The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

Did you call the guy you worked with last summer?

  Let me put more milk in your cereal.

  It’s all well-meaning and loving, but it turns out to be exhausting—for both me and them. So I decided this time would be different. For the next couple of days, I sat back and just appreciated the charming, funny, smart (and did I mention great-looking?) young man who was now hanging around my house. I counted my lucky stars rather than the dishes he piled up in front of the TV. Often the comments parents consider helpful are heard by kids (maybe not wrongly) as critical, so I tried hard to give up on that mode. As I did, Matt relaxed around me more and more. He’s whip smart and we’ve always had a close relationship, but one day he shared a story about a former girlfriend and stopped in the middle to grin. “Am I supposed to be telling my mom all this?” he asked.

  “I’m grateful that you do,” I said. “I’m not going to give any advice, but I’m always on your side.”

  Matt finished his story, then leaned across the table. “Thanks for always being there for me, Mom. I’m pretty lucky to have you and Dad.”

  “We’re the lucky ones,” I said.

  Appreciating your child for who he is should be both natural and obvious—but I’m surprised at how bad many of us are at doing it. Kids of every age want their parents’ approval, and it’s a great gift to let them have it. After Matt headed back to school, I had lunch with my friend Jess, a mom in her midforties who likes to describe herself as a “reformed lawyer.” She had quit a big firm to raise her children and did more volunteer work than almost anyone I knew. I told her what a great visit I’d had with Matt, and she immediately launched into worries about her own daughter, a sophomore in college. Jess didn’t like that she was majoring in art history (“hard to get a job”) or involved with a guy from Spain (“what if she moves there?”). Jess was always trying to get her daughter to share information about her life, but the nineteen-year-old had turned sullen and rarely called anymore.

  “I wouldn’t call you either, if I knew you were going to criticize me,” I said with a shrug.

  “It’s constructive criticism,” Jess said defensively.

  “You think you’re constructing, but she thinks you’re tearing down. Try being only positive.”

  Jess looked at me blankly for a moment and then seemed to get it. She’d been on board earlier when I’d told her about my year of living gratefully and had even started her own gratitude journal. But it hadn’t occurred to her that the same technique could have an effect on her relationship with her daughter.

  “What do you suggest?” she asked.

  “Something cheerful, upbeat, and short,” I said. “A text message that just lets her know you appreciate her.”

  “You do that with your sons?” Jess asked warily.

  “I do,” I admitted.

  I told Jess that when she didn’t hear from her daughter, she missed her and wanted to know what was happening in her life. But what started as love ended up sounding like anger. As I’d learned earlier, the real issue wasn’t the event (the daughter not calling) but Jess’s response to it. The real message Jess wanted to send was You’re the best gift ever! I’m so grateful to have you in my life!

  Jess handed me her iPhone. “You’re the writer. What should I write?”

  “This isn’t ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’” I said. “You don’t have to be John Keats to let your kid know you’re grateful for her. Just be honest.”

  I quickly typed, “Hope you’re having a great week. No headlines from here, I’m just thinking of you with hugs.”

  I gave the phone back to Jess.

  “Not bad,” she said, reading it.

  “Adapt however you like. But that’s the idea.”

  Jess hit Send and then sat back and stared at the screen.

  “Gratitude doesn’t need an immediate reply,” I said. “You do it for yourself as much as for her.”

  The next day, Jess told me her daughter had a job interview that afternoon and she was thinking about sending some advice on what to wear. I vetoed the sartorial suggestions—which seemed to me like just an excuse for getting in touch.

  “The real point is that you want to let her know you’re cheering for her,” I said. Then dictating a possibility, I offered, “Good luck with the summer job interview. I think you’re the best—and I’m betting they will, too.”

  Within five minutes, Jess delightedly reported that she’d gotten a reply. “Thanks, Mom! I’ll call you later and tell you how it goes.”

  It was a small victory, but it seemed to prove the point. We instinctively want to be with someone who appreciates us and accepts us unconditionally.

  “She even said thanks!” Jess added cheerfully.

  Getting a thank-you from children of a certain age is a rare and wonderful thing, and most parents are right to savor it—and not expect it too often. In the gratitude survey I had done, young people ages eighteen to twenty-four (the youngest millennials) proved less grateful than anyone else. Barely one-third said they expressed gratitude on any regular basis (for those over thirty-five, it was more than half), and they were also more likely to think in terms of the personal benefits of expressing gratitude—saying thanks in the hope that it would encourage other people to be nicer to them.

  Gratitude is an issue for slightly younger teens, too, as I discovered when I went to a party and met an energetic group of working moms. Most of them had teenage children, and when they heard about my yearlong quest for gratitude, they offered a lot of eye rolling and teeth gnashing.

  “I can’t wait to read your book, because I have the most ungrateful kid in the world!” one of them said. The other moms were eager to compete with her for title of parent of “most ungrateful child.” One reported that when she sent her fifteen-year-old to an expensive computer camp the previous summer, she suggested he show his thanks by calling home a few times a week. He seemed puzzled by the suggestion. “What am I thanking you for, Mom? Isn’t sending kids to camp what parents are supposed to do?”

  The question elicited knowing groans. Another mom who regularly drove her hockey-playing daughter to tournaments in distant towns said she didn’t mind the long trips, but she wanted her daughter to appreciate the effort. Prodded for thanks, the young goalie turned defensive. “I’m a kid. Since I can’t drive, you have to take me,” she said, pouting.

  Part of the problem could be attributed to the chemistry of the brain. If it often seems that kids don’t know how lucky they are, it’s because—they don’t. How would they know? That’s not where their brains are focused. Neuroscientists have shown that different regions in the brain develop at different rates. The prefrontal cortex, which controls reasoning and executive control, is on the slow track. Children and teens, like all of us, are partly products of their neural circuits. Parents need to use our (supposedly) better-developed prefrontal cortices to provide some perspective.

  For advice on how to do that, I called Christine Carter, a sociologist from Berkeley, California, who coaches families on how to be happier. (Yes, California has happiness coaches.) When families come in for consultations, she often helps them set gratitude rituals. For example, at dinner each night, everyone discusses what made them grateful. Or before bed, they share three good things about the day. “Finding silver linings gives kids at any age more resilience and helps them short-circuit anxiety,” she told me.

  Carter’s family had recently expanded, and with four children and stepchildren ages eleven to fourteen, she had adapted the rituals that she herself had been using for years. “You don’t want gratitude to feel like a grind,” she said. If Christine had to travel or the children were away, she might have them text her three good things that had happened to them. A neighbor who had a very shy son decided it was too difficult to share grateful thoughts out loud, so everyone got slips of paper before dinner and wrote “gratitude fortunes,” which they dropped
in a box.

  I asked Christine if her kids ever objected to her approach. “They’ve grown up with gratitude as part of their lives, so they don’t have that entitled attitude I hear parents describe,” she said. I immediately thought of the moms at the party, and Christine wasn’t surprised to hear their complaints.

  “Teens don’t want to feel like they’re pawns in someone else’s game,” she said. “The more controlling parents are and the more they structure the kids’ lives around enrichment, achievement, and college, then the more kids lose touch with who they are and what they want.”

  Which brings us back to those ungrateful millennials from my survey. When I conducted focus groups about gratitude as part of that John Templeton Foundation study, most of the participants—including professionals, working parents, and stay-at-home moms—got excited by the subject. Some admitted that they hadn’t thought much about gratitude before but just having the session made them want to add more to their lives. “This afternoon was a life-changing big deal!” one woman e-mailed me afterward.

  The sessions with millennials were completely different. College-age kids (and those in their early twenties, just starting careers) were struggling so hard to define themselves that they couldn’t look beyond their own shadows. Many seemed almost offended by the whole concept of gratitude.

  “I hate that feeling of I owe you something,” said Greg, a twenty-two-year-old living in Boulder, Colorado, who took part in one of the discussions. “I don’t like receiving gifts or acts of kindness, because they just make me feel awkward.”

  The other millennials in Greg’s group quickly agreed. And they made it very clear that the people they really didn’t want to feel obligated to were their parents. One young woman literally wrinkled her nose when asked about being grateful to her family. “I can be grateful to the counter guy at the deli, maybe. But my parents are just doing what nature intended. Even chimps take care of their children.”

  Ah, yes. Parents as chimps. If we’re just fulfilling our biological imperative, why would our children say thanks? Part of the kids’ biological imperative was to develop independence, and gratitude somehow felt antithetical to that. The kids in the focus groups were still at an age where they needed parental help, but they wanted to pretend they didn’t. Greg said that when he couldn’t afford an apartment, his dad offered to pay the security deposit.

  “I didn’t like it because the whole point was to live on my own. I took the money, but only with spite,” he said.

  A young woman named Emma understood. She had just graduated from a college in western Massachusetts and her parents were helping pay the rent while she started a film internship. “How I feel is all twisted around. Any gratitude gets smothered with guilt and annoyance that I have to be reliant on them. I feel the guilt a lot more than the gratitude,” she said.

  From the stories, it seemed like they had model parents—generous and eager to give their grown kids a positive start. But instead of flooding their parents with thank-yous, they took what was offered while holding their noses. It struck me that they were secretly grateful for the help, but even more chagrined that they couldn’t yet handle the world completely by themselves. Guilt over gratitude, as Emma said.

  “It’s about control. You want to achieve on your own and not think someone else helped,” Greg said.

  The conflict and confusion registered most clearly in the story that a slim, dark-haired eighteen-year-old named Akil told. He had been given a full scholarship to a small urban college, and in addition to tuition, “they gave me a place to live, they gave me a laptop, they gave me stipends and stuff like that.”

  Surely, a $50,000-a-year gift should hit the list of reasons to be grateful for even the most muddled millennial. But Akil didn’t see it that way. He softly explained that his real dream had been to go to Duke, where he could have cool friends and watch big-deal basketball games. Though he had accepted the generous scholarship and knew he’d learn a lot at the small college, he spent every day second-guessing himself.

  “I’m grateful that I was given the scholarship and all, but I also resent it because I wanted something else,” he said sadly.

  What can you say about a kid who resents having no college debt? A lot of giving and goodwill had been doled out to each of these young adults and they didn’t seem to appreciate it. Were they a bunch of ingrates? I didn’t think so. They seemed to be typical college-age kids who knew in their heart of hearts that they were lucky to have support—whether a security deposit, a scholarship, or a safety net—but were still having the toddler-like tantrums of I want to do it myself!

  Expressing gratitude outright to their parents wasn’t in the cards, but they clearly had the nagging sense that something was necessary to balance the deck. Emma announced that her way of showing gratitude to her parents was by being the best person she could be.

  “My mother told me she was in labor with me for twenty-four hours and my parents paid for my college, so I will be a good child and do equally unpleasant things for them in return,” she said airily.

  What kind of things?

  She thought about it for a moment.

  “Oh, I know,” she said triumphantly. “Sometimes I’ve sat and listened to my mother nattering for forty minutes about the animals chewing up her vegetable garden. I know that’s small-scale, but trust me, it’s not something I enjoy!”

  So there it was. Emma thought chatting about chipmunks was a fair exchange—and a perfect way to show gratitude—for all her parents had done. It brought to mind the lovely poem by Billy Collins, the former US poet laureate, reflecting on the lanyard he made for his mother as a child at summer camp. “She gave me life and milk from her breasts, / and I gave her a lanyard . . .” he wrote, going on to marvel at his childish belief that the “worthless thing I wove out of boredom / would be enough to make us even.”

  The poem makes everyone smile, not because it’s so far-fetched but because it’s so understandably real. Yale president Peter Salovey quoted the full poem once when he gave a speech to graduating seniors and pointed out that “the need to express gratitude reminds us that we are not entirely in control; that we might be indebted or dependent; that our destiny is not entirely in our hands; indeed, that on occasion we are vulnerable.”

  Indebted, vulnerable, and out of control are not emotions that any young adult wants to feel. Yet President Salovey went on to say that true happiness in life “may not be possible without the capacity to reject the myth of total self-reliance. The good life may be out of reach unless we are able to cultivate an openness to accepting help from others and expressing gratitude for that help.”

  —

  So what’s the best way to cultivate that willingness to be grateful? How do we give kids a bigger view and get them to understand that attending computer camp or getting money for college isn’t their essential right? That maybe (just maybe!) we are all interconnected and they are luckier than they know?

  I thought about conversations I had on the subject with actor Matt Damon when we did a couple of magazine articles together. Handsome and charming in person, Damon also came across as smart and thoughtful and very sincere. The first time we met, he told me that when he was growing up, his mom, an educator in the Boston area, had a magnet on the refrigerator with a quote from Gandhi that said, “No matter how insignificant what you do may seem, it is important that you do it.”

  “I was raised to believe in sharing what you have, and I want my children to understand that too,” he said. When he was a kid, he got an allowance of five dollars a week, and after a while, he started sending most of it to various causes that his mom supported.

  “Be careful how you say that or I’ll sound like too much of a goody-goody,” he joked.

  One afternoon, we sat in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a place where people usually talk about movie deals, back-end points, and their latest and g
reatest screenplay. But Matt sipped a cappuccino and told me about his travels around the world to try to understand global poverty.

  “I spent my twenties really focused on my career, which is okay,” he said. “But now my career is in a solid place and I have a family and I want my kids to see that their dad has a bigger world than just photo shoots.”

  Making that world bigger—for himself and his children—was a challenge. He knew that a guy who pals around with George Clooney and has made a fortune in Hollywood blockbusters like The Bourne Identity (and its sequels) wasn’t always taken seriously. After visiting Africa once to raise awareness on the refugee problem, he was interviewed on the BBC, and the somewhat condescending reporter asked if a celebrity like him could really make a difference.

  “We’d just spent fifteen minutes on the air talking about Zimbabwe,” he told me with a laugh. “I said, ‘Would you have discussed this topic at all if you weren’t talking to me?’”

  A few years earlier, Damon was in South Africa, shooting the Clint Eastwood–directed movie Invictus. Damon played a white rugby star who became a key player in Nelson Mandela’s efforts to heal the wounds of postapartheid South Africa. His family had come on location, and Damon thought about taking his oldest daughter, Alexia, then only ten, to tour the impoverished townships of Johannesburg with him. He asked his costar Morgan Freeman (who was playing Mandela in the movie) what he should say to her to explain the misery and poverty. What reason could he give for why her life was so different from theirs?

  “Morgan said to me, ‘You don’t have to tell her anything. Just let her see. That’s all the education anyone needs.’ And it was the best advice I could have gotten. She just looked and looked and took it in. Those kinds of experiences can be life changing.”

  His approach was just right. It turns out that empathy is fundamental to gratitude—and to what psychologists now describe as “emotional intelligence.” Various studies in brain and behavior suggest that IQ accounts for only about 20 percent of a child’s success in later life. A full 80 percent is determined by other factors that revolve around emotional style. When kids can step outside of themselves for a moment and imagine what it is to be someone else, they are better able to respond to other people’s emotions—and to recognize their own. They also start to appreciate both what they have and what others have done for them.