The Gratitude Diaries Read online

  You don’t have to be a big star or travel to South Africa to encourage empathy. When my own son Matt was in high school, he volunteered at the South Street Seaport Museum, helping renovate the 1885 Wavertree, one of the last big ships made of wrought iron. Matt’s job one day was to scrape rust off the hull, and after several hours of hard labor, he was sweaty, exhausted, and filthy, his hands covered with black iron, which had also streaked across his face. As he sunk into his seat on the train home, he noticed people looking at him dubiously and moving away.

  At dinner that night, he turned reflective—and as appreciative of his life as a fifteen-year-old could be.

  “When I was dirty and in work boots, people treated me like a different person,” he told us. “I realized how lucky I am that I was working at the Wavertree for fun and not because I had to.”

  That perspective stuck with him. It made an impression that I couldn’t have achieved by telling him a thousand times how lucky he was. Instead, like Matt Damon, I didn’t need to say a word.

  —

  Teaching values like gratitude on a wider basis is one of the missions of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues in England. I exchanged some e-mails with James Arthur, the director of the center, and though he’s based at the University of Birmingham, he agreed to meet with me on his next trip to London.

  With an excuse to fly to one of my favorite cities, I grabbed the cheapest possible overnight flight and arrived in London early in the morning, much too exhilarated to have any jet lag. I walked around Hyde Park, dipped into the British Museum, and lunched at Fortnum & Mason. (Gratitude, thy name is scones with clotted cream.) Early the next morning, I took a taxi from my hotel near Kensington Gardens to the eminent Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall, founded in 1824 as a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. James Arthur, a distinguished man with silver hair and a firm handshake, met me in the huge lobby and led me up the impressive grand staircase. We took a quick tour through several massive and elegant rooms, including a library with floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases (and not a Kindle in sight). Then we sat down on the leather sofas of the morning room, where we had tea and discussed his interest in bringing gratitude and other moral values into the school system.

  “Virtue education has the potential to transform the lives of young people,” he said.

  His team had looked at how moral character was encouraged in seven different schools, from Eton (founded by King Henry VI in 1440) to a local primary school in Birmingham that included many children with special needs. He hoped to take the best practices and expand them. “We are seeking new ways to teach character and give young people a view beyond themselves,” he said.

  As one way to encourage gratitude, the Jubilee Centre sponsored the Thank You Film Awards for kids under sixteen (divided by age). Entries came in from all over the country, and the center held premieres at real theaters so kids could see their shorts on a big screen. The range of people thanked was impressive—from leaders in civil and women’s rights to doctors in the National Health Service. Videos from some of the youngest kids expressed gratitude to daddies, “lollipop ladies” (the local name for crossing guards), and bumblebees.

  Really, something was going right when five-year-olds wanted to thank bumblebees.

  James Arthur was optimistic that encouraging gratitude could have an effect on creating a more generous and welcoming world. As we moved on to our second cup of tea, I realized that he was a deeply religious man, but he pointed out that the center stuck to what he called “post-religious language.” He felt strongly that in an increasingly secular society, character and virtue couldn’t be abandoned. We just needed a new way to approach them. Gratitude wasn’t just a religious notion, it was a human one. Education has always been about preparing the young for the future—and won’t it be a more hopeful future if it is imbued with the kindness and compassion that gratitude can inspire?

  I nodded and swallowed hard. For James Arthur and his colleagues, research into gratitude wasn’t just cold social psychology. Understanding how to spread gratitude to the next generation became his way of creating a better world.

  Back in New York, it struck me that my personal quest to live gratefully had a much bigger dimension. Gratitude wouldn’t replace math and science in the schools (though some might like that), but it had started to gain traction. More schools now intervened in social arenas—like trying to stop bullying or helping to mainstream students with disabilities—and James Arthur was right that all of those efforts fell under the bigger rubric of teaching values. I read about a private elementary school in Colorado that tried to incorporate gratitude into the classroom. Younger students talked about what made them grateful, and fourth and fifth graders kept gratitude journals. The head of school said simply, “If you raise kids to be grateful, they will find success.”

  What schools aren’t doing yet, parents can try. If we want kids to know how blessed they are, they need a basis for comparison—and that requires the gift of a wider worldview. Some of those moms who worried about their ungrateful teens could think about taking them to a soup kitchen on a Saturday morning instead of a mall. Not as much fun, maybe, but a better deal in the long run. Or they could try one of my favorites: collecting all the charitable appeals that come in the mail into a big basket and finding a night when the whole family can sit down together to go through them. Parents set the budget for giving and the kids decide how it’s distributed. Or parents could simply set the model of gratitude in daily life. I don’t usually hang out on Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest, but heck, go where the kids are. Why not have everyone in the family post or text (or whatever you do) a picture each week of something that inspired appreciation—whether a friend, a snowflake, or a sunset. If kids live on social media, the shared experience might as well help everyone see the world differently.

  —

  Doing research on gratitude and kids, I came across some brand-new studies by a guy named Yarrow Dunham, who seemed to be at Princeton. But when I called him, I found he was now a full-time professor at Yale.

  “My wife studies medieval music, French and Italian fourteenth century, and I’m a psychologist—and we both managed to get appointments at Yale. Talk about gratitude!” he said exuberantly.

  I didn’t know enough about his wife’s field to ask a single question, but his studies definitely had wide appeal. He had done important research on how people divide into social groups—whether Yankee fans or Hindu castes—and headed something called the Social Cognitive Development Lab, which looked at how children naturally adhere to groups. (Randomly assign some children red T-shirts and others blue T-shirts, and they will immediately become fiercely loyal to the group that two minutes earlier didn’t exist.) Now he was starting a side project analyzing the ingredients that encouraged gratitude in children. Like James Arthur, he was interested in how gratitude could lead to a bigger circle of virtue.

  “Adults make a distinction between gratitude and obligation,” he told me. “Obligation is a debt that you have to pay back. Gratitude is that feeling when something good happens and you are happy with the world. Instead of a sense of debt, there’s a bigger feeling of wanting to pay it forward. Children don’t necessarily go through the mental gymnastics necessary for those distinctions.”

  In one study done with his colleague Peter Blake at Boston University, he brought little kids (ages four to eight) into his lab and gave them a gift, like a sticker book or temporary tattoo. Some were told the gift was a thank-you for coming to the lab—what Dunham called “a straight exchange relationship.” The others were told that another child had given them the gift and was sharing his favorite toy.

  Next, the children played a game where they were given ten Starburst candies, and they could take all of them or share some with another child.

  And bingo. The kids who felt they’d received a gift from another child—as opposed to payment for coming to th
e lab—were more likely to share. Dunham was excited to see that even with very young children, a bit of gratitude made them want to do something for someone else.

  Evolutionary biologists have studied reciprocity, which is what happens when you do something nice for me and I now do the same for you. Voilà, we become a cooperative species. Reciprocity is the simplest form of gratitude. Many studies have found it in animals—who are more likely to groom or share food with others who have helped them. I recently saw a touching video of animal gratitude in action. Primatologist Jane Goodall and a colleague had rescued a chimp named Wounda from near death, and after nursing her back to health, they were releasing her to freedom on a leafy island sanctuary. The gangly chimp lumbered out to head into the woods. But then she stopped, came back, and shimmied up to wrap her arms around Goodall. She held Goodall for a long time in the kind of loving embrace we’d all like. Thanks given, she climbed back down and headed off. You couldn’t watch that without thinking—there goes one grateful chimp.

  Dunham was pleased to point out that feelings of gratitude in children (real-life human ones, that is) inspire even greater sharing than simple reciprocity. The children who were grateful for their little gift shared their Starbursts with other children. It wasn’t just payback or obligation. Maybe that bumps us up a little higher than chimps on that evolutionary chain?

  “Gratitude goes beyond the you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours dyad and creates a broad network of possibility,” he said. Dropping his academic veneer, he added enthusiastically, “That’s very cool!”

  Dunham hoped to look next at how gratitude might create in kids and adults “a self-perpetuating cycle of virtuous deeds.” A child who’s grateful does something for the next kid, who does something for the next, who does something for the next . . . And eventually (theoretically, at least) it comes back to the first child. So-called pro-social behavior seems to be contagious.

  On the less positive side, I was interested in Dunham’s discovery that the children who thought they deserved the gift (they had earned it by coming to the lab) didn’t feel gratitude at all. I asked if that attitude might explain some teenage behavior.

  “Great question!” he said, flattering me with his spirited reply. “Teenagers have a sense of entitlement that fights gratitude. If they code it that parents or the community or the world is obligated to provision them with the things they want, then the parent is just living up to their obligations. That’s not a mind-set that creates a grateful disposition.”

  I liked his work and promised to stay in touch. And when I hung up, it occurred to me that maybe the problem I’d seen with the “ungrateful” kids and teens and millennials was really a question of obligation versus gratitude. None of us wants to think that we send our kids to camp or buy them cashmere sweaters out of obligation. But if kids see it as an “exchange relationship,” maybe the moms I’d met who wanted their teens to be grateful for rides to hockey games or summers at computer camp needed to take a step back. Growing up, did any of us really recognize how much our own parents did for us? My dad came from a very poor family and struggled to put himself through Boston University. He was proud to get an education but poignantly couldn’t afford to attend his senior prom, so he got a job working the front desk that night, selling tickets to his wealthier classmates. Watching them glide past him to go to the dance was a misery he never forgot. Thirty years later, he still felt the sting. I was in college (and a week from my own prom) when my dad told me that story, and only then did it occur to me how grateful my siblings and I should feel that he had fully covered our college costs. Moved by what he had sacrificed, I nobly asked if we could work out a plan so I could return the tuition to him as soon as I could afford it.

  “You can pay me back but not with money,” said my gentle dad. “The best return would be to do the same thing for your own children.”

  I didn’t really understand it at the time, but now I would ask the same thank-you of my boys. Don’t pay it back—pay it forward. That’s the greatest gratitude. And it goes far to meeting the virtuous goals of people like James Arthur and Yarrow Dunham, who see gratitude as a step to a kinder world.

  —

  Probably the best thing parents can do is to set an example of gratitude, finding a balance between planning for the future and savoring the present. But we’re often lousy at that. My older son, Zachary, was always so competent growing up that sometimes the best parenting trick was just to step back and admire what he did. But when he was a junior in high school, Zach noticed that every adult he encountered asked where he would be applying for college.

  “It’s as if what I’m doing now doesn’t matter,” he complained at the time.

  He got good at deflecting the queries—he’s always been clever—but once he landed in college, the same people wanted to know about his career plans. Hey, what about classes, professors, and the really cool experiments he did in the physics lab? Somehow, Zach instinctively knew to be grateful for the moments along the way. His freshman year at Yale, he and three other guys shared a suite so small he had to climb over the bunk beds to get to his desk. But the room was in a dorm on the Old Campus, a classic quadrangle built in the late 1800s on the model of Oxford and Cambridge. When I visited one day, we stood outside his entryway as the chapel bells pealed and the sun glinted off the century-old buildings. I wondered to myself if an eighteen-year-old could appreciate the scene, but before I could say a word, Zach gestured to his surroundings and asked me to stand still for a moment.

  “Every morning when I step outside, I make myself stop and look around and appreciate that I’m here. I’ll never get to live in a place like this again. I don’t want to take it for granted,” he told me.

  That he could overlook the cramped quarters and simply feel the magic of the place amazed me. As parents, we can be grateful and teach gratitude too. Helping kids reframe their experiences and exposing them to the greater world is a gift, and a little later, understanding the mind-set that keeps teens from expressing gratitude can help everyone get through bumpy times. I’d like to take credit for Zach’s grateful perspective and report all I did to instill it in him. But the truth is that he figured it out himself. When I think about my children, I am endlessly grateful to have them. And grateful that I can learn from them, too. The bottom line might simply be this: To raise grateful kids, be grateful for your kids.

  CHAPTER 4

  The No-Complaining Zone

  So grateful to . . . stop complaining!

  Thankful to enjoy the weather, however cold it may be

  Grateful to discover how being positive can change my mood

  With gratitude helping me with husband and kids, I started thinking about what else it could do for my daily interactions. On a wintry day as I slipped and slid across an icy sidewalk, I thought wryly that the one thing gratitude couldn’t fix was the weather.

  Well, wait a minute. Why not?

  Everybody I met on the street seemed to have turned into weatherman Al Roker, announcing that it was five degrees with a wind chill that made it feel like ten below. One morning, I had found myself exchanging complaints about the cold as I bought a bagel, stood at the bus stop, and got into an elevator. By the time I landed at the conference room where I was headed, I was exhausted from all the griping.

  My gratitude journal didn’t contain any magic spells to turn the cold into Caribbean sunshine. (I don’t know if even Harry Potter could do that.) But there was one thing I could do about the incredibly cold winter that was paralyzing the East Coast and parts of the Midwest. Stop grousing about it. Finding the good in every day meant overlooking (as much as possible) quotidian problems. Gratitude shouldn’t be reserved for special occasions. So my plan for this month took shape. I’d stop complaining about the weather and use that as a stepping-stone to become more grateful for ordinary, everyday life.

  People whining about the weather know it does
n’t help—they simply take solace in venting. The get-it-off-your-chest approach has many adherents, but what you say has an effect on how you feel. Announce too often that you’re miserable, and you begin to believe you really are. I had the sense that friends, strangers, and casual acquaintances commiserating about the bad conditions just made everyone more unhappy. There had to be a better way of bonding than bellyaching about something we couldn’t change.

  So as I walked down the street and bundled a plaid scarf a little tighter around my neck, I thought about using my new technique of reframing as part of the daily business of . . . getting through the day. Surely I could find a positive side to storms. I remembered a line from the English artist and social thinker John Ruskin that there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

  Just then, a man who was clearing snow from the sidewalk in front of his building tossed back a shovelful—and it landed smack on my shoulder.

  “Ugh!” I shouted.

  “Sorry,” the man mumbled, turning to see what he’d done. He was wearing a thick hat and heavy muffler and probably hadn’t seen me coming up behind him.

  “Be more careful!” I said, my face flushed as I brushed the snow off my coat.

  I started to walk off in a huff and then stopped. My attitude of gratitude had to hold in all conditions. I took a deep breath and tried the trick of flipping from bad to good. Sure he’d hit me with a shovelful of snow, but I was lucky to live in a part of the city where people kept their sidewalks cleared in snowstorms. And I was definitely grateful that he was out shoveling instead of me.