November 12, 2025
Joey and Carla Link
Did you know there is a difference between being thankful and being grateful? They are often interchanged, but they mean two separate things.
Gratitude is a deep, lasting attitude of appreciation, while thankfulness is an emotional response to a specific event or gift. While you are rarely thankful for hard things in life, you can have an underlying attitude of gratefulness no matter what is going on in your life.
So, how do you learn to be grateful? The first step is getting into the habit of being thankful. Making it a habit is not the same thing as saying “Thank you” here and there. Let’s start with us. When was the last time you stopped in the middle of the day and thanked God for something that didn’t seem like a big deal? The other night I couldn’t sleep so I turned the TV on. When I was ready to try sleeping again, I couldn’t find the remote. I looked everywhere and it was nowhere. As I lay down, I couldn’t believe I couldn’t find it. I prayed and remembering I was working on being thankful for everything, I thanked Him that we had TV to entertain us and for remotes so we don’t have to keep getting up and down to change the channel and so on.
Then I asked God to help me find the remote. Getting into the habit of asking Him first is a very good habit to get into too. If God knows the number of hairs on my head He certainly knew where my remote was. The next morning as I was making the bed, there it was, on the floor under the bed. Knowing I had looked there the night before, I thanked God for opening my eyes to see and find it. Don’t assume anything is by chance or luck. Assume everything is by God and take the seconds of time it takes to ask Him first for help and then thank Him for it.
Step 2 is doing the same with your spouse, kids, other family members, friends, co-workers and so on. Ask them first for help before you are in over your head and thank them for it when you get it.
How do you work with your kids to be thankful? You start by working with them the same way; working with them to get into the habit of showing thankfulness. I watched a family at an event remind their pre-teen child to say “thank you” to someone who was kind to her. I purposely watched other parents with their kids of all ages the rest of the night and saw this same thing again and again. WHY are we reminding our kids who know better to say “thank you”?
We keep reminding them because it is important to us but it isn’t to them.
If your kids have never gotten into the habit of saying “thank you” without reminders from you, we would say it is time to think about making a consistent effort to make it a family project to work on. How? With our grandkids and with their parents blessing, if they don’t say “please” when they ask for something or “thank you” when they get it, then we tell them “No”. You’ll be surprised how often those words will be added to their vocabulary when you do this.
You might say we forced them to do it by refusing to give them what they want. What we did was make it important to them to remember to say it. If you have young kids, you can teach your toddlers signs for these words.
One of our daughters takes her 3 year old to the zoo a few times a month. Recently our daughter shared with us that as they were leaving, her daughter said “thank you” to the person sitting at the entrance gate. For our daughter, it’s a habit to say “thank you” in moments like that and her 3 year old had picked it up as well! Little kids will get into the habit of doing something before they understand what it means. Saying “please” and “thank you” certainly fall into that.
Getting into the habit of being thankful will turn into an attitude of underlying gratefulness, appreciating all things.
In Review:
1. Let your kids see you be thankful.
2. Require them to say “Thank you” for little things.
3. Have them make a list of what they are thankful for. Mom or Dad can work with the ones who are too young to write.
4. At breakfast, have them write on the bottom of their list one way they are going to show their thankfulness to their family that day.
5. At dinner, have everyone go around and share one thing they are thankful for that happened to them that day before they can say anything else.
Almost all of us think about this during the month of November, with the Thanksgiving holiday coming at the end of the month. But why not work on it all year long? Teaching your kids to be thankful is teaching them to be God-focused. Why not make it an all-year habit in 2026?!
When Jesus was telling His disciples how valuable they were to Him, He said:
“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?
And not one of them is forgotten before God.
Why even the hairs on your head are numbered.
Fear not, you are of more values than many sparrows.”
Luke 12:6-7
Have you listened to this Mom’s Notes presentation?
We first heard this statement in the Growing Kids God’s Way parenting class, “Peer pressure is only as strong as family identity is weak.” Building a positive family identity takes time and effort, and helps eliminate selfishness in your kids. Practical ways to develop identity as a family both spiritually and emotionally are given in this presentation.
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Parenting Made Practical Podcast
#24 Building Character in Your Kids
Satan is going to use someone or something to try and influence your kids because he wants to write on their hearts what he wants their character to be. It’s your job to beat Satan to it by taking the time to write God’s character on their hearts instead. This is a process that takes years. Satan delights when he wins and God loses the character of an adult, teen or child. Whose side do you want your kids to be on, Satan’s or God’s?
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