mind, you know he's only being around self-standing there.
Speaker 1:You know, and he's not a bad kid, he's not a jerk, you know, he's in the stage of development where his brain only thinks about him, and so I had to have this explicit training moment with him to say, on top of, like all the work that I do outside, of just coming to pick you up from practice, I have a lot of other things to do. So I just need you to say, mom, thanks for going out of your way to come pick me up on time. Yeah, we just have to communicate that to them. So first we have to decide what what gratitude looks like to us, and then we have to have a moment to describe that to our teenagers, and then we have to remind them when they don't do it well, the first time or the 12th time.
Speaker 2:That's so good, to just have that conversation and to say, hey, it would really mean a lot to me if you could show me you're grateful in these ways. That would mean a lot to me. But then the other side of that, though, don't you think, is to have then the same conversation with them and say I'm not going to put you on the spot, you get a few days to think about this, but if I wanted to show you I was grateful, what would I do as your mom, and let them think about what it looks like to be grateful for them, because we think we're being grateful to them and showing gratitude, but probably not the way they even see it or hear it Right?
Speaker 1:No, they do not think. I'm grateful, that's for sure. They're not thinking that way. So I love that you're, I love that you're challenging us to think about this, because even as we were kind of talking about this and I was preparing to speak about this, it's like huh, how have I modeled that for my teenagers? They do a lot of stuff, do well at school. They're kind to their teachers. I have targeted times where I tell them I'm so grateful that you're so good to your teacher. When I get a note from the parent teacher conference twice a year or something. What about the everyday things?
Speaker 2:What's our defining what's our definition, letting others know you see how they've helped you, yeah. Yeah that's perfect.
Speaker 1:Letting others know. You see that they've helped you. Yeah, I could be better at that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I mean, no one has gotten where they are in life by themselves. No one is who they are completely on their own. There are always people who have made us better and made us who we are that we could be grateful to. No, I think this is all really good.
Speaker 2:Another thing I think reframing could be helpful in these moments too. I know with my daughter and I I may have told the story before, but a few weeks ago we were changing the sheets on her bed. We had just washed the sheets and putting them back on and her bed kind of the way it's positioned, it's hard to get the top corner. She's just kind of like crawl over there and do the top corner. Every time she's like oh, I hate doing this. I'm like, I know it is a pain, I hate doing it too, but don't you love the feeling of sleeping in brand new, clean sheets? Isn't it the greatest feeling? Every time she's like you're right, you're right, it makes it worth it. I think reframing the negativity about putting away clothes or making the bed or whatever it is the task that we are not grateful to be doing sometimes reminding ourselves and our kids of what that outcome is can make us a little bit less entitled and a little more grateful for the outcome.
Speaker 1:I think it's sometimes remembering in their pushback, if we can train ourselves to not automatically push right on back and see their resistance for what it might be, instead of just like they're being disrespectful or they're being ungrateful or I can't believe they're. You know, like, if we can just pause, that's when we can insert the reframe, that's when we can insert the teacher moment, that's when we can insert something else. You know, we just have to train ourselves to pause that initial like oh no she didn't Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, and to agree with them, right, Like lots of things do suck and it's okay to say it sometimes. Like yeah, it does. I know All this busy work you just got assigned for homework. It's terrible.
Speaker 1:It is really terrible. Maybe there's some real like value in what you're saying here at the end of this conversation. Right, if I could make a list of the things that I know my kids would have a hard time showing gratitude toward, it would prepare me for when they are like grumbling about it. Right, so my kids have to do chores. My kids have to, every so often, take a shower. I could make a list in my mind, or write it out, of those things that I know they're not gonna show gratitude toward. Yeah, so that I can buy myself the time to have that pause to then be able to reframe like yeah, but aren't we really grateful that we have a house that has a washing machine? You know, like, the alternative is you have to go to the laundromat and that means you load everything up in the car and you have to go, or you have to ride the bus or you have to walk. Let's be grateful for this, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and unloading the dishwasher is terrible, but we have a dishwasher or we get to eat off of clean plates or whatever. The whatever the reframing is, there are some good things, but you can still say yeah, you're right, this chores stinks. This is one of the no fun. I don't like this one either.
Speaker 1:I don't like this one either, and it has to get done. And tonight it's your turn, Tomorrow it won't be.
Speaker 2:Be grateful for that, yep.
Speaker 1:Look at that.
Speaker 2:We can find a bright, shiny spot in the darkest of moments with the dishwasher.
Speaker 2:Be grateful that now it's your sister's responsibility. It's true, it's true, awesome. Well, thank you so much again for the time that you give to doing this. I really am grateful for you and for the words of wisdom that you share not only with me, but with our audience and those who are listening. I do think that there are people who are grateful for this podcast to hear a little bit about how they can be thinking about the words that they use with and about their kids, as their kids are growing up.
Speaker 1:I love it, I appreciate you, I'm grateful for you and I agree.
Speaker 2:Excellent, all right. So if you want to know more about Core Essentials, you can find us online at cevalues or at coreessentialsorg. And what about you?
Speaker 1:BethTramelcom, or Make Worth Matter For Goodcom, and that brings you back to BethTramelcom and you can find lots of information on my website.
Speaker 2:That's amazing, all right. Well, thanks everybody, and we'll be back next month, all right, ciao.