“There are starving children in Africa who would love your
dinner! You should be grateful and eat it.”
“Just be glad you don’t have to dress like her.”
“I’m just glad I don’t have things as bad as him.”
Familiar sentiments? I suspect most of us have heard or
uttered something very much along these lines. Maybe we said them to our kids
or heard them from our parents. They are ideas aimed at assisting in gratitude.
Right? That’s what they do?
While there is a sense in which we should be jarred into
gratefulness by the reality that others have it worse than we do, these kinds
of statements are a pretty horrid kind of instruction on gratitude. They teach comparison
more than gratitude. And what about the kids in Africa? How are they supposed to grateful in this set up?
Building gratitude on the foundation of comparison is a
structure doomed to crumble. All the mortar between the bricks isn’t, in fact,
thankfulness. It’s superiority. I have something someone else doesn’t. I am
something someone else isn’t. It is implicit arrogance that is being created
and a false kind of gratitude. Your kids become thankful, not for the dinner
served, but that they aren’t starving in Africa . . . which is right close to
thinking they are better than those from Africa.
Gratefulness can’t be based on any sort of comparison
between one person and another. It must be based on the reality of right
expectations. What is reasonable to expect?
In truth, nothing. We deserve nothing. Everything we get is
beyond what we deserve. And this is the reality which children need to grasp
(along with the rest of us, who still get angry when we don’t get what we
expect). We need to keep in mind our state as sinners and teach our children
the same.
Gratefulness for something
lends itself to comparison. But gratitude for something to someone changes the equation. All of a sudden our focus is on
the goodness of the giver, and often on our dependence on him or on the
undeservedness of the gift. And this is where we want our children to be:
focused on the giver’s goodness.
