Speaking of Psychology - How to raise grateful kids, with Andrea Hussong, PhD

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Studies have shown that gratitude can help us cope with challenges and is good for our relationships and our health. But figuring out how to foster gratitude in kids isn't always easy or obvious. Andrea Hussong, PhD, talks about why gratitude matters; how to help kids feel thankful, recognize generosity and think about others; and how to respond productively in the moment when kids do something ungrateful. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. As we gather around Thanksgiving tables with our friends and family, many of us may take a moment to think about the things we're grateful for in our lives. For parents, the season may be a reminder that gratitude is something they want to cultivate in their kids year-round. After all, studies have shown that a grateful attitude can help us cope with challenges, and gratitude is good for our relationships, our mental health, and even our physical health. But figuring out how to foster gratitude in kids isn't always easy or obvious. How do we raise children who don't just say thank you, but feel thankful, kids who recognize generosity and think about others? At what age can kids start to understand gratitude and how does

their understanding change over time? How can you teach your children to appreciate what they have while acknowledging frustration, unfairness, and disappointment? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology. the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Andrea Hussong, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Dr. Hussong is a developmental scientist and a licensed clinical psychologist whose work focuses on promoting health and well-being in children, youth, and families. She's studied how children learn gratitude and has developed a program called Raising Grateful Children to Help Families Put the Science of Gratitude into practice. Dr. Hussung, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Let's start with a definition of the term. What does gratitude mean to you and how do you define it in your research? Well, that turns out to be a more challenging question than we might think.

There's a lot of different ways that people talk about gratitude. And a lot of the gratitude that I'm focused on really began with asking parents how they actually were defining gratitude. And when we did that, we found that parents really focused a lot on interpersonal gratitude or the gratitude we have for one another. And they focused not so much on having grateful children as having kids who have grateful moments. So instead of thinking about it like personality or disposition, more thinking about it, how do you cultivate those moments in your kids. So we ended up working with parents to try to figure out that definition. And we talk about it in terms of having four beats in a moment, what kids notice to be grateful for, and then how do they make

sense of what they're noticing through their thoughts and their feelings. And then how do they act on that? What do they do and to show gratitude? So we talk about this notice, think, feel, do model to help parents think about the ways that gratitude comes together in a moment for their kid. And a lot of parents can see a lot of ways to kind of get in there and shape those moments just by how they think about gratitude in that way. Why should parents want to raise grateful children? What benefit does that have for families and for society in general? Well, there's a lot more research on how the benefits of gratitude play out for adults and then we got younger and looked at it for teenagers. And so there's less that we know about kids, but we can look at that long-term trajectory and know something about that.

A lot of the gratitude that we see in kids we think comes out of empathy. So we know that's another way of thinking about how we connect to others. And it's a strong predictor of pro-sociality in kids. So the extent to which kids are really concerned about the welfare of others in their lives. But those benefits then also translate into the social skills kids are developing. As early as six, we're seeing some of that in our work, that we can see some of those more grateful acts of kids. are predicting stronger social skills.

And as they get older, we see effects on well-being, less depression, and being able to have those kind of social connections, which is what we think about gratitude being important for. How can we identify people in our world who they like us? They have a positive bond to us. And then we know who to count on as we're looking for people in our lives that can support us. That's fairly simple to teach very young children the words, please, and thank you. But at what age do kids really start to understand gratitude or to feel gratitude?

And how does this understanding change as they get older? Yeah, that is exactly where we started in this work. And I always think of a six-year-old that we had in one of our early focus groups. And she just looked at this and she said, you know, he said thank you, but he didn't mean it. And at six, she already got it. She already got the idea that saying thank you and being grateful is not the same thing. So it's going to vary like anything from kid to kid. And it's not one of those I wake up in the morning and I'm all the sudden getting it.

But we think a lot of the development of gratitude builds off this early empathy. And so that's sort of the early building blocks that we see for gratitude. And then kids come into line with how much they notice and how much they engage in behaviors or what they do to show appreciation. but all that making meaning of what you have through your thoughts and feelings seems to take a little bit longer to come online and gets more sophisticated. So kids will be more grateful for really concrete things when they're younger, a gift they've been given or a special dinner that they receive. And it may take a little bit older until they're getting up to 10, 11, 12, until they get into less concrete things to be thankful for. A girl in one of our studies, I think she was probably around eight or nine, was drawing a picture of what she was grateful for and it was a horse. And we thought, oh, she loves horses.

And she told story about how her grandparents would take her to visit this horse and how special it was to be with her grandparents. And it became clear it wasn't the horse. It was this other thing that she had in this relationship. And that's kind of moving from something concrete, something a little bit more abstract to be grateful for. So eight is an age where kids can really understand the depth of what gratitude is. It's not just words. Well, I think that probably is, again, varies from kid to kid. But the more that you've got that perspective taking and the more that you're able to kind of connect the what you're noticing to how you're making meaning of it, that's what we think makes gratitude deeper. More of those connections over time. And yeah, by the time we're entering school, some of that is coming on board and just gets deeper as we get more of that perspective taking. So by 8, 9, 10, we're getting farther.

In your work, do you find that most parents say that they want to raise grateful kids? Is this a value that parents have today? Yes. One of the things that surprised me so much about this study is it's a very different area of research for me. I've done a lot of work on sort of addictions and trying to understand. in substance use and a lot of adversity. And this was the first time I tried to recruit parents for a study where we looked at something like gratitude.

And the first day I put out a call for parents, we had 70 parents want to be in the study. That just doesn't happen. So we definitely see parents really want to be in the study. And indeed, that's one of the things that's sort of interesting about studying this. People really want to talk to us about it and to engage in this. But the biggest challenge, of course, when we're talking about what parents value for their kids is they value lots of things. And so the challenge is how do you do all those things that you value in a way that's balanced and doesn't drive your family crazy. You've developed a program, as I said in the intro, called Raising Grateful Children that aims to translate your research into practical advice for families.

What are some of the most important pieces of advice you want parents to take from that work? Yeah, we have really focused on what parents are doing here. There's lots of different things out there on the Internet and everywhere in terms of, you know, having a reflective woman at dinner. There's just so many little pieces of things that you can integrate into a day. And rather than focus on those pieces, we're really focused on sort of these habits that parents can get into themselves with the practice of gratitude with their kids. So we focus on four things, really. We focus on parents modeling gratitude. And in that, it's not just what we say because we like this notice think feel-do idea.

So how do parents model what they're noticing and what they think and feel about what they notice? So helping teach parents to say what they're thinking out loud as they're processing something they're grateful for so kids can see the whole part of the process and not just that thank you at the end. So what they model we think is important, how they select acting. activities for their kids to be in or places to be that might demonstrate gratitude and value gratitude, so they're around that. The third thing is how they talk to their kids about times that they've been grateful, and our intervention really focuses on how to have those conversations in a way that's really productive for kids and focuses on trying to understand why are kids sometimes not grateful, because we focus a lot on not just when kids are grateful in this work, but also in

and this is what parents get really hot about sometimes when kids miss the opportunity to be grateful. It's right there, they could do it, and they just sort of miss it. And so we like to think about the conversations we have when they hit it right and when they sort of miss it. And then we also talk to parents about the extent to which they are sort of giving these daily reminders and nudges in gratitude moments to kids as they're actually unfolding. So these are sort of habits we help parents think about how they model things, how they give reminders, how they have conversations about those moments, and how they pick things to do that might reinforce gratitude for their kids. What do you think about daily practices like encouraging each family member to say something they're grateful for at the dinner table every night? Is this

useful or do practices like this become forced or feel insincere? Well, that's a really good question. I think there are a couple of answers, and one of them is really about how the parents' intent are playing out for what they're picking to do with kids in terms of gratitude socialization. So, I mean, some of the work that we have done is found that when parents are really motivated to do things like this, because they want their kids to be mindful and aware. So that example of talking about something at dinner would be, for me, like a notice activity. What do you notice to be grateful for? That tends to increase all the types of gratitude socialization parents do.

it increases kids' gratitude over time and their pro-social behavior. So we see that as really helpful. But if parents are doing that behavior and their goal is to get their kids to be kind of conforming to social norms, we don't see that they're engaging in other things and we don't see that long-term outcome. So there's got to be some authenticity to it at some level, but both for the parents' intentions as well as for what the kids are doing. When you put out the call for parents to be in your study, what kind of parents said that they wanted to take part? And what did you find out about them? I mean, were they themselves grateful and therefore they were able to model it? Or did you find a lot of parents just didn't quite get it?

We've done a few studies in this space. And so the first study we did, I would say parents saw themselves as fairly grateful. And I would say that was generally fairly truthful. And I would say that was generally fairly true. but we did see a lot of variation in how that played out, particularly how that translates to parenting of children. Sometimes it's hardest things for us to teach children are the things that we care about and we're good at because we just feel like they should get it. But in this case, we had a lot of emphasis on how those conversations were happening,

and that's a different skill. It can be really hard to try to understand, like, why is your kid just not grateful in this moment when it seems so obvious they should be. And the intervention really starts with saying, well, wait a minute, what's going on with this seven-year-old right now and what are they focused on? So can we change that rather than push a narrative about being grateful in this moment? From the parents' perspective, can we start where that kid is, getting frustrated, and then move that conversation? Have you looked at all at differences based on socioeconomic status? I mean, I'm thinking of some people have a lot. and they're not very grateful for the things that they have, and some people have very little, and they totally get the idea of gratitude. What have you found?

We started this work with people who had more resources because we were curious about how intentional they were being about gratitude in that context. And we've looked at a variety of groups at this point, and probably the research with adults has been a better job of answering this question, and there isn't necessarily a big correlation, between gratitude and SES or socioeconomic status. And so that's not something that we're seeing. But I think part of that's because a lot of the focus here is on interpersonal gratitude. We talk a lot about the gift behind the gift.

So it's not that present that you got. It's that sweater that I got has butterflies on it. And my aunt remembered that butterflies are my favorite. And so the gift is really how I was thought about by my aunt's rather than the actual sweater itself. So we don't always need that physical object even for that to be there. But we don't see a lot of differences, and it may be just from what you're saying, there's a lot of different ways that might be playing out. We're going to take a short break. When we return, we'll talk about how parents can respond productively in the moment when their child does something really ungrateful.

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and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. How should parents respond in the moment when a kid does something really ungrateful. For example, child gets a present from grandma that they don't really like and they throw it aside rather than say, thank you.

How should parents respond in those instances? For parents, there's usually many things happening in those instances, right? Grandma is their mom and their mom is looking at them to see how they're going to parent. So I think one of the things that we see is the more that parents get really distressed and they sort of internalize their kid's gratitude as a reflection of their parenting in the moment, then that kind of gets really difficult to separate. Parents sometimes make choices they're a little bit more punishing or a little bit more blaming or a little bit more harsh in the moment.

And those don't tend to foster gratitude over time. The other side of that is a lot of giving in in those moments. The classic example is what's happening in the checkout aisle. when a child is really wanting something is starting to throw a foot about that, it's really easy to give in and get out of the store, but then we see more of those moments coming. So what we kind of focus on is probably

there's an in-the-moment response and then there's a later conversation response. And so we do think it's important that parents are telling kids the behavior that they think they should be doing and engaging in, but also a little bit about why. But that may be the moment or may not be the moment to have that conversation.

So we think that it's a combination of things that parents can be doing in those moments. And there's some about what is less helpful, but the bottom line is managing your own response so that you can be sort of the calm parent to give the directive that you're hoping to get in the moment, but later unpack what's going on for the kid in the moment

and why that didn't rise to the service for them of gratitude in the moment. Maybe this is an unfair question because it's about age again, But at what point do kids understand that even if grandma gave you a gift you didn't like, that you have to say thank you and pretend that you did like it? Well, and that is probably not so much about gratitude. That's about sort of our social rules of conformity, right? And our kind of our social conventions.

And they can look the same, but they're probably not. And different cultures do this so differently. And I think this is one of the places of many places around gratitude where some of these cultural expectations for what we say and do given what we're being given are really scripts that we learn to follow. And that probably isn't exactly gratitude, but it may grease the rails to help us notice things to be grateful for. So ideally, you know, Grandma gave me socks again and I'm just not a socks kid. but I know that grandma remembered to get something for me and that she thought about me is the thing that I'm grateful for. And that's probably something that we can get on board with

a little bit more than the socks. How can parents and other caregivers balance encouraging gratitude in their kids while acknowledging that the world can be frustrating, difficult, and unfair? I think the idea that gratitude is always good and appropriate in context is not true. I think when we talk about genuine gratitude, we really are talking about when we get things and we're saying, hey, I think I got this because somebody gave this to me in a way that it wasn't that I earned it from my effort. It was given to me at kindness. I don't owe something back. So gratitude has some cognitions around it, some attributions that we make about why we've got something that may not happen in circumstances.

where gratitude doesn't turn out. And that's probably appropriate. So if somebody gives us something and we have the sense that we're going to owe them back for it, there's strings attached to this gift. That's probably something that's going to make us feel grateful. And that's probably okay because we need to think about that gift a little bit differently. You might feel a more indebted. I don't know that it's true that we want to say every time you've gotten something, you should feel grateful because that's really not how those gifts are all working. And as you're, as you're suggesting here, the world's a little more complicated than that. How did you get interested in studying gratitude? You mentioned that this really wasn't your

area and then all of a sudden bingo, you decided to work in it. Yeah, it was a backdoor for me. So I was doing a research study where we were doing an intervention with moms in recovery from addiction who had preschool-aged kids, so a little two to six-year-olds. And we were doing some traditional parent training, but a lot of focus on emotion and what kids could learn about emotion regulation in these early years when they're really ramping up emotion regulation skills. And in the course of doing this pilot work, we had one of the moms in the study who was just super grateful to the therapist working with her. And she would say it every time she came in. It was easy for her to engage in the sessions and in the homework. work, and we had another mom who had a very hard time with that. And we had the sense that

her trauma history got in the way because gratitude, there's an element of trust in there. There's an element of being able and willing to receive. And that was just very hard for her. And we were really interested in, well, you know, could we turn back the clock for these moms and help them have some gratitude that would help them find pro-social others in their life and develop a more positive network so that they have some. protection going forward. So we sat down and said, great, we've got a parenting program. Let's just see what's in the research literature about teaching children gratitude. And we'll just put that in our parenting program. And there were zero studies, nothing. So we really had to go back and start

with just thinking about what gratitude was in children, because there's a lot in the popular press, but the actual scientific literature was very thin. Given that we have such a me-fews, focused culture these days, are you finding it more difficult to help instill gratitude in children and even to work with their parents? I have found parents to be particularly interested in this. And a lot of our work has really focused on gratitude outfacing, but parent-child relationships where there's not a lot of gratitude coming back and forth is very difficult to negotiate. It's difficult for parents. And so I think they stay interested even just from, having a functional parent-child relationship and how gratitude might be playing out for their kids.

That's not to say that it's not competing with all kinds of other things. It's confusing when you have a very achievement-oriented and competitive sort of orientation to be thinking about gratitude at the same time. They don't have to be opposites, but they can feel like opposites. And these are some of the other values that are out there. I think that any time we're talking about, about values with our children and our families, any one value feels pretty easy to get on board with. It's the constellation of them. And when they come into conflict, that's really the hard part for us to figure out. So what are you working on now? What are the big questions that remain to be answered? There are a number of questions about gratitude that we think are important.

One of them really has to do with thinking about how it changes across context and how it changes across culture, big culture and little culture and families in terms of how we think about that we think is important. But the cultural context is taking me back to where I started. So right now we're trying to look at the way that moms in recovery are fostering gratitude and generosity and love in their children and how we think about that in the context of trauma and adversity and how those come together. So we're doing some of that work. At the same time, we're doing a little bit of work using virtual reality to see if we can give people experiences of the world in a different way that help them experience things like self-compassion and gratitude.

So we're continuing to try to find ways to get the work out to where people are most interested in engaging with it. Well, Dr. Hussling, I want to thank you for joining me today. I thank you. I think this has been useful for our listeners, and I appreciate your taking the time. Well, it's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much, Kim. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org.

Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade Technologies engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear.

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