Dat Do, Daddy -- Some Thoughts on Gratitude and Happiness
A huge goal of ours as parents has been cultivating polite responses: please, thank you, excuse me, etc. Our goal is that by instilling that habit from the outset and then modeling it consistently and joyfully we will ingrain it in a deep way in our boys. And our hope is that by doing so they will be free to say please and thank you in earnest. I think we all can sense when someone is thanking us in a perfunctory way, can’t we? It doesn’t feel good. We ask ourselves, if they’re not genuinely thankful then why bother with the obligatory ‘thank you’? It feels like it’d surely be better to leave it unsaid. Why is authentic gratitude such a big deal to us? One of my favorite quotes from the famous Theology of the Body teaching/speaker, Christopher West, comes from a conversation that he had with his toddler, also named John Paul. He shared this story in a talk I listened to almost 15 years ago and it has always stood with me. He says that one day he