In the United States, we celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving this week.

This is a great opportunity to show our thankfulness and gratitude for the blessings in our lives. But it is also a good time to teach our children the habit of being grateful.

One of the things we try to do around our home is share our reasons to be thankful, even when things are difficult. And Thanksgiving is a prime opportunity to enforce that, though not the only opportunity to do so.

We have a tradition each year of sharing something that we are thankful for from the previous year. On the holiday, we focus on big things, like a healthy pregnancy, and not the little things, like Cool Whip for the pumpkin pie.

We give each of our kids the opportunity to share this while we eat our Thanksgiving meal, and we direct our thanks to God for his blessings in our lives.

The rest of the year, we try to focus our attention on the smaller details of life that we are thankful for. Each week, and sometimes more often, we each share a detail of our day that we are thankful for. This could be the fact that someone let us go in line first at the grocery store, or one child shared his LEGOs with another.

Reinforcing this like we do is very helpful. But the best way to teach gratitude, in my opinion, is by demonstration and example.

Our children see whether or not we express thankfulness for the big things and for the little things. And when they witness us constantly, consistently, being thankful for the things and people and circumstances in our life, they will pick it up. They will learn to express gratitude because they are saturated with it in daily life.

So, don’t allow Thanksgiving to simply be a day for you this year, dads. Let it be a way of life. And watch it impact the generations to follow us.

Be thankful, Dad!

Be deliberate, Dad!

How do you teach your kids to be thankful? You can leave your thoughts in the comments by clicking here.