2 Play Therapy Techniques to Encourage a More Thankful Mindset
This is the first in a 2-part series on gratitude. For part 2, click here.
Happy Thanksgiving! This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the theme of gratitude, and how it impacts the children I see in my playroom. Our culture pays a lot of lip service to gratitude. We have an entire national holiday dedicated to the concept of being grateful for what we have. Interestingly, right after Thanksgiving, we are catapulted into the most materialistic season of the year. In this post, I’ll be talking about how to navigate this with children, using play therapy skills to teach children gratitude through play.
The day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday sales will immediately start peddling the hottest new products to both adults and children. In fact, lots of kids’ culture is based on needing the hottest new toy, from unboxing videos on YouTube to TV commercials targeted directly at children to videogames that constantly push in-game purchases. In a world where Thanksgiving and Christmas are so loaded with messages about needing more, how can we help teach children gratitude and help them to be thankful for what they already have?
I came across this 2014 article from the Atlantic by Jenn Choi recently, and I think it’s fantastic. It’s advice from a parent’s point of view on how to effectively teach gratitude to kids without preaching or lecturing. The author, a mom and journalist, feels torn: she wants to provide her kids with the material things her own family couldn’t afford as a child, but also worries about spoiling them. She decides to appeal to her kids’ interests and speak their language—toys and play—in order to instill the value of gratitude:
Kids do not know how big or little your paycheck is. Kids do not understand what income tax or health insurance deductibles are either. However, they do know how much a Nintendo DS game cartridge costs. They know how much a Wii costs. Or a slice of pizza or a bottle of Gatorade. This is their vocabulary—their understanding of values in our material world. We can work with that. And to get our kids to understand the meaning of gratitude, we must.
The entire article is worth a read, and it’s a good reminder that adult worries about finances are just not good motivators to help kids learn to be more grateful. They’re too abstract for children to understand, and hearing about financial difficulties might make children feel guilty or anxious, rather than grateful. It got me thinking about how play therapy can help parents to teach the concept of gratitude at home without resorting to lecturing.
Lots of the skills that are “bread and butter” for play therapists can be used by parents at home to promote gratitude in a fun, engaging way. Here are some play and activity-based tips to consider if you’d like to encourage your children to develop a more thankful mindset.
Give Them Responsibility
In play therapy, we talk a lot about “returning responsibility” to a child, which simply means encouraging children to do things by themselves whenever possible. Rather than jumping in immediately to help if a child is working hard to open a jar lid or balance a tower of blocks, a play therapist allows the child to struggle a bit and try to achieve the task alone. With a little patience, the child can usually do the task all by herself, and feels proud of herself for doing it.
Being responsible for an activity can also help children be more grateful for the end result, because they appreciate the effort that went into it. When children are given a job to do during family chores, cooking, and cleaning, they feel more thankful and take less for granted. Here’s two ways to promote gratitude by giving kids responsibility:
Get kids involved with their own meal prep: even toddlers can help with tasks like mixing, dumping ingredients, and washing produce. Older children can cut food with child-safe kitchen knives, measure ingredients, grease baking pans, and rinse dishes. Involving children in the kitchen is a common recommendation for helping picky eaters, because children are more likely to appreciate and enjoy food they have helped to cook themselves. Similarly, kids who took part in cooking their own food take pride in their accomplishment, and are more aware of the work it takes to put food on the table each day.
Let kids assemble their own toys: Did your child just come home with a massive Lego set or playhouse requiring an elaborate set-up? While it may not be realistic for your child to put everything together themselves, encouraging the child to put their new toy together with you can help them to grasp the work and effort that goes into building their new plaything. This might help your child to feel more thankful for his new toy and treat it with more care.
Less is More
Play therapists work with toys for a living, and yet if you peek into a play therapist’s office, you’ll likely find a small collection of traditional and fairly “basic” items. Having a mountain of toys in the office can overwhelm children, making them feel more anxious and unfocused, so many play therapists take a “less is more” approach and carefully curate their playrooms to include classic toys rather than the latest “it” item of the season.
Research now shows that kids with fewer toys focus for longer and play more creatively than children with more. A study published in Infant and Child Development showed that toddlers in a room with only 4 toys showed more imaginative and advanced play than children in a room with 16 toys. The kids in the 4-toy room were also able to play with their toys for longer periods of time, without becoming distracted. Children don’t need every hot new toy advertised on TV, or 100 presents under the Christmas tree. In fact, teaching kids how to make do with less might lead to happier, more grateful kids.
You can read more about play therapy and its benefits for children by clicking here. I’ll be back next week to share some more tips about teaching gratitude to kids during the holiday season and year-round.
